Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“The Camera Gives Me Permission to Feel the Things I’m Always Pushing Down”: Writer, Director and Actor Cooper Raiff on Shithouse
Shithouse, Cooper Raiff’s profanely-titled first feature, chronicles an inspired romance between two young souls on disparate higher education voyages. Told with real insight about college-age characters and their flawed relationships, the picture earned 23-year-old Raiff—a softhearted wunderkind who wrote, directed and starred in the film—the Grand Jury Award at this year’s pandemic-impacted SXSW. Life between dorms and parties doesn’t exactly suit shy freshman Alex Malmquist (Raifff), who’s most comfortable seeking advice from an adorable childhood plush animal he’s brought from home. Though he puts in some effort to adapt to dorm life, he still yearns for the comforting embrace of his protective family. […]
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“I Know So Much More Now about Pandemic Response Than I Did When We Made It”: Brian Duffield on Spontaneous
One of the most fascinating things about viewing new movies in the age of COVID is how many of them tap into current anxieties in spite of having been completed before the coronavirus arrived; films as varied in style, budget, and genre as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, She Dies Tomorrow and Tenet all resonate in this historical moment in ways that would have been very different–and probably less effective–if they had been released just a few months earlier. Screenwriter Brian Duffield’s strikingly original and extremely moving teen comedy Spontaneous is the latest film to speak to the persistent unease and […]
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“I Have Not Seen My Film with Anyone Other than Two People”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on Beginning
Dea Kulumbegashvili should have had the year of her life. At any other moment, the Tbilisi-based writer/director would have already travelled to Cannes, Toronto and San Sebastián to screen her new film for festival audiences. A remarkable accomplishment for anyone, let alone a young director with a first feature, the success of Beginning has instead been a strange, bittersweet ride. In the absence of sold-out screenings and sponsored afterparties, the festival experience in 2020 has given way to far less glamorous rituals: Zoom Q&As, geo-locked streaming links and the solitary act of viewing from home. For Kulumbegashvili, 34, the process […]
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“My Production Costs the Same as a Digital Film”: Philippe Garrel on The Salt of Tears
Philippe Garrel is in recognisably a “late” stage of his career as a filmmaker. He has moved past the point of going for broke. His characters, avatars for any given idea he may be preoccupied with, border on the archetypal. The settings are stripped down, reduced to their essence. His concerns, by this stage, are variations on a few basic themes. He is a commanding narrative presence, the authorial space in which he is most free to assert himself idiosyncratically. With all this in mind, viewers’ mileage may vary. Those of us who take pleasure in the relaxed vibes of […]
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“We Were Determined to Locate and Use the Lenses from Gone With The Wind“: Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz on Antebellum
Antebellum, the debut horror/thriller from filmmaking duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, wasn’t initially scheduled to be released this week. Originally slated for a late April theatrical bow, the film’s public exhibition was indefinitely put on hold once the COVID-19 pandemic hit and closed all movie theaters for the foreseeable future. After waiting in the wings for several months, Lionsgate decided to move forward with a North American digital release (opening the film elsewhere theatrically around the globe) and the unintended timing couldn’t be more apt. Antebellum’s much-dissected trailer, portraying an African-American woman (played by Janelle Monáe) enslaved in the […]
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Past Imperfect: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan on Memory, Metaphysics and Memento
The following interview with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan was originally published as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2001 issue. As French film critic Andre Bazin might have once said: “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” Bazin, as some of you may remember from your Cinema Studies courses, was one of the progenitors of the auteur theory, the line of thinking in which directors are considered the kings of filmdom, and the aggregation of their personal style is seen as a map of their royal terrain. Bazin also liked to talk about film, philosophy, photography and death, […]
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“People are Actually Reading My Scripts When I Send Them!”: Brea Grant on Tribeca Premiere 12 Hour Shift
It was to be a triumphant springtime festival run for Brea Grant. The actor, writer and director (who first won notoriety a decade ago on the NBC series Heroes), had not one, but two, premieres on her calendar at the season’s biggest film festivals, South by Southwest and Tribeca. Grant wrote and has the lead role in Lucky, a thriller about a self-help author besieged by a stalker. The SXSW selection got sidelined as the festival became one of the first to cancel amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, 12 Hour Shift, the pitch-black comedy Grant wrote and directed, likewise […]
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“Rodeos are Incredibly Dangerous”: Annie Silverstein on Bull
In Annie Silverstein’s Bull, an at-risk teenage girl, Kris (by Amber Havard), is thrust into a relationship with neighbor Abe (Rob Morgan), a rodeo bullfighter nearing the end of his career. Silverstein’s feature debut builds out from her 2014 short Skunk, both set in a blue-collar part of Houston where rural and urban poverty collide. Most film productions drop in on locations, shoot what they need and depart. Silverstein and her husband and writing partner Johnny McAllister take a different approach, embedding themselves in communities for months and even years before filming. Bull has a documentary realism, but also a deep, […]
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Five Questions for Writer/Director Kerem Sanga about His Tribeca Competition Drama, The Violent Heart
Played with a compelling mixture of sensitivity and suppressed rage by Joven Adepo (The Leftovers, Sorry for Your Loss) Daniel, the young auto mechanic and ex-con at the center of Kerem Sanga’s The Violent Heart, is a man imprinted by the past. We meet him first in flashback when, as a young boy, he crouches in dark woods, watching a horrible crime unfold. And while the exact events of that evening remain a mystery for much of the story, the powerlessness Daniel feels that night, and the aftermath of guilt, are all we need to understand the complicated shadings of […]
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“We’re Definitely Not ‘Social Distancing’ Distance”: Zia Anger on Performing My First Film Online
After nearly two years of performing My First Film live in theaters, Zia Anger has reconfigured her piece for livestreaming. Currently being streamed to small groups in preview mode, each performance is announced on Anger’s Twitter the morning of; capacity is small and quickly filled on a first come, first served email RSVP basis. The middle core of the show—Anger’s story about her never-premiered first feature, told via a mix of video footage and select online browsing, narrated via TextEdit narration typed out in real time—has remained essentially the same. The beginning and ending have been necessarily rethought: where a key […]
