Naked City Films Lets the Future Lead the Conversation for Nuveen

Sep. 10, 2026

Directed by David Schmidt for 72andSunny Toronto, three-minute film The Future Has Questions gives a group of eight-year-olds the floor as they question Nuveen’s senior leaders about investing and the world they will inherit.

Brooklyn-based production company Naked City Films has partnered with 72andSunny Toronto and global asset manager Nuveen on The Future Has Questions, an unscripted three-minute film that finds a distinctly human route into the often complex language of investing.

The film forms part of Nuveen’s wider "Invest Like the Future Is Watching" brand platform, taking its premise literally by bringing a group of curious eight-year-olds face-to-face with three of the company’s senior leaders: CEO Bill Huffman, Chief Investment Officer Saira Malik and Real Assets CEO Mike Sales.

Rather than building a conventional financial-services conversation and placing children inside it, the film reverses the usual dynamic. The young participants are given the floor, leaving Nuveen’s executives to respond to their questions, logic and occasional curveballs.

They want to know what the executives actually do, what investing means and what decisions being made today could mean for the world they are growing up into. The questions move easily between the practical, the unexpected and the surprisingly profound, forcing a complex subject into language everyone can understand.

The three-minute format gives those exchanges room to breathe. Questions are followed by pauses, counter-questions, puzzled expressions and moments in which the executives have to step away from professional shorthand and explain themselves in language that makes sense to an eight-year-old. The result is warm and frequently funny, but the directness of the children also gives the conversation genuine weight.

Director David Schmidt, co-founder of Naked City Films said:

"I realized pretty quickly that this project had to be driven by the kids. The client wanted the conversations to feel real, natural and completely unprompted. So we had this interesting tension: on one side, a branded conversation about finance; on the other, the spontaneous, inquisitive nature of kids. The challenge became: how do we reverse-engineer those two things so they can exist together?"

 

Finding that balance became the organizing principle for the production. Rather than scripting the children towards predetermined responses, Schmidt and the Naked City team concentrated on creating a framework in which the right conversations could emerge naturally.

Central to that process was child psychologist Dr James Van Cuylenburg, who worked closely with Schmidt and the production team to help shape the environment and the way the children were introduced to both the space and the conversation.

His role was not to tell the children what to say or which questions to ask. Instead, the focus was on building trust, giving the children time to become comfortable and creating the conditions in which they felt confident enough to be genuinely curious.

That preparation was crucial. The more at ease the children became, the less the production needed to intervene, allowing the questions, reactions and unexpected turns to belong to them.

The children were also encouraged to draw and talk about what they imagined for their futures, giving them a personal route into a subject that might otherwise have felt abstract. The exercise allowed conversations around investment to grow out of things they already understood, such as homes, families, ambitions and the world they expect to inherit, rather than asking them to perform somebody else’s idea of what a child might say about finance.

Schmidt said:

"We asked the kids to draw their future, talk about their dreams and ask whatever came to mind. Some questions were funny. Some were surprisingly thoughtful. Some caught everyone off guard. Those unscripted moments became the heart of the film."

 

That philosophy extended to the physical production itself.

The children and executives meet in a bright, open space designed to feel warm and inviting rather than overtly corporate. Soft seating, natural light and an intentionally uncluttered environment keep the focus firmly on the people and the interaction between them.

The camera follows the same principle. Group compositions establish a shared space before giving way to closer observations and reactions, preserving the smaller moments between questions and answers. The filmmaking stays deliberately unobtrusive, giving the children room to speak in their own words and allowing pauses, stumbles and unexpected turns to remain part of the texture of the film.

That restraint becomes particularly important given the subject matter. Asset management is a world often communicated through expertise, terminology and data. Here, Naked City's task was not to make finance feel childish, but to find a way into a sophisticated subject through genuinely simple questions.

By putting the children in control of the conversation and then giving that conversation enough space to unfold, the production found something more revealing than a conventional question and answer format could have delivered. The executives’ willingness to listen becomes as significant as the answers they provide.

For Naked City Films, the project reflects the kind of work the company increasingly wants to make: smart, sharp, human ideas where production craft creates the conditions for genuine interaction rather than competing with it.

Schmidt added:

"In the end, we didn’t make a commercial about investing. We made one about people, and the small, everyday decisions we make because we care about what’s next. Those are always our favorite kinds of stories to tell."