Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“Ordinary People Who Become Very Violent”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Cloud
The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003). Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who […]
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Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage […]
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“Sit Here. Stand Here. Work Here. Slap Her Here”: Lav Diaz and Hazel Orencio on Phantosmia
Since the late 1990s, Lav Diaz’s cinema has explored the Philippines’ troubled history with colonization, authoritarianism, corruption, poverty, macho-feudalism and the tensions that animate and enliven the sociopaths of today. His durational works are simultaneously a test of patience and spirit and assertions that the stories of Filipinos deserve time and space to unfold in all of its complexities. Diaz’s works paint portraits of good men and women whose morals disintegrate along with their minds, poisoned by the pressures of the world, leading them to commit uncharacteristic acts of violence one would think they are too progressive or too intelligent […]
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“I Wanted to Make a Black, Gay Paris, Texas“: Shatara Michelle Ford on Their BlackStar-Premiering Sophomore Feature Dreams in Nightmares
Three cross-coastal best friends reunite for a spontaneous road trip across the American underbelly in Dreams in Nightmares, the sophomore feature from writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford. Though a significant pivot in theme and scope from their lean yet intense debut feature Test Pattern, Ford’s latest continues to plainly indicts the oppression that finds Black, femme, queer bodies at a stark institutional disadvantage. After being laid off from their respective jobs in academia and finance, Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère) hop on the phone to reschedule a planned trip to the Dominican Republic. Instead of lounging in paradise, Tasha […]
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“Everybody Passed on It”: Sean Wang on Dìdi
If having your first feature premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is an accomplishment, being nominated for an Academy Award the same week is pretty much unheard of. Nonetheless, that’s what writer-director Sean Wang experienced last January when his coming-of-age narrative feature, Dìdi, premiered to glowing reviews (and a distribution deal with Focus Features) while his nonfiction portrait of his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Still in his 20s, Wang’s career has skyrocketed over the past year, and now Dìdi “younger brother” in Chinese) opens in theaters riding a […]
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Three Weeks in July: Greg Kwedar on Sing Sing
The first and best reason to see Sing Sing, the new feature from Transpecos director Greg Kwedar, is for the lead performance of Colman Domingo. One year after receiving an Academy Award nomination for his title role in Rustin, Domingo is even better as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a wrongfully incarcerated inmate of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. An accomplished author, Divine G was a member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a program founded at Sing Sing in 1996 that “helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on […]
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“It’s People Struggling To Be Something Other Than What They Are”: Writer/Director Robert Towne on Making L.A. Movies
Legendary writer/director Robert Towne, whose screenplays include Chinatown and Shampoo and films include Personal Best and Tequila Sunrise, died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 89. On this sad occasion we’re reposting Matt Ross’s print edition interview with Towne from our Spring, 2006 issue. Below, the two discuss Towne’s adaptation of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, the financing difference between studio and independent films, and why Towne keeps returning to cinematic L.A. R.I.P. Robert Towne. — Editor Every city has its quintessential storyteller. And when it comes to Los Angeles, a city whose primary business is itself the […]
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“Suspense Comes From Air Conditioning”: Lucy Kerr on Family Portrait
“I thought about The Exterminating Angel,” Lucy Kerr says over coffee as she describes the origins of Family Portrait, her hypnotic feature debut. Indeed, the film’s central conceit hews closely to Luis Buñuel’s 1962 satire, but instead of posh partygoers being inexplicably stuck in a single room, an extended Texas family is unable to get everyone to gather for the titular photo. In particular, Katie’s (Deragh Campbell) pleas for everyone to assemble are frustratingly ignored or otherwise thwarted, especially when the family matriarch (Silvana Jakich) is suddenly nowhere to be found. Wandering around the vast property in search of her […]
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“We Have Regressed Into an Obtuse and Rigid Moral Order”: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer
It’s been a long decade’s wait since Catherine Breillat’s last feature, the semi-autobiographical Abuse of Weakness with Isabelle Huppert, but Last Summer shows the uncompromising French filmmaker in top form, at once fierce and precise. Returning to a favored subject—the desires and power dynamics in affairs between adolescents and usually much older adults—Breillat brings in another taboo this time: the messy sexual obsession between a lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), and her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (newcomer Daniel Kircher). After Théo comes back to stay at the family’s idyllic home outside Paris, the two carry on secretly until the truth becomes inescapable […]
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Of Mascots and Men: Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickston Cole Tews on Hundreds of Beavers
The phrase “word-of-mouth indie theatrical hit” sounds as outdated in 2024 as “coming soon to LaserDisc.” And yet, the slapstick fur-trapping adventure comedy Hundreds of Beavers has graduated from its lengthy festival run to become that rarest of things, a star-free independent film that has already grossed more than double its $150,000 production budget during its self-distributed gradual cinema rollout (still continuing as of this writing, despite its release on VOD). First-time feature writer-director Mike Cheslik previously teamed with lead actor/producer/co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews on the latter’s feature directorial debut, the black-and-white adventure comedy Lake Michigan Monster. In classic independent […]
