Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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The Music Inside: Siân Heder on Her Oscar-Winning CODA
Filmmaker’s interview with Coda director Siân Heder originally appeared in our Summer, 2021 print edition, and is being reposted today following the film’s winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage […]
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“You Never Know When You Will Have a Great Image”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on the Oscar-Winning Drive My Car
Originally appearing here in July, 2021, Filmmaker‘s interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Drive My Car is being reposted today alongside the film’s Best International Feature win at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor It might strike some as sacrilege when I say that the excitement I’ve felt around Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s run of recent work reminds me of watching (and catching up with) the films of Arnaud Desplechin in the 2000s. Drive My Car, which had its world premiere in Competition at Cannes, follows the ecstasies and agonies and everything in-between of Happy Hour, Asako I & II (worth singling out […]
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The Gold Mine of Uncomfortable Social Interactions: Ted Fendt on Outside Noise
I distinctly remember precisely where I was when I watched my first Ted Fendt film, his 2011 short Shattered Sleep. I can very easily envision the room (not my own) and where the laptop (also not my own) was positioned. My experience watching it is also very clear. I remember feeling somewhat befuddled at first—where did this film and filmmaker come from?—but soon that befuddlement turned into amazement. The work was funny, weird, genuine and utterly original—rare qualities then and even rarer qualities now. Since that fateful night, I’ve been thankful to share noodles, tacos, unending pastries and even an […]
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39 Shooting Days and One Year of Editing: James Vaughan on Friends and Strangers
Acquaintances Ray (Fergus Wilson) and Alice (Emma Diaz) bump into each other in Brisbane, discover they’re both about to drive back to Sydney and decide to stop along the way for a night of camping—one of the first of many unexpected detours in Friends and Strangers, a fresh, funny and unorthodox rarity of an arthouse comedy. The title of this 2021 Rotterdam premiere gives some indication of how writer-director-editor James Vaughan’s feature debut unfolds: it takes some time to discern that Ray is the film’s main subject, as he keeps encountering new people and the film seems like it could go […]
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Welcome to the Dollhouse: Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney on Strawberry Mansion
In the year 2035, dream-auditing is a prolific but thankless business, especially for James Preble (Kentucker Audley). Scrummaging through an individual’s archived dreams via an endless collection of VHS tapes, Preble finds himself constantly stuck between mundane reality and the elusive world of someone’s REM cycle. The primary goal of slumming through this government job? Dream taxation. One afternoon, as he visits the home of Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller and, in the dream world, Grace Glowicki), a welcoming but mysterious dream tax evader, the lines between consciousness and unconsciousness grow blurred. A love story, a comedy, a 1980s children’s fantasy […]
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“Images are Moving Away From the Eye”: Dane Komljen on Afterwater
The opening minutes of Afterwater, Dane Komljen’s second feature, might fool viewers into thinking they know what they’re in for. At a university, a young man sketches varieties of fishes preserved in jars of glass. A young woman attends class in a lab with microscopes on every table. They don’t speak, their expressions remain impassive. We observe them in static and meticulous compositions, as if they themselves were specimens. When a character reads from a book about limnology, i.e. the study of lakes, and the word “microcosm” cues a shot of Berlin’s central train station bustling with commuters, the cut […]
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“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
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“African Spirituality Has a History of Being Demonized in Cinema”: Nikyatu Jusu on Nanny
West African mythology is an integral facet of Nikyatu Jusu’s filmmaking. Whether in her directorial stint on an episode of The CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories or the melanated day-walking vampires in her short film (and 2019 festival circuit hit) Suicide by Sunlight, the Sierra Leonean-American writer/director has made it her mission to introduce American audiences to the folklore of her heritage. If she also manages to revamp tired (and overly Eurocentric) monster tropes while she’s at it, then so be it. It’s fitting, then, that Jusu’s feature debut Nanny manages to do a little bit of both. When a […]
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“I Would Love for Horror to Be My Home, But I Want to Be Bi-Coastal”: Mariama Diallo on Master
The racist roots of Ivy League academia are molded into an intangible boogeywoman in writer/director Mariama Diallo’s feature debut Master. While the film takes place on the fictional campus of Ancaster—located in the greater Boston area—much of the film’s insights on matters of race and gender stem from Diallo’s own undergraduate experience at Yale. In fact, the titular term “master” refers to what would more commonly be known as “head of house,” or the senior member of a college within a wider university system. If this term still seems convoluted and archaic, it’s likely because it’s largely a British custom, […]
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“The Oppressive Voyeurism You’re Constantly Surrounded By As a Woman”: Writer/Director Chloe Okuno and Co-Writer Zack Ford on Watcher
The eerie, nagging feeling of being watched is elevated to a hauntingly tangible reality in Watcher, the feature directorial debut of Chloe Okuno. Co-written by Okuno (recently acclaimed for helming the “Storm Drain” segment in the horror anthology V/H/S/94) and seasoned screenwriter Zack Ford (who in 2021 ran for mayor of Skaneateles, NY before ultimately relocating to L.A.), the film follows Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman), a young American couple who relocate to Bucharest for Francis’s work. Shortly after settling into their minimalist new digs, Julia begins to notice an unsettling presence in her most intimate spaces. As […]
