Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
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“I’m Not Interested in Horror Films”: Karan Kandhari on Sister Midnight
It’s a full eight-and-half minutes into Sister Midnight before newlyweds Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) even say a word to each other; conflict immediately ensues. Confined to a cramped, one-room apartment after moving to Mumbai, the spitfire Uma finds herself ill-suited to the rigid traditional roles expected of Indian brides. Her bashful husband, on the other hand, rebuffs her attempts to seduce him with a polite handshake. In this lonely arranged marriage of stifled desires and out-of-sync conversations, even bangles soon begin to feel like shackles. Despite this, Karan Kandhari’s Hindi-language directorial debut unfolds as a domestic drama […]
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“One of the Most Delicate Challenges I’ve Faced as a Filmmaker”: Kevin Haefelin on His Student Short Film Showcase Winner The Fuse
In The Fuse, an elderly sanitation worker named Cassius (non-professional actor Jorge Gabino) decides to quietly shuffle himself off of this mortal coil. Written and directed by Kevin Haefelin as part of his MFA studies at Columbia University, the narrative may not provide direct context for Cassius’ fatal decision, but it certainly does make it difficult for him to complete his morbid task. When a fuse blows out and makes electrocution an unviable option, Cassius traverses his Bronx neighborhood looking for a quick-fix to get his plan back on track. Black comedy abounds, pointing to the universe’s general indifference to […]
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Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
With Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides sneak previewing in New York via Sideshow/Janus Films, we are unlocking our Spring, 2025 cover story, an interview with the director as well as lead Zhao Tao covering their collaboration on this film as well as across their filmographies. On May 4, 5 and 6, Jia will be doing Q&As at New York’s IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center. Caught by the Tides opens May 9. — Editor Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, […]
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“False Histories. Corny Music Biopic”: Alex Ross Perry on Pavements
“I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who’s not that successful in their time tries to think that,” says Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus early on in Pavements, a new hybrid music documentary about the band. The group was certainly successful during their heyday in the ’90s, at least in indie rock terms—a perfect discography that drew near-universal critical acclaim, multiple tours including major international festivals and a hit on MTV—but their stature and popularity has only grown since they broke up in 1999. Beginning in 2002, Matador Records slowly re-released every […]
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“We Literally Burned Our Actual Set”: Writer-Director Ryan Coogler and Producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian on Sinners
Even before its smashing opening weekend theatrical success, Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first original directorial outing since his 2013 indie hit Fruitvale Station, was knocking loud on the box office doors. Early reviews praised the film’s unique genre-bending vision, weaving vampire lore and Irish songs into a 1932-set horror-musical dramatic thriller about identical Black twin brothers leaving behind their Chicago gangster lives to return to their sharecropper roots in the Mississippi Delta and start their own juke joint—that is, before the vampires come a-seducing. Before that, Smoke and Stack, twins played by Michael B. Jordan in a bravura dual performance, throw […]
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“A Redemption Story That Gets Derailed By a Revenge Story”: Ariella Mastroianni and Ryan J. Sloan on Gazer
There are a set of rules that have long-guided ultra-low and microbudget production. Lots of daylight exteriors, one or two central locations (to minimize company moves and location rental cost), a small cast, no stunts, no child actors and a compressed shooting schedule. If today it’s not uncommon to see a 24-day schedule on films of $12 million, and most independents with sub $3-million budgets are boarded between 18 and 24 days, a filmmaker considering their first ultra-low-budget picture should think about going even lower, to 11 or 12 days, even. And, of course, shooting digital is probably the economically […]
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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, […]
