Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Tokyo International Film Festival 2024: Tsuta Tetsuichiro on Black Ox
Telling the story of a small, subsistence farming mountain community whose few remaining members keep drifting away to nearby cities, Tsuta Tetsuichiro’s second feature, 2013’s The Tale of Iya, drew upon his background growing up in rural Japan. “I was actually born near there,” he explained. “As I observed the lifestyle of the people of Iya, the idea came to me naturally to make a film set there.” After shooting his first feature on 16mm film in black-and-white, Tetsuichiro upgraded to 35m color for Iya, whose physicality throughout the seasons overwhelms with brutally immersive snowstorms and epic mountain panoramas. For his […]
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“This is Going to Be the Most Circuitous Interview”: Alan Rudolph on Breakfast of Champions
25 years ago, Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions left theaters as quickly as it arrived, barely making a blip during a landmark year in American cinema save for a litany of negative reviews that all but celebrated its failure. (Luc Moullet might have been its sole admirer upon release.) Adapted from the Kurt Vonnegut novel of the same name, Breakfast captures a cross-section of American archetypes on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown; correspondingly, the film also feels like it’s also losing its mind. Rudolph, cinematographer Elliot Davis and editor Suzy Elmiger imbue Breakfast with a manic, comically grotesque […]
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“There’s an Inherent Absurdity to the Lengths She Goes”: Josh Margolin on Thelma
When Josh Margolin first heard that his grandmother had nearly become the victim of a phone scam — in which someone pretending to be Margolin attempted to score thousands of dollars from the elder — he immediately felt ill at ease and violated on her behalf. But it didn’t take long for the writer-director to recognize a great story: What if his grandmother had given away her money and, upon realizing the scam, set out to get revenge? The result is Margolin’s feature debut Thelma, starring June Squibb in the eponymous role as a 93-year-old Los Angeles resident who doesn’t […]
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“When I’m a Director, I’m a Painter”: Titus Kaphar on Exhibiting Forgiveness
Titus Kaphar’s artwork can be found across the nation at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University and the Mississippi Museum of Art; his painting Yet Another Fight for Remembrance might be his most recognizable, as it was commissioned by TIME Magazine as a response to the Ferguson unrest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. The MacArthur Fellowship recipient continues to examine contemporary Black life in his feature film debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness. Actor André Holland stars as Terrell, an acclaimed painter living with his singer-songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son […]
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“I Knew Exactly How to Bring It to the Screen”: Marco Calvani on High Tide
Italian playwright Marco Calvani makes his feature film debut as a writer-director with High Tide, a Provincetown-set indie drama that centers on the need for communal tenderness after a heartbreak. Lourenço (Marco Pigossi, now Calvani’s husband) considers P-town a paradise. Having left his native Brazil years ago in order to live life as an out gay man (a fact he still conceals from his mother), the queer enclave provides ample community and connection for the handsome young man. However, recent events have made the locale feel more oppressive than he expected: his long-term boyfriend up and left without warning, visa […]
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The Gotham Pages: Lulu Wang on Creating Storytelling Ecosystems Abroad
Writer/Director Lulu Wang has been shooting film and TV overseas since her debut feature Posthumous (2014). The American-German co-production tells the story of a Berlin-based artist who finally finds his audience when the media mistakenly reports him dead. Wang then shot her sophomore hit, The Farewell (2019), between New York and Changchun. The themes and plot of that film—in which the obstinate individualism of a Chinese-American writer (Awkwafina) abrades her family’s collective sense of responsibility when she reunites with them in northern China—is reflected in the film’s co-production model, for which an American and Chinese cast and crew converged. These […]
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“Making the Invisible Visible”: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias on Pepe
There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to […]
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“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
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Make a $100,000 Genre Movie in 12 Days in Chicago: Writer/Director Zach Clark on The Becomers
High-concept movie formula makers will have a field day with Zach Clark’s The Becomers. Is its tender, yet often violent, saga of star-crossed – and serial human body inhabiting – lovers a hybrid of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (whose lead character is played by eight different actors) or an Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for an N95-masked America? Or … something else? Clark’s first film since his widely beloved Little Sister (2016) wasn’t one he had in the pipeline. The New York-based writer-director-editor had put a heroic effort into launching a project on […]
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“I Always Write for Places Where They Won’t Kick Me Out”: Kazik Radwanski on Matt and Mara
Matt and Mara presents a familiar premise—two old friends with an unresolved romantic connection reconnect years after their lives have diverged—but Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski turns this potentially contrived narrative into an organic examination of interpersonal dynamics that’s tailored to the strengths of his performers and longtime creative collaborators Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. When Matt (Johnson) grabs the attention of creative writing professor Mara (Campbell) right before she’s about to start class, it’s clear both are looking to break out of their ruts. Mara is out of sync with her musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) amidst the daily […]
