Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Five Questions with Celeste & Jesse Forever Writer/Actress Rashida Jones
You’re most likely to know Rashida Jones as part of the great cast of the award-winning TV series Parks and Recreation (though she says she’s often recognized for her small role in Freaks & Geeks), but Jones is more than just a talented performer. She’s a dynamic and versatile artist alternating between acting and writing (not just for the screen either!), and in the case of last year’s Celeste & Jesse Forever, both. Her first screenwriting credit has acquired a lot of notice, and we were able to pick her brain a little in the midst of her success, which […]
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Paul Mazursky Loves Talking To Women
I don’t really know how to describe my conversation with Paul Mazursky. The phone connection was weird, his wife Betsy was trying to control the dog in the background, I was working with this new recording device on my phone and he could hear only every other world I was saying. I was late to watch my kid play soccer so I was rushing and he was so patient but I could tell he was busy too. But halfway through the call I realized I might be in a Paul Mazursky film where everything happens at once, energy is flying […]
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Five Questions with Let My People Go! Director Mikael Buch
“On a set I feel like the strongest person in the world,” says Mikael Buch, quickly adding, “In real life, things are far more complicated!” Buch’s new film, Let My People Go!, is his first full-length feature. But in directing and co-writing this frisky combination of sexual farce, romantic comedy, and family drama revolving around a young, gay, Jewish Frenchman named Ruben (Nicolas Maury) and his international misadventures, Buch had some stalwart support, including co-writer Christophe Honoré and actor Carmen Maura (of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown fame). “All these people gave me the confidence I needed,” says […]
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Five Questions for Sebastien’s Deborah Twiss
New York-based Deborah Twiss burst on the scene as the co-writer and star of the 1997 thriller, A Gun for Jennifer. The film achieved cult success in the U.S. and abroad, and since then Twiss has built a diverse career by juggling multiple hats. For Eric Schaeffer’s After Fall, Winter, she co-produced and acted. For School of Rock: Zombie Etiquette, she starred and wrote. She wrote and directed her own feature, In Between, in 2005, and she also regularly appears in both mainstream movies (Kick-Ass) and television (Law and Order). Now she’s producing and wrote the screenplay for a psychological […]
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Five Questions with Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean Writer/Director Matthew Mishory
What began as a short film, Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, became a feature film almost by the insistence of social media. Director/writer Matthew Mishory says the initial shoot for the film took place in Joshua Tree, California, over a few days in 2010. When he returned to Los Angeles, he edited a trailer and posted it online, not thinking much of what would happen. Almost immediately the trailer went viral and expectation was that it was going to be a feature film. “Our production team got together and decided, well, we really ought to be making […]
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Second-Time Director: Craig Johnson and The Skeleton Twins
This is the second in a series of articles about the path towards a director’s second film. Read part one, with Tze Chun, here. It was in the middle of prepping for The Skeleton Twins that Craig Johnson realized something was missing. “That sickening feeling in my stomach that I had the first time around in prep,” Johnson said with a laugh. “I’m so much more at peace this time. Craig Johnson, 36, is currently in production on his second movie. It’s a project that contains a dream comedic cast (Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Ty Burrell) It’s a project that […]
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Writer/Director Stephen Chbosky on The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky has been influenced by a lot of angsty classics, like The Graduate and Catcher in the Rye. In 1999, he made his own contribution to the canon, releasing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a young-adult novel whose tough themes helped make it a formidable word-of-mouth success, becoming the best-selling title from MTV Books by 2000. Within seven years, it sold nearly 800,000 copies, while also getting regularly challenged by the American Library Association for its exploration of drug use, homosexuality, and adolescent suicide. A film version seemed inevitable, but Chbosky wasn’t ready to hand over his polarizing […]
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Five Questions with Backwards Writer/Actress Sarah Megan Thomas
Sarah Megan Thomas recently returned to her hometown of Haverford, Pennsylvania, with a script and a camera crew in tow, to shoot her screenwriting debut Backwards, which she also produced and stars in. Thomas plays competitive rower Abi Brooks who, after she fails to win a seat on the US Olympic boat, must steer her life in a new direction, ultimately landing a coaching job for the rowing team at her old high school. Just as in rowing, Abi has to look backwards — to old places and ex-boyfriends — in order to move forward, with her sport and her […]
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Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
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Writer/Director Martin Donovan on Collaborator
Martin Donovan is destined to be forever remembered for his remarkable actor-director partnership with Hal Hartley during indie film’s halcyon days of the early to mid 1990s. In era-defining movies such as Trust, Simple Men and Amateur, Donovan was Hartley’s on-screen simulacrum, a smart, softly spoken man who was simultaneously familiar and enigmatic. While Hartley’s work is sadly not nearly as popular or present as it once was, it’s fitting that Donovan has made his debut feature as a writer and director with Collaborator, a knowing and witty cinematic chamber piece that feels nostalgic for the more culturally sophisticated times […]
