Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
-
“There’s Something Very Homoerotic About Intense Male Friendships”: Alex Russell on Lurker
The first time we see retail worker Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), it’s through the eyes of his new friend Oliver (Archie Madekwe), as the up-and-coming popstar films him with a camcorder. It’s an arresting opening image, given how much the rest of Lurker finds Matthew gazing at Oliver in adoration instead. “I need a real person,” the fickle musician says, soon after their chance encounter. He’s talking about seeking the honest opinion of a regular person on his music, not the blind adoration of a fan. Little does he know just how meticulously crafted Matthew’s personality really is. Having secured a […]
-
From Elitist to Egalitarian: Julian Radlmaier on Phantoms of July
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously funny one-liners (“Germany is sinking like the Titanic and we’re Leonardo DiCaprio”) make the films meme-friendly without compromising their devotion to labor politics and community. […]
-
“I Have to Lead with the Primal”: Americana Director Tony Tost on Beginning a Film Career at 35
After 15 years working in series television, writing shows including Longmire, Damnation, The Terror, and most recently, Pokerface, Tony Tost moves into the world of feature filmmaking with his road-trip western caper flick Americana, whose cast boasts Zahn McClarnon, Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney. Tost spoke with Filmmaker about his upbringing, his journey from academic and published poet to screenwriter, showrunner, and sage of the narrative craft — his Substack, Practical Screenwriting, is an endlessly rewarding font of experience, narrative nuts and bolts, and honest takes about the industry at large — all while musing over westerns, identity and […]
-
How to Shoot Horses: Kate Beecroft on East of Wall
Kate Beecroft found East of Wall’s main character—now one of her closest friends—entirely by chance. She’s retold their origin story in so many interviews that it’s worth quoting her first iteration from the press kit: “Taking a wrong turn on a road in South Dakota led me to the deepest adventure of my life. I pulled up to a rundown ranch and found horse trainer Tabatha Zimiga and a tribe of intimidatingly bold teenage girls thronging out of their trailer, heads half-shaved like warriors, eyeing me up and down. Tabatha welcomed me into her world with one sentence: ‘Want to […]
-
“The Whole Movie is Doing an Impression of the Genre”: Akiva Schaffer on The Naked Gun
In the early 1980s, Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker pioneered a niche of slapstick- and wordplay-heavy spoof-comedies with films like Airplane! and Top Secret!, which displayed straight-faced silliness as a creative modus operandi. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (or ZAZ) also produced the short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad!, which parodied police procedurals and starred Leslie Nielsen as the inept, overconfident Detective Frank Drebin. After Police Squad!’s cancellation, ZAZ took Nielsen’s Drebin character and molded him for the big screen with The Naked Gun film franchise, where the trio’s patented mile-a-minute visual gags could flourish on a wider […]
-
“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington
Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history. Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and […]
-
Palestinians in Purgatory: Mahdi Fleifel on To A Land Unknown
Midway through To A Land Unknown, Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s narrative feature debut, Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens—sharp Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), his wife and kid back in Lebanon’s camps, and sensitive Reda (Aram Sabbah), working hard to rein in his drug addiction—find themselves wanting to help Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan new to Athenian streets, get to his undocumented refugee aunt in Italy. The duo’s passage to Germany—to Europe, to freedom, to the autonomy of running their own cafe in some Arab enclave of Berlin, to everything neither Palestine nor Lebanon can offer them in the world’s current […]
-
Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis
In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker continues her cinematographic explorations of word, image, time and human emotions. Making its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2025, Polis follows Irma, who around twenty years ago, believing herself condemned, traveled to Greece. She now retraces that journey, moving from island to island in what becomes […]
-
“A Lot of Movies Right Now are Just Shrugs”: Frederic Da on iPhone-Shot Found Footage film Isaiah’s Phone
With Isaiah’s Phone, French-American filmmaker Frederic Da caps off an informal trilogy cataloging the contemporary teenage experience by corralling his film students at a private high school in Santa Monica as crew and on-camera as actors. Short “Ava Dates a Senior” was expanded into the ensemble feature Teenage Emotions—both of which are lensed on multiple iPhones and had their premieres at Slamdance. Da’s latest, Isaiah’s Phone, employs a diegetic, found footage framing device, following a young student Isaiah (Isaiah Brody) as he navigates the difficulties of high school. On-screen text up top teases “a horrific act of violence,” explaining that […]
-
“It’s Really Sharp on the Neurotic Relationships that Americans Have with Money”: Robin Schavoir and Paul Felten Discuss The Jag
The titular sports car of Robin Schavoir’s The Jag is parked in an imaginary space off-stage at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where the play is currently running in a production directed by Paul Felten. The existence of this symbolic object structures the matrix of resentment, envy and desire searchingly embodied by The Jag‘s on-stage trio: struggling screenwriter Tyler (Gilles Geary), rich guy art collector Brian (Mickey Solis), and nursing student Cori (Giovanna Drummond). (A fourth character, the renter of the Catskills home the three converge at, and voiced by a “downtown icon,” is only heard via recited emails […]
