Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“Coziness was a Creative North Star”: Andrew Ahn on The Wedding Banquet
In approaching The Wedding Banquet, director Andrew Ahn knew his reimagining of the 1993 romantic comedy directed by Ang Lee had to navigate nuances of queer and cultural identity that he still wrestles with today. So, in updating the original story—about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant who tries to convince his traditionally-minded parents that he’s straight—Ahn chose to expand it, focusing on a foursome of queer friends who live together in Seattle and become unlikely co-conspirators in a similarly elaborate ruse. Involving not one but two same-sex couples navigating milestone moments, this version of the story (in theaters April 18) goes beyond […]
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“Audiences Think They Want Answers, but They Don’t”: Screenwriter Sam Stefanak on The Woman in the Yard
The Woman in the Yard is the latest production from horror factory Blumhouse, but tones down the jump scares in favor of visualizing the dark imaginary of a woman battling depression. It’s not what audiences have come to expect from the studio, and it has garnered wildly divisive reactions from audiences and critics alike. Woman follows single mother Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), grieving her husband’s death, who is haunted by a female specter in the backyard that is pushing her to self-annihilation. It was a very personal project for first-time screenwriter Sam Stefanak, who was channeling his own demons during the […]
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From the Jewish Repertory Theater to the Movies: Screenwriter Susan Sandler on Crossing Delancey
When Joan Micklin Silver died on the last day of 2020, cinephiles mourned the passing of a major American filmmaker, a status to which she may have begun to ascend in late 2014, when IFC Center presented a 35mm screening of her third feature Chilly Scenes of Winter with its original title and the director’s preferred ending—the first time in perhaps a decade that the film had resurfaced in New York’s repertory scene. At that time, Vadim Rizov spoke to Silver, then in her late 70s, about her struggles to break into the film industry (“‘At that point in time, […]
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“It’s a Maximalist Kind of Movie”: Producer-Turned-Director Alex Scharfman on Horror Comedy Death of a Unicorn
Death of a Unicorn, the feature debut by producer Alex Scharfman, could also be titled Death by Unicorn, as the film offers numerous stabbings via horn by the title creatures. The A24 production co-stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter who, on their way to visit an uber-rich pharmaceutical bigwig (Richard E. Grant) at his secluded compound in the woods, hit a unicorn with their car. The father and daughter load it up and plan to dispose of it later, but the mythical creature’s family comes looking for revenge, going on a murderous parental outrage. “When […]
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Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production. Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting […]
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Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across his filmography, resulting in new sensations, desires and ways of being in the world. In Videodrome, unusual orifices form, as stomachs become insertion points for violent VHS tapes. Real and virtual worlds blur in eXistenZ as videogame controllers jack directly into spinal cords; more recently, in Crimes of the Future, the surgical removal of surreal organs is the latest form […]
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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased. From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo. […]
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Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang
Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot […]
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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
