Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist
“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move […]
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Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]
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You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
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“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]
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Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie
Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the far-flung Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba (where Pete lives) to 1980s downtown Toronto (where they logged time together). Stories from the past blur with the constant activity of the house and environs where Pete’s children and dogs live as Seth visits to record people’s […]
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COVID Zombies in the Fire: Meera Menon on Didn’t Die
Three weeks before the Sundance Midnight Madness premiere of her zombie dramedy Didn’t Die, director Meera Menon (whose credits appositely include episodes of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead) and her partner Paul Gleason (who co-wrote and shot the film) lost their home in the Eaton fire that devastated Altadena, Los Angeles. Not only that, the film’s producer Erica Fishman and her partner Geoff Boothby, who edited the film, also lost their home in the fire. The irony is that Didn’t Die centers on a group of five in the zombie apocalypse, trying desperately to hang on to their […]
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“I Grew Up Playing Nintendo”: Albert Birney on OBEX
Albert Birney has been busy since 2020. On top of releasing 2022’s Eyeballs in the Darkness, a second feature in his series about a pair of 8-bit inspired animated best friends, Tux and Fanny, in, after releasing a video game incarnation of those characters the year before, and premiering his second collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, Birney has now completed his first live-action film as a solo director. OBEX started its humble, black-and-white production with resources Birney had on hand: his house, his bulldog-chihuahua-pug mix (what he calls a “Bullchug”) Dorothy and his affinity for the ‘80s technology of […]
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“14 Inches From a Very Personal Form of Murder”: Steven Soderbergh on Camera as Character and His Sundance Horror Film, Presence
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“The Boys in the Basement Were Very Active On This One”: Screenwriter David Koepp on Writing Steven Soderbergh’s Ghost POV Thriller Presence
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Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
