Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“We Expected for Pretty Much No One To See It”: Justin Zuckerman on Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater
I first saw Justin Zuckerman’s Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater—the writer-director’s ultra-low-budget, MiniDV-shot feature debut—back in December at Williamsburg’s Spectacle Theater. I’d been invited on a whim by the film’s emerging producer Ryan Martin Brown, and I happened to be long overdue for a visit to the volunteer-run microcinema. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was quickly charmed by Yelling Fire‘s humble yet lived-in digital aesthetic, impressively taut script and endearing ensemble of adrift, wannabe New Yorkers. Shot between November and December of 2019 and made for less than $3,000, the film feels like a strange, beautiful […]
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“Seeds for the Revolution”: Robert Townsend on Hollywood Shuffle
I first became introduced to the work of Robert Townsend unceremoniously when his family sitcom, The Parent ‘Hood, premiered on The WB network in 1995. A professorial father figure with a wife and four children, Townsend’s character seemed, at least to my adolescent eyes, the ideal American dad. A noble role that fit him like a glove, Townsend must have enjoyed following up his caped-crusader directorial effort, The Meteor Man, with a sitcom that afforded him a more domesticated form of heroism. Those types of roles were not often offered to Townsend. Released in 1987, his directorial debut, Hollywood Shuffle, […]
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“Part Emulation and Part Making Shit Up”: Amanda Kramer on Give Me Pity!
A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Sissy St. Claire (Sophie von Haselberg) appears on a soundstage for her Saturday night television special. Like the tireless performers who came before her, St. Claire will spend the duration of the broadcast showcasing elaborate outfits, dramatic monologues, groan-worthy jokes, peppy musical numbers and an assortment of special guests (some human and others canine). Tonight is either her big break or the conclusion of a descent into madness—either way, don’t dare change that channel! Give Me Pity!, the latest film from director Amanda Kramer, is a warped take on variety show […]
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“Coming of Age Is a Lifelong Process”: Jennifer Reeder on Perpetrator
“I have no shame saying that on some level, I’ve kind of been making the same film over and over,” writer-director Jennifer Reeder tells me on a recent Zoom call. We’re speaking ahead of the Berlinale premiere of Perpetrator, the anticipated follow-up to her 2019 feature debut Knives and Skin, a horror-tinged teen noir that centers on the disappearance of a high school-aged girl and the reckoning that it brings to a Midwestern town’s inhabitants, particularly the girl’s mother and her teenage friend group. Perpetrator iterates a similar narrative trajectory, this time with a distinct genre sensibility. Precocious 17-year-old Jonny […]
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“The ‘Micro-Budget Apocalypse Now“: Gary Huggins On His “Cursed” Debut, Kick Me
A self-described “knock-knock joke ten years in the making,” Gary Huggins’ debut feature Kick Me has to be seen to be believed. The film ostensibly tells the story of a high school guidance counselor who goes into Kansas City, Kansas one night to buy a pet bunny and meet with a delinquent student before attending his daughter’s choral concert. But nothing — and I mean nothing — goes as planned. What unfolds instead is an (often funny) nightmare freakshow featuring three-legged dogs, maniacal Winnebago-driving swingers, geriatric drug dealers, abandoned shopping malls and jenkem huffers that makes Scorsese’s After Hours seem […]
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“Second by Second, She is Trying to Game Out What to Say Next…”: Writer/Director Tina Satter on Her Sydney Sweeney-Starring Berlin Premiere, Reality
Tina Satter’s Reality opens with a high-angle shot of its eponymous heroine, Reality Winner, her blonde head poking up amongst a stretch of cubicle dividers in a Georgia NSA facility. It’s 2017 and above her on the walls are an array of television monitors, chyrons blaring, all tuned to the latest news about James Comey’s Congressional testimony regarding Russian election interference. The channel is Fox, and you don’t have to be at any particular place on the political spectrum to view this work environment as already an abusive one. Winner works translating Farsi to English, a task that requires sensitivity, […]
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“One Cinematographer, Two Camera Operators and Three Cameras”: Albert Serra on Pacifiction
You might think of Pacifiction as a feature-length version of the shot of the boat in The Parallax View before it explodes—before you know it might explode, before you know anything for sure. A man in a white suit, De Roller (Benoît Magimel), makes his rounds on the Polynesian islands, presiding more like a benevolent impresario at a Euro nightclub than the nebulous political figure that he is (High Commissioner, it turns out). He hears out local power players, consults with Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) and other underlings and associates and grows concerned about nuclear machinations by the French government. “It’s not […]
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“Someone Said I Should Be Publicly Executed”: Alex Phillips on All Jacked Up and Full of Worms
The psychedelic potency of fictional invertebrates is pure nightmare fuel in Alex Phillips’s feature debut All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. Yet worms alone don’t drive the film’s deviant characters past the brink of sanity. Rather, the creature’s hallucinogenic properties serve as unfortunate conduits for their most depraved intrusive thoughts. There’s no shortage of gross-out bodily functions and overtly taboo images on display here—milky vomit, slimy appendages, an infant sex doll which must have put Phillips or another crew member on some sort of watchlist. Yet somehow, Worms doesn’t feel like just another piece of dirtbag, edgelord cinema. It’s […]
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“I Made the Film Out of an Intuition”: Davy Chou on Return to Seoul
Freddie (Park Ji-min) doesn’t get what she wants, but it’s not quite clear what it is she does want. She’s in Seoul for the first time as an adult, a child of transnational adoption, someone who’s culturally French and trying to find something that feels indescribably correct about her sense of self, place, and time. That’s barely easily said, never mind done. She lashes out, she broods, she pulls in and pushes away new connections without consideration of the consequences. She’s adrift in a place that should be, by everyone else’s accounts, her homeland. Yet she remains unmoored, the camera […]
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“Punk Gave Me the Tools To Start Questioning Everything”: Michelle Garza Cervera on Huesera: The Bone Woman
Pre-natal anxieties and an entity from Mexican mythology are deftly and devastatingly woven together in Huesera: The Bone Woman, the feature debut from director Michelle Garza Cervera. Co-written by Garza Cervera and regular collaborator Abia Castillo, the film centers on Valeria (Natalia Solián), a young woman in Mexico City delighted to learn that she and her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) are expecting their first child. This giddy sentiment is eclipsed by nerve-shredding terror when Valeria witnesses a neighbor commit suicide from her bedroom window. From that point on, she becomes the target of a strange entity with broken bones and […]
