Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Cutting Costs in Black and White: Phạm Ngọc Lân ơn Cu Li Never Cries
Unfolding in a Hanoi of twisting alleyways and cramped apartments, Cu Li Never Cries follows a half-dozen intertwined characters whose lives are in upheaval. Mrs. Nguyện (Minh Châu), a widow, has been gifted with a pet slow cu li, a tiny primate that may be more trouble than it’s worth. Her niece Vân (Hà Phương) helps run a day-care center on the verge of bankruptcy. Her fiancé Quang (Xuân An) has doubts about both their wedding and his future. The film’s glistening black-and-white imagery and soundtrack of patriotic anthems evoke a timeless world rarely seen in Western cinema. At the […]
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“Nine Pages a Day of Heavy Dialogue”: Bob Byington and David Krumholtz on Lousy Carter
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the film: Introducing Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter alongside the writer-director, star David Krumholtz preemptively noted that while the film was shot and is set there, “Whatever you think of Texas, its politics have nothing to do with the film.” The disclaimer is accurate—this is another of Byington’s immaculately mean comedies with an underlying sentimental streak, a blend he’s been iterating with various degrees of sharpness for […]
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“We Go from 16mm to Super 16 to 35mm”: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera
Italian filmmaker Alice Rorhwacher’s puckish and scintillatingly tactile fourth feature is her most ambitious to date. Once again dramatizing the conflicting ideals of modernity and tradition, past and present, Rohrwacher continues to pay debt to forebears of Italian cinema like Ermanno Olmi while also infusing her film with a symbolic surrealism and neo-realist class consciousness reminiscent of the respective likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini Roberto Rossellini. La Chimera follows English archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who possesses a mystical ability to divine the location of subterranean treasures. Freshly released from prison, he reunites with a band of tombaroli (essentially grave robbers) […]
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“It’s a Confusing World That We Inhabit”: Ryan Martin Brown on Free Time
In Free Time, writer-director-producer Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature, directionless office drone Drew (comedian Colin Burgess) decides to quit his job. After all, the position is hardly fulfilling (nor is he particularly gifted at it), and why spend all day bleary-eyed behind a screen when all that New York City has to offer exists just outside the door? Soon enough, Drew’s naive work-life musings are proven to be drivel, and his joblessness puts a mighty strain on his few remaining social relationships. His WFH roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh) doesn’t seem thrilled with Drew’s daytime presence in the apartment, nor does […]
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“I Really Wanted Sounds and Images to Exist Independent of Each Other”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s disquieting new film, is at once a major break from the Japanese director’s previous work and a distillation of the questions and anxieties around which his cinema has long orbited; it’s the film he seems to have been working toward his whole career. Anyone mildly familiar with Hamaguchi’s work will know the cardinal role dialogue plays in his films, which often double as symposiums—a proclivity evident long before Drive My Car’s meandering chats and late-night confessions. Pitted next to its talk-heavy predecessors, Evil Does Not Exist is a stark outlier; it may well be […]
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Forgive My Laughter: Vera Drew on The People’s Joker
The following interview with The People’s Joker writer, director and star, Vera Drew, appears in Filmmaker issue #126 and now appears online as the film receives its U.S. theatrical release from Altered Innocence. Just as The People’s Joker was preparing to premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, a “strongly worded letter” arrived that threatened immediate legal action if Vera Drew’s scrappy, bold feature debut went ahead with its multiple planned screenings. Warner Bros. was less than pleased that Drew and co-writer Bri LeRose based their film on a trademarked DC franchise, and it likely didn’t help that the […]
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Transfigured Night: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast
The anxious energy running through the films of Bertrand Bonello is fueled by seemingly contrary cross currents: a mix of naturalism and dream logic, coolness and hysteria, the emotional equivalents of ice and fire. While hopping across distinct genres—his filmography includes a portrait of a bordello in fin-de-siècle Paris (House of Tolerance), a 1960s/’70s fashion biopic (Saint Laurent), a contemporary zombie movie (Zombi Child) and a take on millennial hipster terrorists (Nocturama)—Bonello stays close to characters who get lost in psychic underworlds, highlighting the mind’s slippery dark side and the human tendency (abetted by genre conventions) to fall into one […]
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“I Didn’t Want It to Get Too ’80s”: Rose Glass on Love Lies Bleeding
Equal parts romantic horror movie, revenge thriller and twisted, small town family drama, Rose Glass’s second feature after Saint Maud, is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, complete with Hollywood stars (Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone) doing wild and crazy things all in the name of intense body horror. Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Katy O’Brian as Jackie, a woman making her way through the American Southwest en route to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. In New Mexico, Jackie picks up a job as a waitress at a tacky shooting range run by […]
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“On Our First day It Was 100°, and It Basically Went Up From There”: Writer/Director Shannon Triplett On Her SXSW-Premiering Psychological Thriller, Desert Road
A woman, a car, a gas station and a factory — from this minimalist set of locations Shannon Triplett has crafted a surprising work of supernatural suspense in her writing and directing debut, Desert Road, which premiered this weekend at the SXSW Film Festival. Kristine Froseth is the woman, a 20-something would-be professional photographer on a solo trip. When her car’s tire blows out on the ribbon-like highway, she’s momentarily dazed before coming to and walking back to that gas station to call for help. In a chilling and quickly rendered series of events, she realizes that help is not […]
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“I Want All The Lesbian Experiences I Can See On Film”: Tricia Cooke on Drive-Away Dolls
Directed by and co-written with collaborator and husband, Ethan Coen, filmmaker and editor Tricia Cooke’ Drive Away Dolls (or Dykes, per the end credits) finds her doing sapphic donuts around classic movies like Kiss Me Deadly and even a little North By Northwest. As Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) decide to take a trip to Tallahassee, they’re dogged by inept criminals seeking a package and suitcase in the back trunk of the car the pair have rented. If the road trip movie and film noir have long been exercises to explore the American psyche and the landscape’s possible […]
