Dakota Johnson has every reason to feel stressed out. The Fifty Shades of Grey actress, who is garnering acclaim for her role in the awards-season contender The Lost Daughter , also stars in two films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which runs until January 30. The projects – writer-director Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth and Am I OK? directed by Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne – happen to mark the first finished films produced through her company, TeaTime Pictures. For Johnson, 32, bringing the two films to Sundance is a statement of purpose for TeaTime and her grander ambitions for the company. With Am I OK? , for the first time she found herself grappling with much more than she would as an actor, such as two Covid-19 shutdowns of 10 days each on a movie intended to have a production that lasted only 20 days. “Of course there’s things that are stressful in terms of like, ‘OK, how do we do this? How do we get around this problem and save money?’ All the things that are so unsexy about making movies, but then I feel better about it,” says Johnson. Our Friend: a moving cancer drama that highlights the power of friendship “I feel like every single decision that is made can be made with artistic integrity, it can be creative. It can be, ‘OK, how do we make this work but still push the boundaries a little bit, still reach the hearts that need to be reached?’ “It’s not about control. It’s about contribution. It’s about collaboration,” she says. “It’s about really reaching for an idea and sticking to it and maintaining the integrity of whatever story is trying to be told.” While the rest of the world has been cycling through varying stages of shutdown over the past two years, Johnson has been particularly busy. She launched TeaTime Pictures with partner Ro Donnelly in 2019, and they had already set up a few projects when the pandemic brought the industry to a halt in early 2020. As things got back into gear eventually, she made four movies in fairly quick order, shooting The Lost Daughter in Greece, Am I OK? in Los Angeles, Persuasion in England and Cha Cha Real Smooth in Pittsburgh. “Somehow I just didn’t stop during Covid,” Johnson says. Dakota is such a creative person, I like to say she’s like the wind. She’s just always moving and dreaming, and she’s pretty ethereal Ro Donnelly, TeaTime Pictures co-founder Am I OK? was originally supposed to shoot in 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic. Notaro first met Johnson after Johnson’s boyfriend, Coldplay’s Chris Martin , emailed out of the blue to ask if Notaro could perform stand-up at Johnson’s 30th birthday party. The two hit it off and stayed in touch, with Notaro reaching out as she and Allynne, who are married, were looking to cast their debut feature as co-directors. “She’s not somebody that comes onto a project without an opinion or a note,” says Notaro. “She knows what she’s doing, and she knows what she wants to do. There’s no confusion there. There’s so many people that take on producer roles that are silently sitting by, and that’s just not the case with her.” Raiff first met Johnson over Zoom while she was shooting The Lost Daughter . The 24-year-old filmmaker and actor, who won the grand jury prize at the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival with his debut feature, S***house , pitched Donnelly and Johnson the idea that would become Cha Cha Real Smooth . Before launching their company together, Donnelly, who previously worked at Netflix, had met Johnson through a mutual friend, and came to realise their taste and vision aligned. “We were friends, so we both were scoping each other out,” says Donnelly. “I really wanted to work with some female talent, and she wanted to do something bigger than just some vanity deal.” Late last year, Johnson and Donnelly sold a minority equity stake in their company to Boat Rocker, the Canadian studio where they have a first-look deal, and executive Katie O’Connell Marsh joined TeaTime Pictures as a partner. Her role is to help it expand into something more than a production company, with plans towards building a creative community that can be used to launch curated products. Of Johnson, O’Connell Marsh says: “I’m most inspired by her endless ambition. She thinks of things in terms of how to look at what’s just ahead, what’s going to be relevant. What’s going to be both cool but also incredibly accessible.” “She has great taste, and she can speak as an artist when she’s talking to other artists, to a writer or a director or to other actors,” says Erik Feig, whose company Picturestart was involved in producing and financing both Am I OK? and Cha Cha Real Smooth . “But because she’s been in this business for so long and she knows it so well, I think she also really understands truly the business of the business. That is kind of a unique combination to see.” Johnson is at an intriguing crossroads as a performer, in an unusual position where she can play relatively carefree characters trying to figure out their lives in the manner of a romcom heroine, as in Am I OK? or 2020’s The High Note , while she can also play darker parts reflecting people with more responsibilities grappling with where they have found themselves, as in Cha Cha Real Smooth or The Lost Daughter . It’s rare to see someone who’s able to successfully navigate both sides of that maturity divide. This brings up the question of where Johnson considers herself to be in her own life and whether any of her recent roles reflect how she feels about herself. “No, not at all,” she says. “I don’t feel like any of those roles reflect where I am. Maybe moments in films, retrospectively I may have been there either emotionally or relationship-wise or something, but I don’t feel like there’s a movie that I could go, ‘Oh, that’s me in my life.’ “I don’t know if I would want to do that,” she says. “I think I might want to just live my life.” Before her breakout role in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, Johnson grew up around the business of Hollywood, thanks to her parents, actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. And she brings that background, as well as a series of eclectic career choices, into this new step of producing. “Dakota is such a creative person, I like to say she’s like the wind. She’s just always moving and dreaming, and she’s pretty ethereal,” says Donnelly. “I definitely am the more realist of the two of us, but I love her big dreams. We definitely balance each other out.” After the Sundance premieres of Am I OK? and Cha Cha Real Smooth , both of which come into the festival looking for a sale to a distributor, Johnson plans to continue expanding TeaTime Pictures. Though they have some 25 projects in varying stages of development, the most immediate next project is likely Daddio , written and directed by Christy Hall and set to star Johnson and Sean Penn. There is also a series adaptation of Bexy Cameron’s memoir Cult Following , to be adapted and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones for Johnson and her long-time best friend, Riley Keough. If there was a time when it was a struggle for Johnson to put the notoriety of the 50 Shades movies fully behind her, she now looks to enter the next phase of her career fully under her own control. “People always have opinions about everything and especially other people, especially famous people, especially famous naked people, so sometimes it’s just like mosquito noise to me,” Johnson says. “I think that I just want to do what is true to my heart, and I have done. And though things don’t always turn out what they were supposed to be when I’m there as just an actor, the choices I’ve made have always been from my heart and not for any other reason.”