Producer Brian Grazer says his films avoid politics, aim to unite audiences

Producer Brian Grazer said Wednesday that he deliberately keeps politics out of his films and television shows, telling a panel at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival that his goal as a storyteller is to bring audiences together rather than divide them.

“None of my stories are left or right. I’m not political in any of my movies. ’Frost/Nixon’ was just an account of an event. But I’m never political,” Mr. Grazer said. “I’m only about working on universal themes to create unity with other people, so we demystify other people, other people’s problems.”

Mr. Grazer, an Academy Award-winning producer whose credits include “Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Arrested Development” and “24,” appeared alongside “Yellowstone” director and cinematographer Christina Voros and documentary filmmaker Joshua Seftel for a discussion titled “Building Bridges at the Box Office,” moderated by Steven Olikara of Bridge Entertainment Labs.

Asked by Mr. Olikara whether Hollywood remains “curious” given that much of the industry has rejected viewpoint diversity, Mr. Grazer paused before answering with a grin, drawing laughter from the audience.

“Sure,” he said. “I mean, some people are.”

Mr. Grazer went on to argue that changes to Hollywood’s compensation structure over the past several years have reduced the financial risk — and potentially the creative incentive — for artists.

“The mechanics of the business of Hollywood has changed so significantly in the last four years, it could cause artists to be disincentivized,” he said. “The compensation structure is predominantly based on a socialistic system — that was political — but in that everybody gets paid, you know, you get a streaming price. So you’re not incentivized to work your ass off, feel the risk of that, own that, and fail, lose money, or make $90 million or something. That’s what artists can do.”

He described curiosity as, at its core, a form of basic courtesy.

“Curiosity really always, to me, was, at the very minimum, just being polite to human beings,” he said. “If you’re interested in other people, and you ask — you start talking, and you enable the other person to communicate back to you, they usually will, and you usually create a human moment. It becomes memorable, at least for the day.”

On how filmmakers should approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Grazer said the idea of the American dream shouldn’t be treated as a partisan concept.

“Be grateful to America, be kind to America. I think that’s what would be really nice if that lived in the fabric of our culture,” he said.

Ms. Voros, who described herself as a former Brooklyn liberal who relocated to a small town in West Texas to work on “Yellowstone,” said the experience upended assumptions she had held about rural America.

“I think we as a culture need to be careful of the filters through which we are guided to perceive this country and the stories of this country, because you can get into an echo chamber pretty quickly, regardless of where you live or what you feel,” she said. She called storytelling an opportunity to “crack the wall open a little bit and let the light come in.”

She added that effective storytelling leaves room for audiences to draw their own conclusions. “If you tell someone exactly how they’re supposed to feel, it’s very easy for them to reject that conversation creatively at all,” she said. “You need to leave that space in stories, so people can make those stories their own and draw strength or hope or curiosity from them.”

Mr. Seftel said his own approach to filmmaking is rooted in a similar principle. “It’s not that hard to tell stories that help us understand each other,” he said. “I just hope we can keep doing that.”