Whether you know her name or not, Christine Vachon is exactly the sort of person for whom South by Southwest's "Conversations With . . . " was created. A key figure in independent film, she is the kind of producer yearned for by many of the young filmmakers who attend the festival.

In the '90s, Vachon helped shape the American independent landscape, bringing difficult films (such as "Kids" and "Happiness") to mainstream audiences and securing a place for voices Hollywood couldn't hear.

Writer/director Todd Haynes, whose first feature was the startlingly graphic and avant-garde "Poison," would not have seemed a good risk for most producers. Vachon helped him make the movies he wanted to make, and a decade or so later his "Far From Heaven" gathered four Oscar nominations. (Haynes is now preparing a film about Bob Dylan, which Vachon says should go into production late this summer.)

Vachon — who is in Austin at the moment, shooting "Every Word is True" with Sandra Bullock and Sigourney Weaver — will participate in an hourlong interview on Sunday, and the festival is celebrating her career with screenings of three films she produced: "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Swoon," and "Far From Heaven."

"I think we gave the festival a list of my 12 favorites," Vachon says, "and these were the three they picked." They're certainly representative of her work. Asked which three titles the producer would choose to watch purely for pleasure, her list focuses on slightly less successful films: "I Shot Andy Warhol," "Camp" and "Velvet Goldmine."

One thread running through Vachon's career is the presence of gay characters who don't fit Hollywood's two-dimensional notions of homosexual types. Titles such as "Swoon" and "Poison" were part of a brief wave of indies dubbed New Queer Cinema, a movement that drew mixed reactions. "I have been criticized by the so-called gay community for too many depictions of nonsympathetic gay characters," she says. But "I was never really 'fighting' to get gay characters all over the mainstream. I was fighting to get provocative and original material on celluloid."

Where are the provocative, unexplored fringes of cinema these days? Vachon says she's "not sure what the fringes are exactly. I think it might be a real change in exhibition, since so many art movie theaters have been eighty-sixed. It will be interesting to see where underground movies resurface, because they're bound to."

When asked what kind of movies she'd love to make in the future, though, the subject turns from taboo-shattering adventures to something even more challenging:

"Well, since I have a kid, I have a fantasy of making a kids' movie that I could sit through . . ."