Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“This Sometimes Happens, That Cameras Fall in Love”: Alexandre Koberidze on What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze’s camera is caught up in the day-to-day of the locals of Kutaisi, Georgia, before the meet-cute of main characters Giorgi (Georgi Bochorishvili) and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) draws its attention. The camera watches their shoes as they first stumble into each other, recollect their fallen books and dart off in the wrong directions before realizing the mistake, turning around and bumping into each other all over again. When the camera finally pans up to reveal their faces, it places the curse of the “evil eye” on the would-be lovers, who just scheduled their first date together. As a personified […]
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“97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]
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“It’s Really the Act of Saying the Words Out Loud, Bringing Darkness into Light, Negotiating the Past for Yourself”: Matthew Fifer on His Autobiographical NYC Drama, Cicada
Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]
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“That Particular Phrase, ‘Arthouse,’ Has Hung Over My Head Like a Cloud of Contagion”: Wendell B. Harris Jr. on Chameleon Street
William Douglas Street Jr. needed more money and less of a dead-end job. Working for his dad’s alarm installation company, he’d hit a wall. The only lucrative alternative was to deal drugs, but he refused to get wrapped up in that—instead, he became a conman and created his own opportunities after perceiving how arbitrary the barriers to higher-paying jobs and luxuries of high society are. Through his schemes, Street got to live the life of a Time sports journalist, a Chicago surgeon, a Martiniquan exchange student at Yale and many other personas—if only temporarily. Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street dramatizes […]
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Socks, Scope and 35mm Projection: Mia Hansen-Løve on Bergman Island
Filmmaking couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) arrive at Fårö Island to begin a real-life residency for artists who wish to work in Ingmar Bergman’s former home. “All this calm and perfection, I find it oppressive,” she says; “soothing,” he counters. Mia Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature, Bergman Island, sets up a number of binaries, most directly in the film’s bifurcated structure: the first half is a third-person POV of Chris and Tony’s time on the island, the second a film-within-a-film of the project Chris is writing and recapitulating for Tony. (For schedule availability reasons, the second half was shot first, while […]
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Overdraft Protection: Chloë Sevigny Talks to Amalia Ulman About her Feature Debut, El Planeta
Starting in 2012, the saga of mother/daughter scammers Justina and Ana Belén was low-key Spanish news fodder. Their scheme followed a buy-first, pay-never model, using a variety of excuses to dodge their bills. They came to legal attention when they attempted to dodge a hotel bill in Gijón, Spain, by threatening to accuse the proprietor of sexual harassment; a year later, in 2013, they were again arrested in the same city for racking up thousands of euros in unpaid dinners. In 2017, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman received a photo of the Beléns from her mother, Ale, who still lives in […]
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The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
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Breaking Bodies: Julia Ducournau on Titane
Following her breakout film, the high school cannibal romp Raw (2016), filmmaker Julia Ducournau doubles down on her predilections for freely reconstructed human flesh. The Palme d’Or–winning Titane strays even further from traditional narrative logic, emerging as a baroque investigation of the power of bodies to morph in response to the desires and violence of both people and machines. Taking its title from the metal plate installed in a young girl’s head after her father (Bertrand Bonello, in a fun bit of casting) crashes their car amid her aggressive fury, it is, yes, the movie where a woman fucks a […]
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“I Have to Pay Some Form of Homage to the Art Form That Saved Me From Myself”: Writer/Director James DeMonaco on His Staten Island-Set Drama, This Is The Night
A veteran screenwriter and, more recently, an accomplished director, James DeMonaco has had a prolific career most commonly associated with The Purge franchise. Spanning five films and a television series, The Purge marked DeMonaco’s sophomore directorial outing and, aided by the upstart production company, Blumhouse, saw the filmmaker’s first box-office hit. DeMonaco, who also directed the second and third entries in the series, continues with the franchise, as a screenwriter, to this day (a rumored sixth installment is currently in the works). However, ties to his hometown of Staten Island remain at the forefront of DeMonaco’s creative endeavours, and his […]
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“Once It Exists Conceptually, It’s Just Problem Solving”: Writer-Director Jonathan Mostow on Breakdown
In the summer of 1997, a season characterized by gargantuan spectacles like The Lost World, Con Air, The Fifth Element, and Batman and Robin, a modest thriller by an unknown young director surprised audiences, critics and probably even its own financiers by becoming a sleeper hit thanks to its classical virtues and relentless determination to put the viewer in the palm of its hand and squeeze. The film, Breakdown, began when Dino de Laurentiis hired low-budget filmmaker Jonathan Mostow to write and direct a new adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Trucks,” which King had already directed himself as Maximum […]
