Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“Carrots Played an Important Part in the Whole Process”: Jerzy Skolimowski on EO
In a year that saw the passing of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s astonishing to see a sometimes overlooked fixture of golden age European art cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, directing one of his strongest films now—with a donkey for a star, no less. Boxer, poet, actor, painter: the 84-year-old director has brought a restlessness to his career, often expressed on film through a muscularly lyrical approach to mobile camerawork that remains unique in many ways. His classic Deep End (1970) heaves and wheels and gawps alongside its awkward, sexually frustrated teenage protagonist, Mike, who stalks a facsimile of curdled Swingin’ London shot in […]
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Apartment Stories: Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson on Something in the Dirt
While the line “I want to believe” is most associated with The X-Files, today’s onslaught of conspiracy theorists and ravenous fact-deniers change that mantra to the more desperate “I need to believe.” After all, who needs objectivity or visual proof to confirm a preconceived notion that we wish to be true when some dude on Reddit can easily prove it for you? With a flare for endless questioning, tinfoil hat conspiracies and alternative views of history, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s two-hander, the 2022 Sundance Film Festival NEXT selection Something in the Dirt, burrows in and digs deep. Here the […]
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“It’s Not Precisely an Image, It’s More Like a Sensation”: Quentin Dupieux on Incredible But True
One of the funniest movies of 2022 is Quentin Dupieux’s Incredible But True. On November 8, it’s available on streaming and Blu-ray from Arrow, but as far as I know, it has no American distributor since its world premiere in Berlin last February. One has to wonder whether Dupieux is now only considered to be a French local delicacy, even after the perverse joys and glorious idiocies of Mandibles and Deerskin (starring Academy Award winner Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel). Or maybe we’ve all been too cagey in describing Incredible But True and its Philip K. Slapstick premise. So here […]
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“Don’t Shoot Too Many Takes”: Walter Hill on Dead for a Dollar
The closing title card of the new Western Dead for a Dollar includes the dedication “In Memory of Budd Boetticher.” Had director Walter Hill worked during Boetticher’s era, he too may have churned out exceptional, modestly budgeted Westerns at a clip of roughly one a year, like Boetticher did for Columbia Pictures in the 1950s. Instead, Hill has settled for being one of a handful of contemporary repeat practitioners of the Western, a disparate group ranging from Clint Eastwood to the Coen Brothers, Kevin Costner to Quentin Tarantino. Hill’s first Western, The Long Riders—a retelling of the Jesse James story that […]
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Wayward Spirits: Nia DaCosta Interviews Nanny Writer/Director Nikyatu Jusu
Nanny, the feature debut from writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, evokes a truly rebellious spirit, channeling West African folklore as a liberatory chaos agent to confront the xenophobia, racism and misogyny that regularly besets immigrants working as domestic laborers in the United States. Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese woman living in New York City, is initially ecstatic when she lands a gig as a live-in nanny for a wealthy family in Manhattan. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector) appear to be well-intentioned employers, and their daughter Rose (Rose Decker) instantly connects with Aisha. However, she quickly realizes that the family’s swanky […]
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Within Memory: Writer/Director Charlotte Wells on Aftersun
Charlotte Wells has been saying that her first feature, which she calls “emotionally autobiographical,” was inspired by leafing through a family album and realizing how young her father was when she was born. A bittersweet aura permeates Aftersun, in which Sophie, just turned 11, spends a week before the start of term with her father, 30-going-on-31 Calum, on vacation at a Turkish hotel, just across the road from the all-inclusive resort where they sneak food from the buffet. Like Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) in Sofia Coppola’s similarly liminal and hotel-set Somewhere, Calum’s arm is initially in a cast—the presumed vestige […]
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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Ricky D’Ambrose Speaks with James Gray about Armageddon Time
Armageddon Time returns the American writer and director James Gray to his childhood—or at least to a version of it. While its treatment of grade-school-age protagonist Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) and his dealings with the world of grown-ups in and around his home in 1980s Queens, New York, might not be, strictly speaking, autobiographical (Gray has been careful to distinguish between personal and autobiographical filmmaking), Armageddon Time draws upon the filmmaker’s childhood to fashion a story of a boy’s moral and aesthetic education that seems at once thoroughly lived-in and unsentimental. For nearly two hours, we watch as young […]
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Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]
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Canadians in “Space”: Stéphane Lafleur on Viking
While Stéphane Lafleur’s third feature, 2014’s Tu Dors Nicole, chronicled the summer malaise between of aimless Quebecois post-grads, his follow-up, Viking, explores a different, slightly otherworldly strain of existentialism. High school gym teacher David (Steven Laplante) gets the opportunity to revive his dreams of becoming an astronaut by joining a behavioral research team called the Viking Society that will mirror the first manned mission to Mars. This B-team plans to replicate the mission in a controlled environment that resembles the probe—i.e., a Quonset hut in the desert—where they will game out potential interpersonal conflicts between the five-member crew in order […]
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“It’s Not Funny if It’s Not Bright”: Greg Mottola on Confess, Fletch
I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]
