A Conversation with Brian Grazer
Moderated by Mary Parent 

Brian Grazer is an Oscar®, Golden Globe®, Emmy®, and Grammy® award-winning producer. His work has been nominated for 47 Oscars and 296 Emmys. He won the Best Picture Oscar for A Beautiful Mind and is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life; Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection; and the recent A Curious Mind Expanded Edition. 

Grazer’s feature film productions include Candy Cane Lane, The Beanie Bubble, Thirteen Lives, tick, tick...Boom!, Apollo 13, American Gangster, 8 Mile, Frost/Nixon, Liar Liar, and Parenthood, as well as the television series Under The Banner of Heaven from Dustin Lance Black, Genius: Aretha, Wu-Tang: An American Saga, Swagger, Empire, 24, Arrested Development, and Friday Night Lights.  

Grazer has also produced numerous documentaries, including the feature documentaries Personality Crisis: One Night Only directed by Martin Scorsese; Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award winner Judy Blume Forever; the critically acclaimed Carlos Santana documentary, Carlos; the NAACP award nominated Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues from Sacha Jenkins; the Emmy-winning Lucy and Desi, directed by Amy Poehler; the Emmy-nominated We Feed People, profiling renowned chef José Andrés and World Central Kitchen; the Grammy Award-winning Best Music Film, The Beatles: 8 Days A Week; The Day Sports Stood Still; Rebuilding Paradise; The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari; The Super Models on Apple TV+; and the docuseries Light & Magic, about George Lucas’ pioneer visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic, among many others. 

Recent projects include After the Hunt, a thriller for Amazon MGM directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and upcoming projects include Wild Things on Apple TV and The ‘Burbs for Peacock, among other feature films including How To Rob a Bank directed by David Leitch starring Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Pete Davidson, Whalefall starring Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin, The Mosquito Bowl from director Pete Berg and Spaceballs 2. 

Profiled by Time Magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” Grazer believes that curiosity is the superpower that has helped him create his best life, and is passionate about turning that curiosity towards doing good in the world. He has been honored for his global humanitarian work by organizations including the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, the Alfred Mann Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Association, World of Children, and the Atlantic Council. He serves on the Board of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he also teaches a course on “Starting from Zero.” 

Grazer and his longtime friend Ron Howard founded Imagine Entertainment in the early ‘80s, embarking on what is now one of the longest running partnerships in Hollywood. They continue to run the company together as executive chairmen. 

As an award-winning film producer and executive, Parent has actively been involved in films amassing over $25 billion at the global box office.  Parent has been nominated for three Academy Awards--Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE: PART TWO as well as DUNE: PART ONE in addition to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s, THE REVENANT, for which she also won a BAFTA and Golden Globe.  

Parent most recently produced DUNE: PART THREE, the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed trilogy, the upcoming Alejandro González Iñárritu/Tom Cruise film, DIGGER, ENOLA HOLMES 3, directed by Phil Barantini, STREET FIGHTER directed by Kitao Sakurai, as well as the next installment of Legendary’s Monsterverse, GODZILLA X KONG: SUPERNOVA. 

Other critically acclaimed and commercially successful films Parent has produced include A MINECRAFT MOVIE, directed by Jared Hess, DUNE: PART TWO, and GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, Guillermo del Toro’s, PACIFIC RIM, Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH, ENOLA HOLMES 1 and 2, KONG: SKULL ISLAND and POKÉMON DETECTIVE PIKACHU, to name a few. 

Parent also produced Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality masterpiece, CARNE Y ARENA, which received a rare Special Achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its groundbreaking exploration into fully immersive storytelling.   

She is currently the Chairman of Worldwide Production for Legendary Entertainment, overseeing all aspects of film. She is the former Chairman of MGM and Vice Chairman of Worldwide Production of Universal Pictures.  

Parent was the 2022 recipient of the prestigious David O. Selznick Achievement Award from the Producers Guild of America as well as Variety’s Billion Dollar Producer. 

Parent is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America. She has also been featured in The Hollywood Reporter’s “100 Most Powerful People in Entertainment, “The Variety 500," Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment List," Wall Street Journal’s “50 Women to Watch," and The Hollywood Reporter’s “Most Powerful Women in Entertainment."