Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Alonso Ruizpalacios on Museo, Casting Gael Garcia Bernal For His Shortness and Never Meeting Your Heroes
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ two features to date are both about Mexico City’s recent past. The writer-director first gained international visibility with 2014’s Güeros, a black-and-white road trip movie set in the 1990s using the protests at the National Autonomous University of Mexico as backdrop for an intimate coming-of-age plot. For his sophomore venture, Museo, Ruizpalacios enlisted major star Gael García Bernal and one of Güeros’ cast members, Leonardo Ortizgris, to address a larger than life, yet based on real life, crime story. 1985 was a chaotic year for Mexico City, aside from the devastation left in the wake of a massive earthquake […]
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Moment of Conception
“All it takes is one good egg.” This refrain is uttered more than a few times throughout the course of Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, her first feature since 2007’s The Savages. A meditation on marriage, middle age and the haves and have-not’s of fertility, the film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artist couple—she’s a writer, and he runs both a theater group and an artisanal pickle company—desperate to conceive in their 40s. While the pair loads up on IVF hormones and diminishing hopes, they must also make room in their realistically cozy East Village apartment for their […]
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“Would You Mind Going to Video Village?” Andrew Bujalski on Support The Girls, Hollywood Casting and the Patriarchy
The last time I interviewed Andrew Bujalski, he’d thrown a number of viewers for a loop with Results, his gym-set, quasi-romantic comedy starring Guy Pierce and Cobie Smulders. The overt weirdness of Computer Chess was one thing, but Bujalski feinting at a mainstream-leaning movie with honest-to-goodness name actors, a perky score and the promise of two hot people hooking up for a happy ending was a proposition that seemed to fry the expectations of both veteran Bujalski viewers (who didn’t see it coming) and people who didn’t know his work at all (and didn’t get the normal romcom they expected). I’m firmly […]
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Writer/Director Kitao Sakurai on Designing the Deliberate Randomness of The Eric Andre Show and The Passage
Adult Swim’s Tim And Eric, Awesome Show! Great Job and The Eric Andre Show ushered in a revolution of on-screen-comedy. Their new perspectives offered something so irradiated, shocking, non-linear and “random” that explaining them seemed inscrutable. You’d flip the channel if your grandma joined you at the television in fear you might have to justify it to her—in fear she might discover you’re insane. “These shows can only be the result of drug induced, inhuman, and unconscious improvisation!” The artists responsible for making you laugh are high, and maybe you ought to be while watching too. Those who “get it” […]
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“It Certainly Doesn’t Hurt to Make Films For This Little Money”: Ricky D’Ambrose on Notes on an Appearance
Writing about Ricky D’Ambrose for last year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Vadim Rizov described the script of his debut feature, Notes on an Appearance, then in postproduction, as “giv[ing] a sense of a disciplined, honed gaze refined over years of self-tutoring.” That autodidact’s precision manifests, in shorts like Six Cents in the Pocket (2015) and Spiral Jetty (2015), in straight-on close-ups of people against blank white walls or monochromatic wallpaper, or of pictures and texts and cups of coffee on tables as the sun streams through the window, and an almost monastic sound mix of epistolary voiceover and […]
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“David Duke Called Us Out By Name”: BlacKkKlansman Screenwriters Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz
When I went to see BlacKkKlansman earlier this summer, I was startled to completely lose it two minutes in. The opening scene is a fire-breathing racist monologue by Alec Baldwin as a segregationist leader. I knew the premise of the film — the true story of how black police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrated a Colorado branch of the KKK with the help of a white partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), in the late ’70s — and figured a fair amount of racist invective would be involved. What I did not expect was to hear Baldwin spit out the words “fucking Jews” […]
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Committed to Paper: Writer/Director Paul Schrader on First Reformed
With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]
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“I Don’t Care If It Never Shows in a Theater”: Steven Soderbergh on sex, lies, and videotape, 4K HDR and the Studio System
Some films make a splash on their initial release and are largely forgotten just a few years later; others are ignored but rise in stature with the passage of time. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape is one of those rare movies that was a phenomenon in its time and has only gotten better with age, a razor-sharp exploration of the ways in which we lie to each other and ourselves and an inquiry into what those lies say about our relationships, our desires, and our society as a whole. An extremely specific movie about a precise social […]
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“Zooms are Totally Underutilized”: Bo Burnham on Eighth Grade
With Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade now in theaters, we’re reposting this interview with the writer/director conducted during SXSW 2018. The movie: Eighth Grade The Plot: Shy and uncertain (except when doling out life advice on her sparsely followed vlog), eighth grader Kayla (a revelatory Elsie Fisher) struggles through her last days of middle school. The Interviewee: Bo Burnham. Eighth Grade is the feature directorial debut for the multi-hyphenate writer/director/musician/stand-up comedian. Filmmaker: Let’s start by talking about opening shots. The way you open the Jerrod Carmichael stand-up special you directed for HBO — this extremely tight close-up with Carmichael already on-stage […]
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Nine Cameras and 101 Shooting Days: Director Dante Lam and Producer Candy Leung on Operation Red Sea, Stunt Choreography and Working in English
The second-highest grossing Chinese film of all time, Operation Red Sea has earned over a half-billion dollars since its release this past February. Writer/director Dante Lam introduced the film at a New York Asian American Film Festival screening on June 30 and accepted the festival’s Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Operation Red Sea is loosely drawn from the real-life evacuation of Chinese hostages during the 2015 civil war in Yemen. In the movie version, Jiaolong, an elite task force, not only have to free hostages, they must also stop an attempt to sell yellowcake uranium to terrorists […]
