julia leigh
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Sleeping Beauty Writer/Director Julia Leigh
When Filmmaker chose Australian novelist Julia Leigh for our 25 New Faces list of 2008, the author of such books as The Hunter and Disquiet was teaching at Barnard while establishing herself as a screenwriter of provocative, nuanced dramas for directors like Walter Salles and production companies like Plan B. She said when I interviewed her that screenplay writing was originally a form of “diversion therapy” while working on Disquiet, but that she grew to appreciate the form. “I actually find scripts hard to read — ugly,” she said in 2008. “I got my head around the very basic conventions […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 30, 2011 -
DAVID LOWERY ON STORY STRUCTURE IN “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE” & “SLEEPING BEAUTY”
Filmmaker David Lowery (Pioneer, St. Nick) has an interesting piece on his blog today comparing the storytelling engines in Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty. Martha, he argues, deliberately builds tension by withholding key information, while Sleeping Beauty lays everything on the table up front in an attempt to diffuse tension and focus deeper on story, theme, and character. In the article, Lowery also defends Martha against Richard Brody’s recent New Yorker blog post (a response in itself to Anthony Lane’s review of the film) in which Brody argued that the film’s flashback-heavy narrative […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Nov 7, 2011
