Max Kondziolka ‘16 has been working in international film production for almost a decade, and even co-founded a production company, Pierce Capital Entertainment. So why is he now pursuing an archaeology degree at Oxford University? He sees these as both routes to his ultimate passion: examining the human condition.
He was most recently an executive producer for “The Brutalist,” which follows a Jewish architect immigrating to the U.S. after World War II. By the time he was attached, the film was a few years into production, and many other companies had refused to finance the project, considering it too risky. Kondziolka, who seeks movies that interrogate humanity’s past, jumped on the opportunity.
He believes the film’s success has proven them wrong: “The Brutalist” won three Golden Globe awards and received 10 nominations at this year’s Academy Awards. Furthermore, the film was made on a budget of only $10 million, far less than the hundred-million-dollar milestones of competing Hollywood films.
“These ambitious projects get pushed to the side because they’re too expensive, or because people say audiences don’t care,” Kondziolka said in an interview with The Beacon. “Having just come off a three-and-a-half-hour epic about a mid-century designer who survived the Holocaust, we’ve proven that people want to see movies for adults again.”
His journey with film distribution began while he was studying at Emerson, when he took a course with Senior Distinguished Producer-in-Residence Linda Reisman, who, at the time, taught a course called Studios of Independence.
“That was one of the most valuable courses I’ve ever taken,” Kondziolka said. “The truth is that the business is like the Wild West, and it’s constantly changing. Having a professor who has their finger on the pulse, in terms of what’s happening in the business, really pulled back the curtain on how things function.”
In that class, he gained the real-world industry insight he felt was missing from his filmmaking classes, but he quickly learned that being a producer today means keeping tabs on not just Hollywood, but film industries worldwide.
“For a very long time, you had to come to Hollywood to make a movie. Today, we live in a globalized world where Hollywood is in everyone’s back pocket,” Kondziolka said. “For everyone that’s moving into this business, looking internationally is going to be key.”
The day-to-day of his work with Pierce Capital Entertainment, which he co-founded with Thomas Pierce in 2024, involves evaluating scripts and working with filmmakers to create projects. He then brings these projects to festivals at places like Cannes, Toronto, and Birmingham, and pitches them to financiers and distributors.
While traveling around the world, Kondziolka studies how different film markets have different sensibilities: he sees international film distribution as an “anthropological exercise.”
Kondziolka first considered seriously studying anthropology, a long-held interest, during the pandemic, when he realized the parts he enjoyed about his work—meeting international clients, learning about different markets worldwide—had been just that. In 2023, he enrolled at Oxford University in a “mostly virtual” archaeology program, which allows him to continue his work worldwide.
He’s especially fascinated by how advances in technology reshape our understanding of human history. For example, it was once widely believed that humans first migrated to the Americas through a land bridge from Siberia, but new developments may prove that humans have existed on the continent for far longer than previously thought, which excites him.
Likewise, Kondziolka seeks to produce films that reexamine old narratives about humanity. Stories like “The Brutalist,” which examines the post-World War II conception of the American Dream, and Pierce Capital Entertainment’s current project—a script about John Franklin, the 19th-century British explorer who led a failed expedition into the Arctic Circle—interrogate myths around migration, the central act of human history.
“What we’re focused on are stories that capture the human experience,” Kondziolka said. “Whether it’s diving back a hundred thousand years into the past, or talking about people that lived in the last hundred years, we’re really interested in pushing the limit and inspiring this next generation with stories of human potential.”
