Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“There’s Political Relevance to Melodrama”: Karim Aïnouz on His Lush Tropical Tale of Sisterhood, Invisible Life
Greenery abounds in Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz’s affecting and bright-colored sisterhood saga Invisible Life. Based on Martha Batalha’s 2016 novel, it chronicles the forced disconnection between siblings Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler), whose hearts break with each passing day apart in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Victims of a male-dominated society that denies their dreams and ambitions, the sisters embody two sides of the same still resonant struggles women of the time endured. In addition to the striking work of French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, top talent was plentiful across the board. Illustrious producer Rodrigo Teixeira (Call Me By Your […]
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“All These Other Misogynists Waiting to Pounce”: Sophia Takal on Black Christmas
Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]
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“Something with Your Therapist”: Noah Baumbach on Marriage Story
Marriage Story depicts the love two people can find in separation. It is not a rekindling, it is stepping back to respect the boundaries you crossed in your strangling embrace. The original love hardens. It dies and returns as something like an actual reverence. At this distance, you might actually be able to see each other again. If the separating lovers in question, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), can learn to walk away from each other with nothing more than that knowing glance—“I accept that we will not be together. It is sad, but you are great. I […]
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Commodity Fetishism
The visual exquisiteness of Peter Strickland’s films has sometimes led to them being regarded as precious bon-bons—laced with strychnine—that favor style over substance. It’s an argument that applies no more to his self-financed feature debut Katalin Varga (2009), an unsentimental neo-Gothic rape revenge drama, than to his harrowing giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio (2012) or his depiction of an inverse Domme/sub relationship in The Duke of Burgundy (2014). Each of these movies is a penetrating psychological study of a character struggling to survive victimhood and the unfair hand she or he has been dealt. If you don’t sympathize with Katalin […]
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Every Day I Write the Book
Creating cinema without concern for the economic system in which you operate is a privilege few can exercise. Like most filmmakers I know, I make films not only as a form of expression but also as a means of financial subsistence. I wrestle with the impact this dependency has on my work on a daily basis. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a film that she pitched as being about “art and women and money,” examines the complex relationship between profit and power in storytelling. Gerwig’s adaptation of the century-and-a-half-old text boldly restructures the narrative and further blurs the line between author […]
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Parlays and Teasers
I first learned of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems—a comedy/drama built around the self-delusions, self-destructions and unbridled compulsions of a midtown Manhattan diamond dealer—back in 2011. The brothers had just completed their first feature as a directing duo, Daddy Longlegs (Josh previously directed 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed), and shared a 161-page early draft. Much of the ingenious plotting of their new film was missing, but the character of that dealer, Howard Ratner, screamed out. Indelibly portrayed by Adam Sandler eight years later, Howard is a perpetual motion machine of mishap, whose schemes spiral more and more painfully […]
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“A Black and White Movie in a Stupid Aspect Ratio”: Robert Eggers on The Lighthouse
Eulogized debuts draw ravenous, patient cynics, who stalk the scent of a fledgling’s success to their second movie, hoping their foe might slip. Robert Eggers, a name of contention after headlines announced he would remake Nosferatu (TBD) before his Sundance debut The Witch was released theatrically for audiences to decide if he were worthy themselves, has made his second move. The Lighthouse, a sophomore effort especially susceptible to readied blows, has made it back with critics on the festival circuit and will now see appraisal from the mainstream on its theatrical bout. But the film expels farts and sailor vulgarity, an […]
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“It Doesn’t Make Sense to Explain Anything”: Angela Schanelec on I Was at Home, But… and Robert Bresson
The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&A for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to TIFF, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]
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The Soul that Remains: Paul Harrill on Light from Light
Paul Harrill’s Tennessee-set Light from Light, which premiered this year at Sundance, stars Marin Ireland as a paranormal investigator who may or may not believe in ghosts and Jim Gaffigan as a recent widower who still feels his wife’s presence in their house. Harrill is quick to point out that it is definitely not a horror film, and anyone expecting scares will be disappointed. Instead, Harrill investigates seemingly more mundane day-to-day Southern living (as he did in his previous effort, Something, Anything), and in it finds a delicate balance between reality and spirituality. I saw Light from Light at the […]
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Made For These Times: Ulrich Köhler on In My Room
Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room begins with what looks like a DCP glitch. The view is from a handheld news camera entering a press conference scrum, its operator confirming in voiceover that he’s rolling while roaming from lectern to lectern. Each time an official statement is delivered, the image cuts to the aftermath—the as-yet-unseen cameraman, Armin (Hans Löw), has confused the “off” and “on” switch, and the inadvertent B-roll he shot is unusable. All of Armin’s life is similarly shabbily disarrayed: At a club, he picks up a young lady and brings her home, but an ill-phrased refusal to let […]
