Screenwriters
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“I Didn’t Want to Have Complex Animatronics”: Alex Scharfman on Death of a Unicorn
Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega in Death of a Unicorn
Death of a Unicorn, the feature debut by producer Alex Scharfman, could also be titled Death by Unicorn, as the film offers numerous stabbings via horn by the title creatures. The A24 production co-stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as… Read more
Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
Crista Alfaiate in Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen… Read more
Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin in Caught by the Tides
Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, but for Jia Zhangke, whose project has in large part been to document changes in China’s… Read more
Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
The shroud in The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across… Read more
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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased. From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo. […]
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Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang
Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot […]
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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
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“This is Part of Where Our Title Came From — the Amount That Women are Censored”: Annapurna Sriram On Her SXSW-Premiering Fucktoys
While sitting on a raft in the middle of a Southern swamp, AP (Annapurna Sriram) learns that her recent string of bad luck, missing tooth included, is caused by a curse. A psychic (played by New Orleans-based rapper Big Freedia) reveals that the only way for AP to free herself from the spiritual bind is to sacrifice an innocent lamb in an ancient ritual. The needed ceremony will cost AP $1,000, which she promises to raise in just a few days. This sets the plot of Fucktoys in motion, which finds AP traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown […]
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“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
