Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“My ‘Jaws’ Obsession Had No Boundaries”: Kleber Mendonça Filho on “The Secret Agent”
Kleber Mendonça Filho has never been shy explicating how personal memories have seeped into his professional work. Born and raised in Recife (capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco), the filmmaker has consistently dived into its history and, in doing so, his own history as well. While technically a narrative (featuring a remarkable cast led by Wagner Moura), The Secret Agent is also a movie about tumultuous events in and around the filmmaker’s hometown. Anyone who spoke out against the military dictatorship’s brutality was relentlessly harassed, spied on and, in some instances, murdered. An adolescent when these events unfolded, film-critic-turned-filmmaker […]
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“Withholding Information Makes You More Engaged”: Elena Oxman on “Outerlands”
After a run-in with a new coworker at the laundromat, Cass (Asia Kate Dillon) has a drunken hookup with Kalli (Louisa Krause). Kalli seems to take an immediate trusting to Cass, and after Cass tells her their side-gig is nannying, Kalli asks if they can watch her daughter Ari (Ridley Asha Bateman) while she goes out of town for work. Cass makes an income by caring for others—watching rich kids by day, serving in a restaurant by night—but their own inability to take care of themselves comes to the forefront when they suddenly have to play parent to a pre-teen. […]
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John August on “Scriptnotes” (the Book)
After Syd Field’s Screenplay was published in 1979, an entire cottage industry sprung up in Hollywood. Screenwriting manuals and classes, overnight gurus and other (often predatory) enterprises promised impressionable aspirants a breakthrough if they just practiced a particular architecture of rules to write their dream spec feature. The next migration happened to the blogosphere in the Aughts, and in the teens, a plethora of screenwriting podcasts blossomed. Few voices have proven trustworthy, though. Cutting through the clutter in 2011, John August (Big Fish, Corpse Bride) and Craig Mazin’s (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) “Scriptnotes”’s podcast has developed a formidable following […]
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Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
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“It’s Great to Feel Like You Made a Cult Favorite”: Alex Winter and Bill Corso on “Freaked”
Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s 1993 cult classic Freaked is less an example of “high” and “low” art commingling than of pop- and-sub-cultures colliding. At the precipice of marquee fame after headlining the first two Bill & Ted movies alongside Keanu Reeves, Winter—along with his former NYU classmate Stern and TV writer Tim Burns—pitched 20th Century Fox on an anarchic comedy called Hideous Mutant Freekz, in which Ricky Coogan (played by Winter), a shallow TV idol, becomes spokesman for a patently evil chemical corporation. Ricky, his best friend and a handful of others board a plane to the fictitious South […]
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“Long Time Artistic Relations Are Fascinating… And Hard to Maintain”: Rick Linklater on “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
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“Collapsing the Past Into the Present”: Connor Sen Warnick on “Characters Disappearing”
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present. Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and […]
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“The Algorithm of It All”: Tucker Bennett and Chris Corrente on “In the Glow of Darkness”
Drawing heavily from internet aesthetics that feel at once contemporary and dated, In the Glow of Darkness is a sprawling, hand-made cyberpunk ensemble film following detectives, streamers, pop stars, struggling families, corporate conspiracies and a rave-dancing hitman. Eschewing direct references to our world’s online space, In the Glow of Darkness constructs a parallel reality of tech-run nightclubs, LAN party fraternities and a “meme-tripping” drug culture, where users get have their subconscious uploaded to a QR-code tramp stamp, which, when scanned, gives them euphoric hallucinations as well as sending AI-generated targeted ads directly to their brains. Tucker Bennett started making films […]
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“We Had to Test the Audience’s Own Morality”: Harris Dickinson on Urchin
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), stars Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) as a homeless addict trying to rehabilitate after his latest stint in jail. I spoke to Dickinson […]
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Endgames: Alejo Moguillansky on Pin de Fartie
Pin de Fartie (2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play’s themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky’s ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy. The title refers to the end of a chess game; here, it signals the twilight of relationships––both filial and romantic––against the current approach of the end of civilization. Each sequence of Pin de […]
