Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
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Opening Doors: Jessica Jones Creator Melissa Rosenberg
The more money involved in any industry, the more timid and conservative the financiers become about what they are willing to back. When deciding what to greenlight, they cling to outdated ideas of what audiences will want to watch, often lagging behind what the rest of us have always known: both men and women alike will watch, love and cheer a badass female protagonist. Props, then, to Netflix for recognizing that a series based on the Marvel character of Jessica Jones and created by Melissa Rosenberg could be fed to a hungry audience waiting like chicks with tiny beaks open […]
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A Suburban Megachurch in John Hughes Territory: Stephen Cone on Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
Simultaneously a rebellious yell against Christian authority and an appreciation for growing up with evangelical values, Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is neither religious condemnation nor agitprop. Its title character is a gay teenager celebrating his birthday with friends and family; the film, unfolding over 24 hours, keenly observes how temptation and buried secrets can rise to the surface when theological and political debates make their presence known. A rather sexy movie — in part because premarital sex is presented as something risqué or taboo — Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is a beautifully rendered, impeccably scored experience that makes a profound, heady impact. There’s an interesting moment featuring a conversation […]
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“Do You Mind If I Finance the Rest of the Film?” Tom DiCillo on Living in Oblivion
In Living in Oblivion, Tom DiCillo’s 1995 triptych of the agony and ecstasy of indie film production, Murphy’s cinematic law is in full effect. Prima donna actors. Uncooperative smoke machines. Blown lines. Soft focus. Booms in the frame. However, the film’s most soul-crushing moment comes when the camera isn’t even rolling. It arrives when the faux film’s director, played by Steve Buscemi, takes a moment to run lines with his two lead actresses. And of course — with the camera sitting idle and the cinematographer off set vomiting out-of-date milk from the meager craft services table — the scene comes […]
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“We Got Over 90 Setups One Day”: John Sayles on Eight Men Out
Few directors in the history of American film have presented a perspective on the human condition as complex, varied, and compassionate as that of John Sayles. The quintessential independent filmmaker, he once said, “I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie.” He has remained true to that ethos from his directorial debut, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, to his most recent gem, Go For Sisters. No one tells the truth with as much humor, pain, sympathy, irony, or expansiveness as Sayles, a man to whom no aspect […]
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“If You Move in a Hasty Manner, I’ll Put a Bullet in You”: S. Craig Zahler on Bone Tomahawk
With its careful widescreen compositions and painterly period-motivated lighting, Bone Tomahawk possesses a classical visual style that belies its pulpy genre mash-up logline of western-cum-cannibal horror film. There are no elaborate tracking shots in the feature debut of writer/director S. Craig Zahler. No Steadicam moves, no booming Technocranes, no extreme close-ups. “All of that stuff, to me, is like the director is sitting next to the viewer and saying, ‘Hey now, look at this.’ And I wanted as little of that as possible,” said Zahler. “You see a lot of first-time directors really out to impress the hell out of […]
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The Camera and the Pen: Documentary Writer Mark Monroe
Over the past 15 years, documentary writer Mark Monroe has almost silently built up one of the most prolific and successful careers in nonfiction film. His credits include Louie Psihoyos’s Oscar-Winning film, The Cove (as well as the brand-new Racing Extinction), the award-winning Sundance films Chasing Ice, Who is Dayani Cristal? and The Tillman Story, Foo Fighter Dave Grohl’s Emmy Award-Winning HBO series Sonic Highways and Ron Howard’s upcoming Beatles documentary. I recently sat in on some of Monroe’s work in New York (which included a feedback screening of Nanfu Wang’s upcoming doc on Chinese activists, The Road from Hainan) […]
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“Guillermo’s Got a Wonderfully Unhealthy Obsession with Insects”: Screenwriter Matthew Robbins on Crimson Peak
If screenwriter Matthew Robbins had penned the pivotal moments of his movie life, he might not have come up with anything better than the reality. Robbins fell in love with movies in Paris while studying abroad alongside his college roommate, future editing legend Walter Murch. After writing Steven Spielberg’s debut theatrical feature (The Sugarland Express) and directing the fondly remembered 1980s fantasy films Dragonslayer and *batteries not included, Robbins found himself in Guadalajara, Mexico as part of a program to mentor aspiring filmmakers. He was assigned a 29-year-old with a fondness for insects and ghost stories named Guillermo del Toro. […]
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Director Ron Shelton on Making Play It to the Bone, Fighting Gratuitous Insert Shots and Why White Men Can’t Jump Tested Well
How many filmmakers are capable of writing a script that not only invites comparison with Casablanca but earns it – and then surpasses its source on nearly every level? That’s what Ron Shelton did with his first produced screenplay, Under Fire (1983), which riffs on Casablanca’s combination of romance and international intrigue but strips it of all sentimentality and gives it a concrete political context (the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution) that intersects seamlessly with the film’s intimate character studies and relationships. The love triangle between the journalists played by Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, and Gene Hackman is as mature, complex, and […]
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Lolo’s Julie Delpy and Eugenie Grandval at the Venice International Film Festival
“She’s an auteur,” Eugenie Grandval tells me. “She has a lot to do on set between directing other actors and creating as she goes. I’m just there to be supportive.” Grandval is the co-writer of Lolo, a comedy about a single-mom whose love life is sabotaged by her only child. The auteur whom Grandval is referring to is her co-writer and the film’s director and star, Julie Delpy. Together, the writer duo recently traveled from Lolo’s world premiere at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival to their North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Several decades ago, Delpy […]
