Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“You Run the Risk of Becoming a Brand”: Co-Writer/Co-Producer/DP/Editor James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Co-Producer Paul Dallas on Berlinale 2019 “Fake Indie” The Plagiarists
Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]
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“Since It’s About the Death of a Body, We Wanted the Language of the Film to Be Sensuality”: Mazen Khaled on Martyr
Men touch each other tenderly in Mazen Khaled’s formally eclectic second feature Martyr, about the death of a young adult whose self-perpetuated despair drowns him on the shores of the Mediterranean. In this ethereal Lebanese mood piece, the religious interpretation of martyrdom is counteracted with tangible flesh. Rather than glorifying the loss of life as a divine honor, Khaled subtly revels in the presence of desire and the body as constant reminders that being alive is precious. Unemployed and adrift, Hassane (Hamza Mekdad) only finds respite from his restless mind when tanning by the water with his cherished friends, brothers […]
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“What Moonlight Gave Us Was the Confidence to Execute Our Ideas Without Fear”: Writer/Director Barry Jenkins on If Beale Street Could Talk
Writer-director Barry Jenkins solidifies his position as one of the current cinema’s most empathetic and visually (and aurally) expressive filmmakers with his third feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. Adapted from a 1974 novel by James Baldwin, the film tells the story of Tish and Fonny, a young couple whose dreams are cut short by Fonny’s wrongful imprisonment; moving back and forth between the early days of their love story and the brutal reality of their present, Jenkins crafts a masterpiece that is simultaneously achingly, hopefully romantic and unblinking in its portrait of social injustice. While Moonlight drew upon cinematic […]
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A MAGA Nightmare Scene, Marketing to Incels and Reacting Against “Performative Wokeness”: Eugene Kotlyarenko and Dasha Nekrasova on Their Reverse Romantic Comedy, Wobble Palace
Wobble Palace is a reverse romantic comedy set in relationship hell tinged by the toxicity of Tinder hookups and Trump’s political rise. “One of the early ideas was to make a movie about a happy break up,” explains director Eugene Kotlyarenko. “The formula for a rom com is whatever happens for the first 90 minutes, by the end, the couple gets together.” Flipping this arc, the film climaxes (spoiler alert!) in the couple splitting up instead. “In a relationship that’s really toxic, staying together is really horrible and breaking up is really liberating,” Kotlyarenko continues. The film follows a millennial […]
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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” […]
