I started in the film industry in 1990, seven years after Christine Vachon started her own career. I became aware of her in 1994, while working in Portland, Oregon, on Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Poison and Swoon, two films produced by Christine, were released during this time and opened doors in my brain to rooms I didn’t know existed.

I felt lucky to be plugged into the world of American independent film during that time. I devoured Christine’s next wave of original work—Go Fish, Safe, Kids, Stonewall, and I Shot Andy Warhol—between 1994 and 1996. I saw all of those films in the cinema and admired them for their boldness and singularity of vision, but what lasted was the emotional impression they left on me. As a young person, it was an awakening.

In those early years, Christine wasn’t yet famous, nor had she made films that brought her to the Oscars, such as Far from Heaven, Boys Don’t Cry, and Still Alice would later. But within the community of independent filmmakers at the time, she was recognized as a producing force to be reckoned with. Even though she was still early in her own career, she was a legend to me already.

Christine continues to have a reputation for being uncompromising when it comes to protecting a filmmaker’s vision. But she is uncompromising with herself first. She makes work she believes in, work that has something important to say about the world and the people with whom we share it. We talked in June 2017 at the Las Vegas Film Festival, in a conversation hosted by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute and The Believer. We faced an attentive audience, though a good many of them were reclined to near supine on bright red vinyl theater seats.

—Mary Ann Marino

I. “A CLOWN CAR OF PRODUCERS”

MARY ANN MARINO: Was there a movie that you saw that just sparked something in you, that made you think: This is what I have to do with my life?

CHRISTINE VACHON: I was lucky in that I grew up in New York City, where we could walk to the movie theater. And we did. We went to the movies, old movie palaces that were divided up into four or five cinemas where your feet stuck to the floor and you could hear the other movie in the other cinema. There were second-...