Busy Hollywood Producer loves the ease of working in KC

Hollywood producer Sasha Yelaun has always been right in the thick of filmmaking things. Yelaun has been in the industry for more than two decades, from working at Paramount Studios and ABC/Touchstone Television, to splitting off into the independent film world, line producing his first feature film in 2010, and eventually becoming the lead producer on most of his other projects since 2017. Yelaun has worked on well over two dozen features, and currently has seven in post, including the shot-in-Kansas City comedy thriller “Boris is Dead” which is premiering at Chinese Theater in Hollywood as part of the 26th edition of the Beverly Hills Film Festival.

He averages three to four films a year. His most recent film, “Hellfire,” shot in Arkansas and starring Avatar’s Stephen Lang, Dolph Lundgren and Harvey Keitel, was released earlier this year by Sony.

Yelaun has worked with many A-list Hollywood stars, such as Sylvester Stallone, Danny DeVito, Emily Blunt, Malcolm McDowell, Demi Moore, Jessica Biel, John Krasinski, Jason Sudeikis, and Anthony Hopkins and has produced films shot in locations around the world. 

His most recent films include two shot in Thailand (“Eyes in the Trees,” starring Hopkins, which is a re-imagining of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”), “Contra,” starring Booboo Stewart, Kal Penn, and Til Schweiger and the Paralytic, starring Jonathan Rhys Myers, who is also the lead in Eyes in the Trees. 

Boris is Dead wrapped in late November of 2024 in Kansas City. 

“I had done two other films in Kansas City previously,” he says. “When my investors were researching different states to go to, I told them how I had a good experience with Arkansas, but the (Missouri state) rebate was much more competitive.”

Yelaun says it seems like Missouri is in “a honeymoon stage” where people are friendly, welcoming and approachable. “They’re not necessarily trying to make a business off of you, like LA or New York and drive up the prices,” he says. “But they want you to come there. They want you to film here.”

Kansas City reminds Yelaun of his home town, Austin, Texas. “It’s a growing city. You’ve got a young crowd, things seem relatively easy to pull off in terms of logistics, and there’s less bureaucracy,” Yelaun says.

In LA, he says, there are a lot of delays and runarounds in doing films there. “It could take weeks and weeks to get approvals on things that should have been relatively easy to do.”

The added plus of working in Kansas City is that some of the crew that used to live in LA, and were originally from KC, moved back and are now working in Kansas City. “It’s just a gem that you find all these people that are in the industry that now can move back home and find the same industry back home.”

While in Kansas City, he and various crew members made the Longhorn Steakhouse by the airport their post-shooting hangout, and got a chance to try Joe’s Barbecue. Yelaun is trying to pull off another Kansas City shoot in the near future, and expects to release two of his Missouri shot films later this year.

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