Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“In Switzerland, We All Benefit From the Bank”: Andreas Fontana on Azor
Andreas Fontana’s exquisite, quietly dazzling feature Azor answers a question we didn’t know we had: how to make a mystery—a thriller, even—set in the world of private banking. Partly: it’s about the arrival of a Swiss banker, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), in early 1980s Buenos Aires, when Argentina is still in the grip of dictatorship. De Wiel is there to take on the wealthy (and suspicious) clients of a colleague, Keys, who has disappeared, leaving a flamboyant reputation. Often accompanied by his wife, Inès (Stéphanie Cléau), he’s left to navigate the already murky areas of hush-hush finance under the […]
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“Spreadsheets Are the Best Things in the World”: Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski on Animating Cryptozoo
Cryptozoo, Dash Shaw’s beautifully animated follow-up to 2016’s My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, begins with a stark, colorless prologue in which a couple, Amber and Matthew (voiced by Luisa Krause and Michael Cera), scale a fence that seems to be randomly placed in the middle of the woods and find themselves staring at an honest-to-God unicorn. The ensuing scene is delicately handled, conveying both the beauty and fright of the encounter and, eventually, its tragicness unflinchingly, without sentimentality. It’s a wonderful introduction to the weird world of the film, where not only unicorns but also gorgons, griffins, […]
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“A 12-Year-Old is Not Going to Know What an Existential Crisis Is”: Pascual Sisto on John and the Hole
Bluntly titled but mysterious all the same, John and the Hole marks the directorial debut of visual artist Pascual Sisto. Originally set to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, the film finally premiered (albeit virtually) at Sundance this past January. Played by lead actor Charlie Shotwell (Captain Fantastic), suburban pre-teen John appears content with his suburban life. He lives in a beautiful Massachusetts home with his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga), surrounded by nature and endless open space, complete with an underground bunker (the hole of the film’s title) built in the yard […]
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“We Had to Combine Three Different Islands”: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic on Cannes Caméra d’Or-Winner Murina
The winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best debut feature at Cannes this year was the maritime Murina, a coming-of-age drama of slow-motion escape from Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic. Premiering in Directors’ Fortnight, the sun-baked film tracks teenaged Julija (Gracija Filipivoc) as she slowly but surely pushes for autonomy from her grumpy father, Ante (Leon Lucev), who runs their family like an impatient captain. A visit from a longtime friend, bekhaki’d and comfortable businessman Javier (Cliff Curtis), sets thoughts spinning for Julija and her youthful mother, Nela (Danica Curcic), as Ante frantically schemes to sell land. Kusijanovic brilliantly […]
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“Where in Europe Can We Find Some Castles?” David Lowery on The Green Knight
A 14th-century epic poem by an anonymous author serves as the basis for one of the most visually and aurally thrilling movies of 2021 in writer-director David Lowery’s The Green Knight, an adaptation of the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s made for adults but casts a spell on the audience every bit as magical as that of classic family films like E.T. and The Wizard of Oz. Dev Patel stars as Gawain, King Arthur’s brash nephew who accepts a challenge from the title character that sends him on a mythic quest which will most likely end […]
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“I Could Only Shoot When I Had Increments of $200 to Spend”: Lizzie Borden on Working Girls, Harvey Weinstein and Changing Perceptions of Sex Work
Highly respected but rarely screened, Working Girls, Lizzie Borden’s 1986 feature about a group of women working an extended shift in a Manhattan brothel, finally makes its way to home video this week thanks to the Criterion Collection. Presented in a new 4K digital restoration, the film is long overdue for reappraisal, and not merely due to the struggles currently faced by sex workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Borden’s previous feature, Born in Flames, was defiantly scrappy and overtly political. Working Girls represents an upgrade in production value while retaining Borden’s unwavering interest in feminist politics, race relations, workers’ rights […]
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Shooting on a Moving Period Russian Train: Juho Kuosmanen on Cannes 2021 Competition Premiere Compartment No. 6
In Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Finnish boxer (and baker) gets a title shot at Helsinki Olympic Stadium against the American featherweight champion. At their joint press conference, the Finnish media is desperate to hear from their distinguished foreign guest: “What do you think of our country?” The real Olli Mäki lost by second-round TKO, but this movie about a small nation jostling for recognition on the world stage took top honors at Un Certain Regard in 2016. Kuosmanen is back at Cannes this year and he’s gone up a class: […]
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“People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]
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Pregnant Pauses: Matías Piñeiro on Isabella
Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles. These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]
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“You Have to Work with What Reality is Giving You”: Danielle Lessovitz on Port Authority
Port Authority, filmmaker Danielle Lessovitz’s gritty debut feature, is “so New York” that one of its least surprising traits is that Martin Scorsese is credited as executive producer. Opening in the cold, shadow-filled halls of the metro transportation hub that provides the film its title, the narrative follows Paul (Fionn Whitehead), a twentysomething arriving in from Pittsburgh, as he attempts to get in touch with his estranged sister (Louisa Krause). A bloody altercation on the subway leads to a chance encounter that connects Paul to a few (temporary) friends, odd jobs, and shelters to live in. One evening, Paul meets […]
