Susan Kouguell chats with the award-winning writer and director about her feature film debut, blending lightness and darkness in her writing, and more.
About Honeyjoon: Persian-Kurdish Lela (Amira Casar) and her sensual American daughter June (Ayden Mayeri) travel to a romantic Azorean Island, for the one-year anniversary of Dad’s death. They planned this trip to be together, but Lela and June have opposite views about why they’re there, how to grieve, and June’s tiny bikini. Surrounded by honeymooners, doom-scrolling for Woman Life Freedom, and taken on a tour by their hot philosophical guide, João (José Condessa); Lela and June find each other… coming back to life.
Honeyjoon
Lilian Mehrel won the 2024 AT&T Tribeca Untold Stories award for Honeyjoon. She was selected for the 2025 SFFILM Rainin Grant, TorinoFilmLab 2024 ComedyLab, Cine Qua Non 2024 Storylines Lab, Warner Media TFI Co/Lab, and a Marcie Bloom Fellowship. Her films have premiered at Tribeca, Clermont-Ferrand, and the American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at Cannes. She earned her MFA from NYU Tisch Grad Film, and her BA from Dartmouth with a Senior Fellowship, and is a PD Soros Fellow.
It was a great pleasure to speak with Lilian Mehrel about her debut feature Honeyjoon, which she describes as a sexy, emotional comedy about … a mother-daughter trip. It was quite evident during our lively discussion that Mehrel is passionate about this film and filmmaking itself.
Kouguell: Congratulations on your film and receiving the AT&T Tribeca Untold Stories grant of $1 million. Tell me how this award enabled you to bring Honeyjoon to the screen.
Mehrel: I wrote the script on my own and then found myself a wonderful, Oscar-shortlisted producer, Andreia Nunes. It turns out all we needed was a million dollars to make the movie (she laughs)—once we received the money everything quickly fell into place.
I developed the script at the TorinoFilmLab and the Cine Qau Non Lab. We were selected as one of the five finalists. You pitch live in front of hundreds of people. It was an amazing experience, and a high-pressure situation, but it was a hint of the future audience and their expectations. That same day we pitched, the judges deliberated, and we made it, and then got selected for the Tribeca award.
Kouguell: Let’s talk about your inspiration for the story and how the script evolved.
Mehrel: As a filmmaker, the stories I love to tell are funny and moving. I went on a trip to a beautiful island in the Azores, when I was going through something hard. There, I realized the very dark and funny premise of having a mother and daughter grieving on this beautiful, romantic island surrounded by honeymooners. There was this blend of light and dark, and I was thinking about when hard things happen, life can still be sweet, and being alive means all those things.
Kouguell: The screenplay was developed at the TorinoFilmLab. Tell me about this experience.
Mehrel: We had workshops in Torino, Italy; it was an inspiring location. It was the first year they were doing the comedy lab. One of the things they were looking for was features to connect with a wider audience by using comedy as a way to bring people to cinema.
Kouguell: That’s so interesting because on the surface Honeyjoon leans more to drama; the humor/comedy avoids the slapstick and predictable comedy tropes.
Mehrel: The process was amazing.They brought in four comedians, who improvised scenes with us. One of my tutors, the filmmaker Laura Piana, played a therapist and had her ‘patients’ played by our characters, talk about their childhood and parents. We discovered deep thematic things about the characters. It expedited my development and writing process, seeing actors embodying scenes.
The Cine Qau Non Lab focused on the skeleton of the story, helped with pitching, and also shooting on the island, with ideas on what I needed to do to tell the story.
Kouguell: The film was shot on location in San Miguel, Azores, Portugal. What was that experience like as your first feature and shooting on location, not to mention in another country where you are reliant on the weather and light with all your exterior shots?
Mehrel: It was an incredible experience and made me a stronger director. I had an amazing team, working with collaborators and a great cast. It was very magical.
Kouguell: The beautiful and tranquil locations contrast—even highlight—the tensions in this poignant mother and daughter relationship.
Mehrel: I love that you used the word ‘contrast’—comedy lives in contrast. You have these characters going to a romantic island, they’re in paradise but they’re grieving. They reveal the absurdities of being human often with humor.
Kouguell: We were talking about your being a daughter of immigrants from a mixed background, living in a multicultural world. This is a major theme of the film, which is successfully executed, particularly because this experience is quite universal.
Mehrel: I’m glad you said that because I’ve been getting reactions from diverse audiences, telling me that they see themselves and their family on screen despite their various backgrounds.
Kougell: As a daughter of immigrants, I definitely related, but also to the mother and daughter relationship, while often so funny, it’s honest and raw. Also, placing mother and daughter on an unfamiliar island, away from their comfort zones, forces various issues, including their generational differences and culture clashes to the foreground.
Mehrel: I love road trip movies, and this film is about characters going on a trip. When you go somewhere unfamiliar you discover new things but there are also those differences within this one family, external and internal differences, but it highlights their connectedness underneath. These are two women who have different approaches to grief.
Kouguell: Final thoughts?
Mehrel: This is a sexy darkly funny life-affirming move. I don’t claim to have answers, but I explore questions. We shot some of the film on Super Eight; those visuals make it feel like a memory; and this idea of fleeting memories and moments passing is also a metaphor for this story.
June 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Interview with ON A STRING writer, director, producer, and star Isabel Hagen
Tribeca Film Festival 2025: Interview with ‘On a String’ Writer/Director/Star Isabel Hagen for Script Magazine
Susan Kouguell chats with writer, director, producer, and star Isabel Hagen about her film debut, how she found stand-up comedy amidst her Julliard training in classical viola, and more.
It was a pleasure to speak with the multi-hyphenate Writer/Director/Producer/EP and Star Isabel Hagen about her first feature, On A String, during the Tribeca Festival.
As a classically trained violist myself, (but not Julliard-trained like Hagen) we shared many funny—OK, sometimes tragically funny stories of our musician experiences, but she’s a professional stand-up comedian and thankfully I am not—as well as the profound influence music has on our respective writing and filmmaking.
Isabel Hagen is a nationally touring stand-up comedian and classically trained violist based in New York City. As a stand-up, she has been featured twice on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and as a New Face of Comedy at the Just for Laughs festival in Montréal. Isabel started stand-up immediately after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in viola performance from The Juilliard School. As a violist, she has played in the orchestra of many Broadway shows, and worked with artists such as Bjork, Max Richter, Japanese Breakfast, Steve Reich, and Vampire Weekend.
‘On a String’
About On A String: Isabel (Isabel Hagen) is a young, Juilliard-trained violist still living at home with her parents in the heart of New York City. She’s trying to make a living playing gigs with her friends but when her toxic ex-boyfriend reappears, who also happens to be the Philharmonic’s “newest, hottest cellist,” he informs her of a viola opening in the prestigious orchestra. Nothing can go wrong, right?
Kouguell: Tell me about your decision to transition from music to filmmaking.
Hagen: It was a couple of things. Partly it was my deep love for stand-up comedy, and I had a repetitive stress injury in my hand from hours of daily practicing, so I had to take time off playing. I tried open mic, and I knew that it was something I wanted to explore. After graduating Juilliard, I did more stand-up. Writing for stand-up got the wheels turning to writing other things, and then I did the web series.
Kouguell: I watched your five-part web series is a violist, which is not only so funny, but it captures the lives of classical musicians with all their flaws, quirks, painful rejections, and honest realizations. Did you study screenwriting/writing and/or filmmaking?
Hagen: No. I learned by doing. It came out of doing stand-up comedy.
Kouguell: As the writer, director and star of this film, how did you approach the filmmaking process?
Hagen: There was a time I thought I’d bring in another director, but ultimately it was such a specific story, I felt that people had to have a deep understanding of this world. It felt right to direct it as a first feature.
‘On a String’
Kouguell: You mentioned that it’s such a specific story, which it is, yet it feels universal.
Hagen: Sometimes the more specific you get—and in this film, about a classical musician navigating a specific world, which many might find unfamiliar—the universality aspect was important. That experience of following your dreams, accepting unexpected challenges and limitations, is something most of us feel.
Kouguell: How did your stand-up comedy evolve?
Hagen: Years ago, when my brother watched George Carlin on TV, I became interested. I marveled at it. When I had a little space in my schedule at Julliard, I tried it out. Initially it was never a goal to become a stand-up comedian.
Kouguell: Let’s discuss your writing process.
Hagen: It’s always driven by music. I start by latching onto a piece or a song or the essence of it. It will inspire a scene I want to capture. So much of this film, I was writing with music in mind, such as Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. I draw inspiration from music.
Both classical music and pop songs follow a strict form, and that’s what makes things interesting. I wanted this whole film to feel like a piece of music; recapitulations, incorporating certain motifs, the structure, and so on.
Kouguell: We’ve been talking about your role as the observer when performing as a violist at various events such as weddings. You mentioned that On A String is not about someone driven by a desire for success, but rather by a need for true connection to the world around her, with no idea how to find it.
Hagen: I always felt like an observer, which is not necessarily bad or good. I’m always watching how people talk and at certain times I wanted to mimic it. So much of comedy is observational and I realized a lot of work I did was the role of the observer like watching a narcissistic conductor and watching people how they behaved.
Kouguell: The film features live-captured musical performances, and the musician characters are almost entirely played by trained musicians, including your real-life brother, pianist Oliver Hagen, who portrays your character’s brother in the film. How was it to work with him?
Hagen: Working with Oliver was great. He’s not a trained actor but he is an accomplished musician who I have always looked up to.
Kouguell: What’s next for you?
Hagen: I’m continuing to tour as a standup and performing with the indie rock band Vampire Weekend, And working on new ideas for another film.
To learn more about Hagen’s projects visit her website.
May 6, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Interview with GOVERNMENT CHEESE Filmmaker Paul Hunter for Script Magazine
Paul Hunter talks about the inspiration for his new series, breaking the rules of TV, and creating outside of the box.
It was a pleasure to speak with showrunner, executive producer, writer and director Paul Hunter about his new series Government Cheese, which is now streaming on Apple TV+. In our wide-ranging interview we discussed his inspiration for the series, breaking the traditional rules of television and creating out of the box.
Government Cheese is a surrealist family comedy set in 1969 San Fernando Valley that tells the story of the Chambers, a quirky family pursuing lofty and seemingly impossible dreams, beautifully unfettered by the realities of the world. When Hampton Chambers (Oyelowo) is released from prison, his long-awaited family reunion doesn’t go quite as he’d planned. During his absence, Hampton’s wife Astoria (Missick) and sons Einstein (Ellison) and Harrison (Di’Allo Winston) have formed an unconventional family unit, and Hampton’s return spins their world into chaos.
David Oyelowo in “Government Cheese,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
KOUGUELL: The series is loosely based on your family.
HUNTER: It was from a time growing up in the San Fernando Valley. I was thinking about my childhood. The Harrison character, who’s into the Native American stuff, was inspired by my neighbor, a Native American Apache, who was like a mentor. I was excited learning about his culture. My brother, who’s more like the Einstein character, was kind of odd, he loves language and yo-yos and all sorts of funny things like that.
My dad was incarcerated for a little while when we were young, and we used to go visit him. My mom was always kind of creative. She just always encouraged us to be open about things no matter what was going on. And my dad as well. All that wrapped up into my thoughts. After I shot a movie in 2003, I wanted to do something that was personal, something that I could speak to, and something that’s unique. My family is a little odd and funny and quirky, and I thought, there’s no Black characters out there like that. I want to show the other side. So that’s where it comes from.
KOUGUELL: How did your family feel about writing about them?
HUNTER: They’re tickled. At one point, we rented out a stage, had actors come in and we did performances there. We all read the script together. My family’s been involved in it for so long. It’s just a dream come true.
KOUGUELL: Your characters have such distinct voices. Let’s talk about your writing process.
HUNTER: What helped me figure out how to express myself better in scripts is that I took some acting classes. It was really helpful having that so that you can build from an emotional place; like finding the nugget in scenes and working on making sure that the emotion and that nugget is pulled through in a scene and in a story. It was learning to be available and being open really helped my confidence in writing and directing.
I love to build things from a place of truth. With the Hampton character, his whole thing is about, are you going to go back to what you’re comfortable doing or are you going to trust and have faith in something that you have no control over. The obstacles that are in his scenes and his overall arc are all about testing his faith.
Evan Ellison, David Oyelowo, Simone Missick and Jahi Di’Allo Winston in “Government Cheese,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
KOUGUELL: My interpretation was that it’s not necessarily only his religious faith, but also faith in himself as well as his faith in his family.
HUNTER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. He’s like a modern-day Jonah. At its core, that’s been the journey of this project; it’s been about perseverance. Even as a filmmaker and as a writer, it’s not an easy journey. A lot of times you’re getting reset and you become unsure about what you want and how to get there. Figuring out what you want to say is a big process. It’s not always a straight line.
KOUGUELL: In the series you allow the viewer to find their own meanings and interpretations.
HUNTER: That’s how I really wanted to express this story; to show it as much as you can, visually and poetically, so that the audience can interpret things the way they want. And, like you said, not force feeding it. And so, there’s more nuance. I think that also makes it interesting for the actors to perform because there are layers in there.
KOUGUELL: Tell me about your collaboration with Creator/Executive Producer/Showrunner Aeysha Carr.
HUNTER: It’s always great to have creative partners, especially when you’re trying to expand stories and look for different points of view. Aisha has more of a traditional television background, and it was helpful to have that type of creative person to bring a structure to it like with this 10-episode structure.
I wanted to challenge any kind of traditional structure so that it pushed the project into a new space. I was really resisting the television format, and I wanted to try to chip that up as much as possible and make each episode feel like little indie movies but still have their arc.
Aisha came in to help pull the thread, pull the arcs through the episodic world and then I tried to kind of chip it back. When you have that creative dance, it’s a nice thing.
Working with Aisha, but also, working with the actors and the crew, it all goes back to the acting classes that I took. It’s all about how you communicate the story you want to tell. The acting classes were for my writing and then you thread that all the way through all of your departments: casting, costuming, cinematography, production design, writing—all of that pulls through.
KOUGUELL: We were talking about creating out of the box and breaking the traditional rules of television. What was your inspiration?
HUNTER: My mom and my dad; they always encouraged us not to be a follower and not do whatever anybody else is doing. You don’t have to be that. You can do your own thing. It’s like we’re our little Addams family here and don’t be afraid to be different.
I really wanted to show Black characters that you hadn’t seen before. It was important to be, as you said, out of the box or just different. And that’s hard when you’re in this industry. When you come out with something different, it takes a minute for people to wrap their head around it, which was the journey of the feature script that I started with, which is now this television show. Then, you can relate that back to, OK, well, it’s a story about perseverance.
If you look at the Hampton character, he has all of these challenges, and so it’s about his perseverance. How is he going to get this drill sold? How is he going to get his family back? How is he going to be able to stay on the right path? So, the emotions behind it are continuing to thread through.
March 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Script Magazine Interview with MEANWHILE Documentary Director Catherine Gund
In this wide-ranging interview, Susan Kouguell discusses with filmmaker Catherine Gund their respective work and shared artistic sensibilities in terms of employing nontraditional filmmaking structures, the inclusion of poetry in film, tackling challenging subject matter, and how to make it the most honest.
It was a pleasure to speak with Emmy-nominated and Academy-shortlisted producer, director, writer, activist and Aubin Pictures founder Catherine Gund about her new film Meanwhile. Gund’s media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and racial, reproductive and environmental justice. Her films have screened worldwide and on many platforms. She won the 2023 Gracie Award for Documentary Producer.
Meanwhile is a docu-poem in six verses about artists breathing through chaos. In dynamic collaboration, Jacqueline Woodson (text), Meshell Ndegeocello (soundscape), Erika Dilday (support), M. Trevino (structure), and Catherine Gund (direction), combine artists’ expressions with historical and observational footage to unveil a rare cinematic meditation about identity, race, racism and resistance as they shape our shared breath.
In our wide-ranging interview, we discussed our respective work and shared artistic sensibilities in terms of employing nontraditional filmmaking structures, the inclusion of poetry in film, tackling challenging subject matter, and how to make it the most honest. As it turned out, we realized we were both fellows (several years apart) at the Whitney Independent Study Program, which further enlivened our talk.
Meanwhile (2024)Courtesy of Aubin Pictures
Kouguell: How did Meanwhile evolve?
Gund: The film at its core is about community and about relationships, especially at a time when we were isolated and separated and left alone. There was so much loss and different kinds of loss. Obviously, the loss of people first and foremost, but we were also losing this whole sense of ourselves and our identity. And then this sense of our society.
It really started in June of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered. Also, I had a dear friend who is in the film named Ivy Joan Young, who had been sick for a while. She died in 2023. She became homebound with emphysema, which politically is hideous; menthol deadly cigarettes were being marketed to the African American community.
There was a lot about breath.
It was unmistakable that George Floyd was asphyxiated; he was strangled. People couldn’t breathe and they were dying. We were sharing one air. Then my other dear friend’s mother was also on oxygen and struggling to breathe. Breath at its core, was the genesis.
Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration. Did the images or text come first, or did they work together from the start?
Gund: One of my oldest friends is Jacqueline Woodson, who wrote the narrative; we have always collaborated in some way or another. There was an opportunity here for us to try to deal with what was happening around us in the ways we knew how. Honestly, I imagined she was going to write a text and I would come up with some imagery but it became a bigger collaboration with many others, including Meshell Ndegeocello. It was a dynamic back and forth; it was not one or the other. I filmed on my little phone. It’s sort of a journal. I was inspired early on by Agnes Varda.
Kouguell: Me too! I was fortunate to interview Varda several times for this publication.
Gund: Varda’s documentary The Gleaners And I was definitely a main inspiration for me because I was collecting images. I’d see these men sweeping, and those images became such a dynamic part of the film, even at the end with the women finishing building their bed and they clean out the room. And then the archival footage of the one man in the 1950s sweeping in his baggy clothes, and he just looks right up at the camera.
I’ve had this approach to imagery – whether it’s a poem, a song or something that gives you a feeling just from its association – to let myself edit associatively and work associatively. Jackie would send me text, and it would inspire me to film in various locations where there were people of all races and classes. It wasn’t just about race, it was about class – strata.
Jesse [Krimes], the white guy in the film who has served so much time in incarcerated facilities who’s from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and not Amish, said: ‘I didn’t know what race was. Everybody was white, so there was nothing that made that edge.’
To me, that edge is again the association, associative editing and putting the edge between Jackie and I, between words and pictures, letting each other figure out what that association, and our association is.
Kouguell: These associations felt like a conversation. You were allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions and to create their own narrative.
Gund: You’ll notice no one in the film ever says ‘that was racist’. In the extreme, that’s an opinion, right? We wanted it to be something where people were just experiencing what we were experiencing. And then realizing that they may have a different experience from someone else. That was a key takeaway for us.
We’re all seeing the same thing, we’re all in the same world of “meanwhile”, but also of our world. We have different choices we can make. But we still have the same materials to process.
Kouguell: How did you come about choosing the various artists to film?
Gund: The choice of artists really gets at the notion of community because we did not set out and make a list of artists and then go and talk to them. All of the artists are people I was in deep, sometimes decades-long, conversations with.
That sense of community has a kind of internal coherence or an internal sensibility. They are friends of mine and Jackie’s. It was more like one conversation led to another, and it turns out a couple of them are more well known or recognizable, and some are very new or are people that wouldn’t be considered artists at all.
What was interesting to me about working with them was that we. This is true for the whole film. I never wanted them to explain anything, not about our relationship, not about their work. I didn’t want them to say, ‘I use the color orange because sunsets are important to me’. I wanted to be in this “meanwhile” moment with them in between.
Kouguell: Tell me about incorporating archival footage.
Gund: I looked for footage that really engaged with ideas around race and racism, and places where races overlap because that’s where you learn about race and you learn about what we think about race. This is something Jackie and I were very committed to.
We were always trying to deeply contextualize them into our experience and not just pull them randomly out of nowhere. In the film you see Doc Rivers on the TV in an Ohio community center when he says, “I should just be a basketball coach, not an African American coach”.
It was a ripe time when we were making this film, because sh-t like that was happening all day. Every day. All the old stuff was coming back as being things we could use. Like the James Baldwin scene, it was really important to see that 50 years made no difference at all.
Kouguell: The film is structured with the six verses. It reminded me of symphonic movements, except generally there are only four movements with several exceptions, including Mahler’s 3rd Symphony.
Gund: I love what people bring to the film and point things out. I did obviously create a space where those associations made sense. There were some obvious yet unintentional associations related to breathing from some of the artists.
I had no reason for there to be specifically six, except that I had six ideas, and that’s what it broke into. To me it was really based on breath. The end point was our ability to go on; the vision and hope. The difference between being alive and being dead, is that you have one breath. But of course there’s more than one person.
The second is, who is the we? It’s more than one breath. Then, as soon as you have more than one person, it immediately devolves into a power struggle, a relationship, right? But then unrequited love. And then the reality – chaos, right? Yes, there is chaos but we made it an explicit goal to not re-traumatize and to not exhibit violence, but also not to brush everything under the rug. That is really the pivotal verse or movement. And then embracing the chaos. And then reclaiming the meanwhile.
Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris delved into their close collaboration with each other and director James Mangold, discussing the challenges of editing live performances, integrating archival footage and sound, and creating the narrative and musical rhythms of the film.
It was a pleasure to speak with Academy Award®-winning film editor Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris about their editing work on A Complete Unknown. Buckland began working with director James Mangold on Knight and Day and The Wolverine, and has extensive credits on narratives and documentaries. Morris, named one of Variety’s top 10 Artisans to Watch, has worked with directors James Gray, Adam McKay and Gareth Edwards.
Buckland and Morris delved into their close collaboration with each other and director James Mangold, discussing the challenges of editing live performances, integrating archival footage and sound, and creating the narrative and musical rhythms of the film.
A Complete Unknown (2024)Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration with each other and with director James Mangold.
Buckland: It was a great collaboration. We like to use the word “organic”. I started on the project and then Scott came on a few weeks later. It was pretty clear that he and I have very similar tastes, sensibilities and philosophies. Scott just jumped right in and took the next batch of dailies and started working. It was great because we really needed to move quickly.
Morris: I’m new to Andrew and Jim Mangold and the team he’s cultivated over the years, and I was so grateful to be welcomed into the team. Andrew is such a great collaborator, and Jim is incredible. I was just thrown right into it. We were so fortunate to have similar sensibilities.
Kouguell: Were you cutting every day while they were shooting?
Buckland: Yes, we tried to as much as possible. When they were done shooting, Jim would come back and expect to see a cut of the film.
Morris: [laughs] No pressure.
Buckland: [laughs] Yes, no pressure, Jim likes to work with more than one editor and he likes to move fast. I think we only had about four days when we presented basically the first cut, what they call an assembly but I don’t really like using that word so much.
Morris: More refined.
Buckland: A lot more refined.
Morris: Jim likes to work with the editors during the shoot, so he’ll shoot all day for 12 hours and then he returns to his place in New Jersey and goes on Evercast, virtual editing sessions. We’re in Los Angeles and we’d be refining the scenes a little bit together, so that by the time we did watch the cut when he got back to L.A., he’d already done a pass on most of the scenes with us where we refined them a bit.
Buckland: It’s always scary to see the first assembly, especially for a director because you’re now presented with what you’ve shot. Fortunately, Jim was pretty happy, and then when we worked from that, and just dove in and started working.
Kouguell: I recently interviewed Myron Kerstein, the editor of Wicked for this publication and we spoke in depth about the fact that most of the songs were performed live on set and some of the challenges. It’s interesting that in your film most of the performances are also live.
Buckland: What’s unique about this movie is there are a lot of performances. And yes, most of the performances are shot live. They’re not shot with a pre-record. Timothée really wanted to sing live, which means each take is unique. You can’t really group these many takes of the same shot together, which is sunk to a singular music piece, which allows you to move between the takes without worrying about losing sync.
A Complete Unknown (2024)Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Morris: One thing I’ll add that’s unique about this film, is that it’s folk music. It’s very authentic and intimate. Sometimes it’s just a guitar and a voice, and the way Jim directed us was that our characters were driving all these musical scenes and that it wasn’t about watching a performance. It was about how our story is progressing, and how the characters are driving us through the scene. It was almost oddly kind of like editing a dialogue scene, except we are now beholden to the timing of the music and the lyrics have to be the right timing for where it is in the song. So you have this extra complication. You’re really cutting a scene for drama and for story and the music is a constant in the movie.
Kouguell: How did you two discover the editing rhythm in the film?
Buckland: We worked a lot on that with Jim. He wanted to create this propulsion through the film within the scenes. We were very conscious of finding the essence of the scene and moving on and not lingering. It’s the age old adage, get in as late as you can and get out early as you can. The music element allowed us to have propulsion as well.
Kouguell: Did you stick close to the screenplay during the editing process?
Morris: It was a very tight script but there were definitely some changes. There was the regular old compression because most of these were live performances. They recorded most of the song and in some cases, the entire song and some of these tracks are seven minutes and we obviously had to truncate them in such a way that the audience would not feel cheated.
Kouguell: The film integrates historical footage from the 1960s. Let’s talk about this and how you worked with that.
Morris: There are little things like the script mentions the Beatles and the British invasion and rock and roll; it’s subtly there but we’re not putting it in your face, it’s just a part of the world. When you have the death of JFK, the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, the anti-war songs are narratively linked and deeply woven into the story we’re telling and then showing how these events are affecting the characters.
Buckland: These elements create a context of the time period that these characters are living in without being too on the nose about it. We just really wanted to try to incorporate it organically in the story. So it is the context of the scene but it’s not the focus of the scene.
Kouguell: What additional challenges did you find editing the musical performances?
Buckland: When they covered some of these scenes of a musical moment, they covered it with multiple cameras. So you have a multiple of two or three cameras covering the same moment and then multiple takes of that. Each grouping of those three cameras is its own take with the music attached to it. It’s unique in terms of tempo and phrasing and you end up with multiple takes. There’s multiple groupings; three camera groupings, for example. If they were shooting with a pre-recorded piece of music, it would be much easier to group; they would be perfectly in sync with the music but that wasn’t possible.
Kouguell: Did the fact that the film is based on an actual person, Bob Dylan, a music icon, influence your editing at all?
Morris: It was about Mangold’s script and treating them as characters in the film. Yes, there’s the awareness of the reality that they’re alive and these are historical figures, but it was about making the film work, and then focusing on the characters and digging into the scenes.
Buckland: Timothée brought his unique perspective on the character so you want to honor what he’s doing and try to bring that out in the cutting and not be a witness. And, not be overly concerned about the real Bob Dylan, because who is he? [laughs] I mean, I don’t know, right?
In this wide-ranging discussion, Mohammad Rasoulof reflects on his many years of dealing with censorship and the intelligence services, his imprisonments, his challenges in balancing the story for Iranian and non-Iranian audiences, and the time and safety constraints making the film clandestinely.
I first saw The Seed of the Sacred Fig last summer at the Locarno Film Festival on the Piazza Grande, which I highlighted for this publication. Both the film and Mohammad Rasoulof, received standing ovations. In a moving speech, Rasoulof stated: “I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile.”
Filming in secret, Rasoulof and his cast and crew risked their lives making this film. Once the Iranian government became aware of the film, Mohammad was forced to flee the country and now lives as a political refugee in Germany. The film is Germany’s official submission for International Feature for the Oscars.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig centers on an investigating judge on Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, who grapples with mistrust and paranoia as nationwide political protests intensify and his gun mysteriously disappears. Suspecting the involvement of his wife and his two daughters, he imposes drastic measures on his family as societal rules unravel. Metaphorically, the film’s title is the symbol of a tree killing its host to survive.
With the assistance of a translator, I spoke with Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof over Zoom. In our wide-ranging discussion Rasoulof reflected on his many years of dealing with censorship and the intelligence services, his imprisonments, his challenges in balancing the story for Iranian and non-Iranian audiences, and the time and safety constraints making the film clandestinely.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)Courtesy of Neon
Kouguell: Let’s start with how the screenplay evolved and your initial inspiration.
Rasoulof: It’s been about 15 years that my issues with the censorship office have transferred into challenges and problems with the intelligence services. All these years this question was in my head that the people who sat across from me, who blindfolded me and interrogated me, I thought, what is this difference between these people and myself? Sometimes I even thought, what if there is a biological difference between him and I that makes him devote himself to an authoritarian system and that doesn’t let me do the same things? This curiosity has always been with me.
It was 2022 when I became arrested a few times. I was in jail the last time the Woman, Life, Freedom movement happened. It was the peak of this movement when a political prisoner went on a hunger strike and the rest of the prisoners and myself were watching him. At this time, a higher prison official came for a visit to see up close what this person was doing.
I was standing in the cell and watching everything when one of the officials came to me and started talking to me and took a pen out of his pocket and then gave me the pen as a gift. He said that he was having a lot of problems with his family and his children for having this job and cooperating with an authoritarian system and it was at that point that I wanted to write about a family like that. I thought if I write a story about a split between family and children I could also write about that devotion.
Kouguell: One theme of the film is the idea of submission and resistance as seen in Iman and his wife’s and daughters choices. Please talk about this more.
Rasoulof: The women’s movement in Iran has a long history and in the last episode of it, which was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, we were caught by surprise. The new generation has a very different approach to the meaning of resistance and the meaning of life. In the previous generations, death was glorified in the fight and in resistance.
A big difference with the new generation is that they fight for freedom, they fight for life, and they glorify life and they put value in the act of fighting for life, not for death. So their perceptions of life, their understandings of life are very different than what the previous generations understood. The new generation has a very large communication with the world around them and it sees itself as part of the world around it through, of course, social media.
Mohammad RasoulofCourtesy of Cosmopol Film
At the same time, the previous generation sees itself belonging to tradition and to the closed world in which it was born.
So I can summarize and say that the story is about the confrontation between awareness and ignorance. It’s an ignorance that comes from insisting on the previous beliefs and ideas, and it’s an awareness that’s coming from being open to the world and not wanting to submit to former beliefs.
One way it’s shown in my film is the character of the mother who gets all her information from the TV, whereas her children do not believe the news shown on TV, and they try to seek outside and be in touch with the world around them.
Kouguell: The four main characters (the parents and two daughters) are each distinct and poignant. While one might not agree or sympathize with some or even all of their actions, the film allows the viewers to put themselves in the character’s shoes. Please talk about developing these characters.
Rasoulof: There are many experiences that people have in oppressive situations in democratic situations they are not felt and not transferable. So, this form of storytelling creates certain problems. For instance, if I want to make the situation understandable for the non-Iranian audience, the way of life in Iran becomes so dramatized for the Iranian audience that they might find it meaningless or useless.
A big part of my energy [making this film] was spent on forgetting what has become normalized for me in these abnormal situations and putting myself in a situation that is more in tune and in sync with everyday life outside Iran.
There was another problem with making the film in a clandestine way; you have to make everything very quickly or you get exposed, so these contradictions are always very tense for me and take a lot of my energy to get to a level of thought that I want.
Kouguell: Each of these characters hide the truth in some form. Whether it’s the actual hiding of the gun or the daughter’s friend, there are many layers of secrets, deceptions and lies. Please elaborate on this.
Rasoulof: These oppressive situations are parallel to that in a family structure in which the father rules to do something to the members of it and it takes away the trust between the members. In this family, parallel to the patriarchy, girls are not allowed to express themselves the way they are. Not only they cannot express themselves in the family setting to their family members, but they cannot express themselves to members of the society in a social setting.
In my film, for example, the sequence with the family at the restaurant, the mother is telling them that they have to get used to having multiple perspectives of their lives, showing themselves in multiple ways, in their lives. The mother herself is somewhat rope walking between the children and the father, sometimes she leans towards the children, sometimes she leans towards the father, and she’s constantly trying to find an image that brings the two together and reflects on the other side.
The father believes by hiding his job from his children he’s protecting them. Therefore all the characters have reasons not to be themselves and not experience trust together.
Kouguell: The gun is the dramatic catalyst and symbolizes not only violence and a false sense of safety but paranoia. How would you describe it?
Rasoulof: The gun is a symbol of power and the father holds it as his way of getting close to the power he wants to get to. When he holds the gun, he’s one step closer to the position he wants to get. When he sees the situation in danger and sees the path he has been walking is under a threat, he becomes disheveled and worried inside. Gradually he shows a side of himself that is fully prejudiced and biased and we, as the audience, understand how the events unfold in the way that they merge with one another.
In the end, the younger daughter tries to bring her father back to himself and remind him of who he once was to them by broadcasting and playing sounds from the past. But it is now too late. We see how prejudice can take away humanity from us and cause violence.
December 13, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Interview with Oscar-Nominated ‘Nickel Boys’ Writer and Director RaMell Ross and Editor Nicholas Monsour
RaMell Ross and Nicholas Monsour delve into their collaboration, discuss the film’s nontraditional structure, the unconventional screenwriting process, point-of-view, and so much more.
When covering the 2024 New York Film Festival for this publication I highlighted Nickel Boys, and since then I was eager to chat with RaMell Ross one-on-one. Our conversation did not disappoint and in fact, the bonus for this interview was speaking with Ross together with his editor Nicholas Monsour. We delved into their collaboration, discussed the film’s nontraditional structure, the unconventional screenwriting process, point-of-view, and so much more.
Directed by photographer and Oscar-nominated documentarian (Hale County This Morning, This Evening), RaMell Ross, and co-written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida. Whitehead’s book is inspired by the Dozier School, a Florida reformatory in business for over a century with a brutal history in the Jim Crow South. After it closed, authorities discovered 100 unmarked graves of boys, mostly Black youths, subject to horrific treatment.
[L-R] Ethan Herisse stars as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS (2024).Courtesy Orion Pictures
Kouguell: First, congratulations to you both. To date, Nickel Boys is on many top ten lists, and garnering many nominations and awards. RaMell, you just received Best Director at the Gothams and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Spotlight Award at the African American African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA), among other accolades.
Was this the first time that you two have worked together?
ROSS: Yes it was. Nick came highly recommended. After working with him, I definitely understand why.
KOUGUELL: What’s your collaboration process like?
ROSS: It’s a lot of asking Nick to do things that he thinks are good ideas. Follow the script as best as possible and if something’s not working, to make adjustments, but kind of simultaneously ask him to adapt the sort of Hale Countyaesthetic within the context of the script we had.
It’s very much a process of one foot forward in conversation, two feet back in practice, and then five feet forward in practice, and then two feet back in conversation. It’s almost like trying to walk in quicksand and in a direction you don’t quite know you’re going, but you know that if you stay moving long enough, you know there’s something in that process that could be generative.
MONSOUR: I love all these metaphors because I think the more we talk about the movie and think about it retrospectively it does seem like whatever metaphor you use, there’s this thing where you keep moving from one space to its kind of opposite or reciprocal space. When it’s on a big enough scale, you have to figure out how to take it out of your emotional, intuitive space, and think about it, and talk about it, map it out, and then you can take it back into your kind of really intimate, intuitive space.
I just love the challenge. My favorite part of editing is trying to understand someone else as an artist, their sensibilities and aesthetic as best as I can to sort of nudge it in the right direction rather than work at cross purposes.
KOUGUELL: Nick, your background is also as a writer and filmmaker, and you’ve done video installations and sculptures.
Nicholas Monsour
MONSOUR: The scale of this project is enormous, considering how much it rests on artistic impulse. I’ve never been anywhere close to that. I’ve worked on other projects that have shades of that, but this did feel gratifying. I got to actually access some of the deeper, more inspirational kinds of things that I was interested in film in the first place on this project.
KOUGUELL: RaMell,tell me about the adaptation process from Whitehead’s novel to the screen. You co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes.
ROSS: The writing process was fun; that’s where the majority of the concepts became really manifest and organized and what we wanted to get towards. It’s great to work with someone like Joslyn, who is brilliant and genuinely kind, well-read and as well-versed as Nick. Joslyn is like her own version of a Wikipedia, has read a bunch, and has a global sensibility.
Starting with images, we made a treatment as an edit, as the first process. Going from images to script was a joy with her because we were able to work with the density of what it means to look and see, and then retroactively go to language.
I think normally in the filmmaking process, it’s a kind of an imagination script, and then you go to images, and that reversed order allows for the language to be more in service to the image, as opposed to the image being in service to the language. Basically, we wrote this script visually.
KOUGUELL: POV is a vital element of the film.
ROSS: The idea of point of view is not radical to me. It’s just the way that human beings see the world. To me, it is a more natural camera use than third person. And that’s not scripting, that’s not the script, but just to show you the way.
Brandon Wilson stars as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS (2024).Courtesy Orion Pictures
KOUGUELL: The film challenges the viewer where and how to look and takes us inside the characters; we see what they see. It did not feel gimmicky that the actors were wearing the cameras; it served the sensibility of the film.
ROSS: There are ways to edit even the dialogue scenes that would make the POV feel gimmicky. It’s another place to give hats off to Nick, because he’s deeply fluent in the traditional and conventional languages of cinema in general, and the editing structures.
We could rely on Nick to find ways to make a scene feel like its POV and also give the audience what it wants, but also maintain the truth of what the intention of being in their perspectives are.
MONSOUR: I just love hearing how you describe this process and what you were saying about going from working from the image to sort of inverting that common paradigm. You never quite know if you’re seeing it the same way as someone else.
I didn’t have to start totally from scratch, but I still had miles to go in terms of learning when, where and how you, RaMell, wanted to sort of dial-up, calling attention to a shift in perspective. The material allowed that because of the way you captured it in this very visceral, raw way. It had this fundamental integrity in the image. It really felt like we got to dial up or down or accentuate in almost kind of a musical way.
I know you said, Susan, it challenges the viewer, but I also think it sometimes invites the viewer, sometimes it challenges the viewer. We got to mess with that. That was really exciting; you just use your own intuition when something is feeling like RaMell was saying, not quite right by convention or what an expectation is. But that doesn’t mean you don’t do it. Like RaMell said, he and Joslyn are working from this kind of global perspective on cinema language, It’s not like there’s one set of rules for this stuff.
ROSS: Joslyn was with us in the edit room most of the time. It was good to have a brain trust of three because quite often it’s like Joslyn and I would feel one way, Nick feels one way. Nick and Joslyn feel one way. I feel one way, and so on. It actually forces the other person to not push so hard and to be like, well, both of them think that, I guess we’ll see where that goes, and that’s a really good tension to have.
KOUGUELL: We’ve been discussing structure. I recently watched Hale County, which is phenomenal. With both Hale County and Nickel Boys, you are successfully challenging the traditional narrative structure in film. As the viewer, it gave me enough room to breathe and impose my own ideas and insights onto the characters and stories. How did you decide on the structure for Nickel Boys?
ROSS: When editing Hale County I wondered how approximate you can get to consciousness with a film and with the edit. There’s something about the images that exist and also human life in that there’s something constant.
Can you make a film that feels like every moment you’re walking around a corner and you don’t know what image, what you’re going to encounter next, but you’re down for the walk, and you love it when you turn to it. There’s something about that surprise that feels very sensory and very human real life, and not going for realism. I don’t even think reality is real based in the way that fantasy and fiction are incorporated in the meaning-making processes across cultures.
RaMell Ross
With Hale County, the film is made up of five visual movements. It’s edited from sunup to sundown. There are 12 days over the course of the film. There’s these really stringent rules that force you to make decisions that produce a kind of new meaning. I knew in Nickel Boys that I wanted it to feel in the same way like Hale County – this sort of musical, almost consciousness-oriented thing; it almost feels like it’s evolving. It’s like making itself or it’s thinking itself. It’s in dialogue with itself. But it’s not to the point where it seems navel-gazing, or it seems like everything is an inflection point, like it wants to be a conscious thing, but it doesn’t want to collapse on itself.
KOUGUELL: You referenced how the inclusion of archival footage further enhanced the storytelling process; it was your way of depicting history – replacing or reproducing an archive that doesn’t exist. You worked with archival producer Allison Brandin.
ROSS: It’s really interesting because I had these ideas of how I want to film and edit, based on the archival images that our amazing archivist Allison Brandin and her team found.
We’re never cutting forward in a scene. We’re never cutting in. Jomo Fray, our great DP, and I came up with this thing called a thrown gaze, which is like the macro shots that allow you to be hyper-attentive to these emotional moments, which allows us to jump time and maybe cut in. It was kind of a secret breakthrough in my openness to the way that the film could be edited because it worked so well. It opened up another language for us to play with eventually. Nick and I didn’t have much time to talk because production was so crazy.
MONSOUR: It takes a lot of confidence to make it through the harrowing process of production and see stuff that you were not imagining. It just might be my Marxist bias, but there’s a dialectical thing that’s going on. Partially, it’s the subject on the one hand, and then the society they’re in on the other, and then other times, it’s the music and the image, and it’s like they’re almost never in the same emotional register.
There’s always this spread that sometimes we focus on, and I feel that structurally, emotionally. When you break it into themes, it does work in this kind of movement of gulfs; sort of dialectically opposed themes or complimentary themes.
KOUGUELL: As a classically trained musician, to me, it felt similar to a symphony or chamber piece, with the different movements, and these movements informed the pacing and the rhythm of the film.
ROSS: I’m so glad you said movements. Hale County has five visual movements. In Nickel Boys, the first conception in the writing process was 17 movements. All of them had scenes at the end of them. Each of the scenes have poetic resonances and their plurality, etc., in terms of it being like some sort of ebb and flow of images. Of course, over the process, they’re like, yeah, we can make that film, but it’s going to cost $116 billion that’s all. [Laughter] So eventually it gets chopped down, and it kind of lost the 17 movement structure, but we were able to get into the movements in the edit that are just a lot smaller, but still have at least some sort of ephemeral emotional impact that is equal to the original spirit.
KOUGUELL: The film addresses a dark history and the erasure of history in a way that’s accessible and not pandering to the audience.
MONSOUR: I don’t have these experiences of those characters and of the other people in this film, in my body, the way they do, or in my family. I watched very closely how RaMell and the filmmakers and the actors and everybody were handling certain parts of the history.
That was where I found the book useful. We’re not making that book exactly or making this script in this movie, and they’re different, but it did help me. Anything I could absorb, because that reflection of this history was useful for me. I don’t have it in my every day, in my day-to-day experience in the same way as the characters in the film.
Amazon MGM Studios
ROSS: I think of this film now as an experiential monument, in the sense that it, if we think about the source material in the Dozier School for Boys, it allows you to have an experience of history that’s so strongly experienced-based that you take it into your body, in the way in which the camera goes into the body of the boys. That’s not a history that someone can bury. It’s an interesting way to deal with the complexity of the past where it’s not a physical thing.
I wrote an essay, and one of the first lines is: ‘Human beings are the real documents of civilization.’ It’s like taking society into us so that we are experiencing it in the way in which they did to therefore pass it on in other art pieces.
Nickel Boys opens in Theaters on December 13, 2024.
December 3, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell Interview with ‘WICKED’ Writer Winnie Holzman
Wicked writer Winnie Holzman talks about the genesis of the stage play to the screen and then adapting it from one movie to two, and the importance of collaboration for Script Magazine.
It was a joy to speak with award-winning Wicked writer Winnie Holzman about the genesis of the stage play to the screen and then adapting it from one movie to two, and the importance of collaboration.
Ms. Holzman generously shared insights and behind-the-scenes anecdotes that were inspiring, not to mention, fun. As I revealed to Ms. Holzman, I had just attended the movie screening and I had seen the play twice on Broadway with my daughter when she was young, thus adding more stories to our delightful discussion. It is no secret, Winnie Holzman is passionate about Wicked.
Winnie Holzman is the writer (with composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz) of the musical Wicked, for which she won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical and was nominated for the Tony Award. Winnie attended the NYU Musical Theatre Program, where she studied with Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. TV credits include Thirtysomething, Once and Again, Huge (collaborating with her daughter, Savannah Dooley) and Roadies (with Cameron Crowe). Her play Choice was recently produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. With her husband, actor Paul Dooley, she wrote Post-its: (Notes on a Marriage) and Assisted Living. Winnie is currently at work on a new drama series for HBO, which will reunite her with the star of the show she created, My So-Called Life, Claire Danes.
[L-R] Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked (2024).Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Kouguell: You wrote the book for the 2003 Stephen Schwartz Broadway musical Wicked, which was inspired by the Gregory Maguire novel by the same name. How did this evolve?
Holzman: We took the brilliant idea of his novel, which was that you don’t know the true story of the Wicked Witch or her real name or what really happened, and it is from her point of view. That was a genius idea. As soon as we started working together we felt the need to create our own plot that used elements of his novel and luckily he trusted us and gave us permission. He was willing to let us take liberties and we did. One of the big things in the novel was that the two young women were college roommates, and the idea of who was the good witch. That to us was gold. We let that friendship storyline inspire us.
Kouguell: Tell me about the adaptation process of the novel and how you collaborated with Stephen Schwartz on the Broadway project.
Holzman: The friendship idea grew out of an early presentation of a table read. We only had a first act, which was as long as the show is now. We had a lot of trusted people in the audience, and it was clear that when the two characters, Elphaba and Glinda were together, it worked best rather than if just one was on stage.
Winnie HolzmanCourtesy Winnie Holzman
There were so many conscious and unconscious ingredients. The writing process has a mysterious quality and who really knows how that happens? It started to become clear to us to lean into the friendship and the life-changing aspect for both women and how they were going to have this effect on each other’s lives. And, the idea of ‘hate at first sight’. What happens sometimes when you hate at first sight is that you’re having an intense reaction that’s furled with something deep within that person and to take that and find that moment, where the two of them see each other for the first time.
Kouguell: Let’s talk about the adaptation process from the stage to the film.
Holzman: There’s an alchemy when Stephen Schwartz and I work together. Stephen and I wanted a movie that we really loved and felt our fans would enjoy. All that mattered was getting it right. Stephen was always intensively and intently involved with the screenplay, and then the two scripts when we decided to make it into two movies. He was all over the movies with feedback and ideas for every scene. Director Jon M. Chu put his stamp on it completely and in the writing for it. He was always right there and hugely helpful.
I approached writing the script as if I was coming in fresh, as if I wasn’t the writer of the book of the staged musical Wicked. It was my job to explore. I opened my mind to other parts of the story. I had gone down a lot of different roads, I experimented and was open to a lot of ideas.
Kouguell: How did the script evolve from one movie to two movies?
Holzman: For years I was writing it as one movie. One of the first things that happened when Jon Chu came in, was this idea for two films. The idea was floated before, but we weren’t ready. We trusted Jon. We came to understand that the first movie is Elphaba’s trajectory with Glinda being part of that, and the second movie is Glinda’s trajectory to become the person she was destined to become – Glinda the good, and how she becomes that.
With producer Marc Platt we did not just open up the book to be cinematic, we wanted it to be even more emotional. We wanted to show more nuance between the two girls and take our time, and importantly, Stephen had an idea for two new songs that come in the second movie.
It was exciting. We wanted this balance between being true to the play, evoking the play, and staying true to the play and having the freedom to go deeper and show things you can’t show on stage. In the end, it became a very organic decision: if it’s two movies we’ll have room for all of it. That freed me as well.
Kouguell: You mentioned thatJon Chu tapped into important ideas you and Stephen had for the play that you were now able to bring to the screen.
Holzman: It was almost like traveling back in time. Jon Chu asked about every beat of our show. He’s a wonderful listener and person, and a big part of this is that he loves the show. He’s a genuine fan. He asked, what were you thinking about when you were creating this, with every beat, every scene?
With the song “One Short Day”, we were starting to get this image of two young women, finding this exciting place, this is my destiny, that was the whole idea of the song. If you only have one day in Emerald City, that was something we thought about years ago as an image. Looking at the language for that number and describing it to Jon, memories came back and things landed in the movie.
It was the same as the little girls in the movie. I always wanted to have a little green girl in the show, and I pictured her but it was not practical in a musical. Another example are the animals on stage. We could have a goat professor but it didn’t make sense to have more animals as characters on stage; there wasn’t room. I always felt that to help understand the story we had to go back to Gregory’s novel. In the novel, the animals are being treated as outcasts and persecuted, it’s such a salient part of the novel.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in Wicked (2024).Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Kouguell: We’ve been talking about the Grimmerie, the ancient book of spells that Elphaba uses, and how that further evolved from the stage to the screen. (Spoiler alerts!)
Holzman: Part of the job of adapting the stage play was to go into more depth about story points, and one of these points was how to set up the background and importance of the Grimmerie. I had many drafts of setting this up but none of it ended up working. We didn’t want it to be fluffy, and we wanted to make it a piece of propaganda. With that in mind, I wrote a little playlet that they perform in Emerald City. Stephen then suggested it be musicalized and become a musical interlude and at this point, Jon Chu says these women are the ones who could read the book and instead of an earlier idea that was rejected that Kristin Chenoweth appears as Glinda’s mother, Kristin and Idina Menzel would be the wise women.
Kouguell: Dana Fox was brought onto the project later on as a co-writer. How did that come about?
Holzman: Universal, Mark Platt and Jon Chu had worked with Dana. Bringing Dana on had a lot to do with the time element to make sure we could get it done on schedule. We were adapting that script and adapting the Broadway show, which was always there as source material. We were also inventing new things; Jon Chu brought so much invention, vision and exciting visuals, and exciting ways of approaching the material. Jon and Dana Fox posed good questions. It was an intensive collaboration and Dana was good to work with. When a director says I’m looking at a huge task ahead of me and this is what I need to accomplish, you work for the greater good and that’s part of making something together and embracing it.
Kouguell: We’ve been chatting about how we each began our writing careers writing poetry and how that’s influenced our respective work.
Holzman: When I started writing, I began with poetry and then I was writing comedy sketches and songs and then I got into musical theater. The link to me was poetry writing. There’s a definite connection. It is all about word choice, brevity, saying a few words and that distillation – and that’s screenwriting.
December 3, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell Interviews WICKED Editor Myron Kerstein
In this wide-ranging interview for Script Magazine Kerstein talks about his love of editing musicals, his collaborations with director Jon M. Chu, finding the emotion in scenes, and so much more. No doubt, Kerstein’s enthusiasm and passion for films is contagious.
Myron Kerstein, ACE, is an Oscar-nominated and ACE Eddie Award-winning film and TV editor, producer, and director. His credits include tick, tick…BOOM!,In the Heights,Crazy Rich Asians, Garden State, Girls, House of Lies, Little Fockers, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. Kerstein made his directorial debut in Season 2 of the AppleTV+ drama Home Before Dark.
[L-R] Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked (2024).Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Do you have a background in music? What drew you to this genre?
Kerstein: I had a very loose background in music. As a teenager, I played drums and saxophone in bands. Ialways had a love for music. I remember as a kid watching the Wizard of Oz, of course. The Music Man had a big impression on me as a kid. As a teenager, I loved films like Grease and Purple Rain. I loved movies that had lots of music in them, as well as music videos in the 80s.
When I started getting into the film business, I gravitated to that genre, working on Camp and Hedwig and the Angry Inch as an assistant editor, Garden State, which had a big soundtrack, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – all these films were training for me.
When I met Jon Chu he actually wanted to make a musical together. I was really excited because I had put out in the universe that I wanted to work as a sole editor and it came at the right time. Jon and I would say we’ve been training for this all our lives. The truth is, it really did sort of build over the course of 20 years.
Kouguell:Wicked parts one and two are the fifth and sixth projects you worked on with director Jon Chu. Tell me about your collaboration.
Kerstein: It’s been a bromance. I love him like a brother. We found instantaneous connections on how to make films and television. It’s like you’re a kid again having this childhood wonder approach to making things to put out in the world. And, to have a real message and joyful presence in the world.
On Crazy Rich Asians we started to understand each other as creative artists and how we approach things. That trust began quickly and built with that film and with In the Heights it kept building; we were raising each other’s bar. We did that on television as well. Television has a certain speed because of schedules, and you’re thinking on your feet.
It’s been a dream come true. Jon changed my life. In Wicked there are themes about how a person changes you for the good or how they have the handprint on your heart. And he really has. It’s been an incredible journey. I’m really excited that people are responding to this movie because it is all the culmination of the things we’ve done together and with his collaborators Alice Brooks and Chris Scott, it’s an amazing collaboration.
Kouguell: You immersed yourself in Wicked by reading early drafts of parts one and two of the screenplay, watched the stage production on Broadway several times, re-watched the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, and read Frank Baum’s source material. How did this influence and inform your editing choices while capturing the spirit of this project?
Kerstein: It’s all about feeling and emotion for me. When I finished the first script I literally cried. I never had a more visceral reaction in my life. And that was very similar to seeing the original stage production. I watched it with my six-year-old son and then rewatched it when Broadway opened again after the pandemic. It was like a rock show, like Beatlemania. What I knew is that in order for the films to work, the audience had to connect emotionally the way I was connecting emotionally to the source material. I was chasing that the entire time, I needed to make sure that whatever my choices were I was listening to my heart.
Myron KersteinCourtesy Myron Kerstein
There were 250 hours of footage of the two movies. I took note of my emotions. It all goes back to how I responded to that source material, and how I can best tell the story dramatically.
Kouguell: The editing was seamless, moving from live-action to visual effects.
Kerstein: Our job as filmmakers is to have a steady grip on the audience, there’s a suspension of disbelief that shouldn’t stop. The second that happens you’ve lost them. Keeping that firm grip and letting the audience know that we have you takes a lot of work between finding the right pace, to letting things breathe, to letting the emotion feel earned by the performances and getting carried away and immersed in that experience.
Kouguell: There is so much thematically going on, as well as shifts and tones and various genres, yet I never felt like I had whiplash.
Kerstein: We’re throwing a lot at you, a lot of tones – comedy, drama, melodrama, action, and horror – but if we keep that firm grip on the storytelling and the emotion, we felt that the audience would go along for the ride.
Kouguell: The screenplay by Winnie Holzman, had the lyrics written into the pages.
Kerstein: It was very helpful because my approach with cutting musicals is not to treat lyrics any different than dialogue so that it feels seamless. The storytelling doesn’t just stop because the characters stop singing. It’s just another way for the characters to express themselves. It was really helpful for me to read along and listen to the Broadway soundtrack, and to read along to understand the storytelling. There’s a lot packed into the lyrics and vocals. Otherwise, I think you’re just like, OK the song starts here and we’ll see you on the other side. Working this way I had a real understanding about what these characters are talking about through these songs, and how it works dramatically in the scenes.
Kerstein: There were a few moments like when Elphaba was flying around that we got to steal another live vocal from another live take, but they’re all doing it live the entire time. They were 100 percent thoroughbred; they are the best singers on the planet.
It was just an abundance of riches having all this dialogue/vocal/singing mixed into one another.
Kouguell: There must have been some challenges cutting the live vocals.
Kerstein: Editing musicals is the hardest genre; nothing compares to cutting live vocals that are, by the way, not always on a musical grid. Jon likes to start and stop songs, and build up anticipation, and mess with audiences’ expectations within a song. He wants to keep it fresh for the audience. He wants to build dramatic moments like he did in “Defying Gravity” and chapter things sometimes to give it a sense of place and setting. It’s super challenging, it’s a lot of balls in the air. I’ll have multiple tracks of different vocals, live piano, instrumental tracks, click tracks. There are lots of things I’m keeping track of and at the same time, I want it to all disappear into whatever the dramatic scene is.
And on top of that, there is VGX and world building, and CG goats and CG animals. Thank goodness I didn’t have a flying monkey singing too! And then none of this matters, you need to make sure that it all disappears and it becomes this wonderful cinematic experience, and it did.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in Wicked (2024).Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Kouguell: Let’s talk about the Ozdust ballroom scene.
Kerstein: This is the centerpiece of Wicked and if that didn’t build up the emotion – between Glinda and Elphaba – the loneliness, bullying, and trying to find power and struggling with how Elphaba’s going to someday connect to somebody else in the world, the rest of the movie wouldn’t work.
We had to be really bold in how we picked performances and how we constructed that sequence. Jon shot 9-10 long takes with Cynthia Erivo in the Ozdust ballroom all the way to the end of that scene. Every one of those takes made me cry when I watched the dailies. I had to find that same emotion when I was cutting that sequence and build it out. It had to feel earned otherwise you weren’t going to root for these characters.
Kouguell: Were you editing both parts 1 and 2 at the same time? How did this process work?
Kerstein: For a bit, I was editing both parts at once. They were shooting both films at the same time, it was like block shooting like television. So one day I would get scenes from film one and the next day it would be scenes from film two. At some point, I brought in another editor Tatiana S. Reigel who cut I, Tonya to help me sort through stuff for the second movie. Tatiana is amazing.
Kouguell: Yes she is! I interviewed her several years ago for this publication.
Kerstein: What I love about the two Wicked films, it gives us time to spend with these characters and feel the nuances of how people go through the world together. You can’t have it all happen in one movie; any pace or rhythm would have felt cheapened. I just think that you can’t have that if you stuffed it all into one movie; it would feel like one big musical montage.
Kouguell: I’m really looking forward to seeing the second Wicked film. One year is a long wait!
Kerstein: It’s the longest intermission in the world. It will be worth waiting for.
![[L-R] Ethan Herisse stars as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS (2024).](https://scriptmag.com/.image/t_share/MjExMjc3ODAxMTc1NjU2MTI1/nb_fp_479_rgb-600.jpg)
![[L-R] Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked (2024).](https://scriptmag.com/.image/t_share/MjEwOTk5Njc4Njg5MzU1MzEx/wicked-universal.jpg)
![[L-R] Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked (2024).](https://scriptmag.com/.image/ar_16:9%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cg_faces:center%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_640/MjEwOTc4Mzg3NDYyNzI3NjU3/241110-wicked-movie-doll-wm-417p-f678f6.jpg)
![[L-R] Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked (2024).](https://scriptmag.com/.image/t_share/MjEwOTc4NDA0Mzc0MTYxMzg1/241110-wicked-movie-600.jpg)
