INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS & FILMMAKERS Archives

Interview with ‘Wicked’ and ‘Wicked: For Good’ Co-Writer and Executive Producer Dana Fox

December 8, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

In this wide-ranging interview, Dana Fox discusses collaboration, the challenges and joys of adapting from source material, and creating emotional authenticity and thematic depth.

By Susan Kouguell for Script Magazine

It was a great pleasure to speak with Dana Fox about the global box office phenomenons Wicked and Wicked: For Good. In our wide-ranging interview we discussed collaboration, the challenges and joys of adapting from source material, and creating emotional authenticity and thematic depth.

Acclaimed writer, producer, and showrunner Dana Fox was nominated for a Critics Choice Award® and a WGA® nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay along with Winnie Holzman. Fox’s feature work includes co-writing The Lost City, Disney’s Cruella, How to Be Single, Couples Retreat and What Happens in Vegas. In television, Fox is an executive producer for the new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie, and she was the co-creator, showrunner, and executive producer of Apple TV+’s Home Before Dark.

Wicked: For Good (2025). Courtesy Universal Pictures

Kouguell: Last year, in two separate interviews, I spoke with writer Winnie Holzman and editor Myron Kerstein about their work on Wicked for this publication. They were an absolute treat.

Fox: Winnie and Myron are two of the best. Myron is one of my old dear friends; we have done a few things together. He is so brilliant. I have learned more about writing from watching him edit. He follows emotion stronger than anything else and how those pieces can be used to tell an emotional story.

Winnie is so smart and wonderful. We’re very complementary to each other. I have a very structured brain; I think in movie trailers, film poster form, and then movie form. My brain is always thinking, what are going to be the big trailer moments, [laughs] which is a very strange thing to do. And Winnie loves to dig deep into characters. I’m always thinking about structure because I think of structure as character; structure is a character’s journey, and it’s where that person is along their journey. And are we hitting those moments in the places that the audience wants to experience that feeling? Also, Winnie is just so beautiful at themes. She’s so careful with words and understands the power of an individual word.

Kouguell: How did you come onto the project?

Fox: I was brought on by Jon M. Chu because he and I had worked together before and we really enjoyed the process. I had said to him, ‘I will do anything for you from now until the end of time’. He is constantly striving for excellence. He’s very collaborative, but he really knows what he wants, and I respect and love that. And so he called me and said he had another project and this one was Wicked. My secret was that I had never seen Wicked in the theatre. It was the middle of the pandemic, so Broadway was closed, so I couldn’t rush out and see it.

Winnie and Stephen [Schwartz] were generous enough to give me the script of the play, which I read probably 25 times while listening to the music. Jon said we’re gonna be working with Winnie and Stephen to break the stories for both movies, and then you and Winnie are writing them. It was a dream come true.

I had been a fan of Winnie’s for my whole life because I was obsessed with My So-Called Life. I dressed like Claire Danes for all of high school because I thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world. So to get a chance to work with a writer whom I love and respect so much and then to even be in the room with Stephen Schwartz who’s an absolute legend, was incredible.

Kouguell: Tell me about your collaborative process.

Fox: I couldn’t believe my luck to be with Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, talking about one of the most famous plays of our time, along with Jon M Chu. Winnie, Stephen, Jon and I basically sat on Zooms for about 150 hours before we ever even started writing. That was the period where we interrogated the plays.

Kouguell: What were some of the challenges you faced adapting the source material to the screen?

Fox: We knew that we had this source material that was so beloved and that we had to be very careful with how we adapted it, and yet we knew that everything had to be different to give it a reason for existing. The questions were: how do you make it different? How do you add the things that are not gratuitous but deepens the core DNA of this that people love so much.

We also talked about what are the inherent problems in splitting it up as two movies, and how do we approach it.

It was a very delicate dance we were doing with the source material of both the play and The Wizard of Oz film as well. We wanted to be so careful because that movie was all of our favorite movie. We knew we couldn’t hurt anyone’s memory of the Wizard of Oz either.

Kouguell: In Wicked: For Good there was a nod to the original movie. For example, seeing Dorothy’s dress from a distance I thought that was such a smart choice.

Fox: It was very controversial, apparently. People thought that was a wild choice, but to me, it was the point of the project; which was, isn’t it funny and wonderful that the story that you’ve known your whole life, you’re now realizing that every main character has their own story. And so to me, you have to not show her. You have to have her be on the sidelines otherwise you’re violating the principle of what the brilliant idea of Gregory Maguire was in making this project: The story you thought you knew isn’t necessarily exactly what you thought it was.

Kouguell: And then everyone can impose their own story onto those characters.

Fox: Exactly. And we really wanted people to feel like they could engage with the movies and that the movies were theirs even though it was a very rare experience to be able to make two movies at the same time.

Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration process with Winnie.

Fox: Winnie and I sort of invented our own version of collaboration, and we changed it throughout the process based on what the movie needed from us at any given moment. We broke both stories at the same time. We did focus on the first one first, and then we moved into the second one. But that only existed on cards, sort of like index cards but on Zoom like computer index cards that gave us the broad strokes of what each movie was going to be.

It was interesting because once we finished carding the second movie, there were a lot of moments where we thought actually, we got to go pop back into movie one and tweak this because we’re setting up that. It was the most amazing gift and puzzle.

Once we had the cards, then we outlined the first movie together, and we started writing the first movie. And, basically, Winnie and I did any version of collaboration that made sense to us.

Either she was writing a scene and I was writing a scene, and then we put them together, interweaving the scenes. Or she would do a chunk and I would do a chunk. We would swap chunks, rewrite each other’s chunks, and then stick them together.

When the first movie was done, Winnie started doing notes for Jon and the producers and that group, and they kept working on movie one. I pivoted over and did the outline for movie two and then started beating out a blueprint version of movie two so that as soon as Winnie was done with those notes, she could come over into movie two. The collaboration just kept evolving with wherever we were in the process.

It was also really fun because I was on the East Coast, and Winnie was on the West Coast. She is a night owl and I’m a morning person. So weirdly, there was a lot of passing back and forth where, somehow we got twenty hours out of every day because of the fact that we were in different time zones. So there was always an elf working on the movies at all times.

Kouguell: The two films felt that each could exist on its own.

Fox: That was a big thing we were trying to do. You have to be able to see them if you’ve never seen the play and still like them. You have to be able to see them if you’ve never seen the Wizard of Oz and still like them. That was the hardest thing to solve for movie two, which is – can you enjoy movie two without ever having seen either the play or movie one?

We were also dealing with the audience’s expectations that came from having watched the first movie. And the tone of the two movies is very different. It’s almost like asking the audience to go from Harry Potter 1 to Harry Potter 5 within just a year.

Kouguell: You mentioned that the tonal shift in Wicked: For Good was a deliberate choice.

Fox: What was so interesting about exploring this particular movie was that Glinda makes bad choices. She doesn’t stand up for what’s right when she should. I really wanted to make her more complicit in that. I didn’t want it to just be like, oops I’m Glenda I forgot to do the right thing because I was focused on doing my makeup over here. I wanted to be like, no, you had chances to do the right thing.

Part of that complicity to me makes it more OK that Elphaba and Fiyero run off together because you chose this. And your choices made you a person that has to live with that, and face it, and you could have stopped it, and you didn’t.

Kouguell: Indeed. Yes, complicity and silence.

Fox: I have studied the time period at the beginning of World War II. I’m so interested in the psychology of when did people know, what did they know, what choices did they make, and how did they rationalize those choices to themselves to not do anything.

Kouguell: Glinda’s complicity and moral struggles can be viewed in a broader historical context and parallels to the past and present.

Fox: That’s why the tone had to be what it was. We did not know that this was the moment we were going to be in when we were writing this movie. We wrote it five years ago so this isn’t about what’s happening right now. This isn’t about a specific person, of course, because it couldn’t be. But what I find upsetting about it is that the reason this feels so timely is because persecution of people by other people who want power is timeless.

It happens over and over again. When Gregory Maguire was writing the book, there was a version of it that was happening. When Winnie and Stephen were writing the play, it was in the shadow of 9/11, and a certain group of people were being persecuted because of fear.

I felt strongly that I wanted to see Glinda’s complicity more because that’s a big part of the emotional arc of her actually changing at the end. Winnie and I talk about this all the time. We want people to interpret it however they want to interpret it. And Winnie and I even have slightly different views of why the Grimmerie opens.

In my opinion, the Grimmerie opens up to her because when Elphaba hands it to her, she says, you know I can’t read that thing. It’s the most painful thing she could admit and it’s so dark for her because it showed her childhood. What Glinda wants is to be magical, and she is not. And so for her to admit her core wound in front of her best friend, that to me is why she earns the Grimmerie opening to her. The Grimmerie isn’t saying, now you’re magic. It is saying, now you get to start the work; this is just the beginning of the work. I love that message because it’s saying we can still do the right thing; it’s never too late to do the right thing. Glinda does it so late and yet it does make a difference.

Wicked: For Good is now in Theaters.

Susan Kouguell interviews Frédéric Hambalek about his new feature film ‘What Marielle Knows’ at Tribeca Festival

July 23, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

For Script Magazine

About What Marielle Knows: When titular character Marielle, 11, inexplicably gains the ability to see and hear everything her parents do, the illusion of the perfect family shatters.

I had the pleasure of speaking with writer and director Frédéric Hambalek during the Tribeca Festival about his sophomore feature, What Marielle Knows. In our wide-ranging discussion, Hambalek spoke about his writing process, genre, and family privacy.

Kouguell: This is such a thought-provoking film. How did the story evolve?

Hambalek: I had this idea about 10-15 years ago, when I saw a baby monitor with a built-in camera. The image of someone watching a sleeping child felt strange and wrong. I thought a lot about privacy in a family. I asked myself: ‘What would parents do if they were monitored by their kids?’ I thought about how parents relate to their children and vice versa, and the power structures that exist and shift within a family.

The second aspect of this is how kids see their parents. A young child sees their parents as almost gods who know everything and can do anything. But then they start growing up and realize that these gods, their parents, make mistakes.

Kouguell: Tell me about your writing process and how as the writer/director one might influence or inform the other.

Hambalek: I started out at 18, I made films you make with your friends, and at some point, I realized you need a good script to make a good film. The process I follow: after expanding on notes of an idea, I work with index cards and see if I can get scenes out of that and have that before me and see that film in front of my eyes. Then I write the treatment, to see the structure, and finally I write the script. There are many rewrites that follow.

Kouguell: How much story and/or dialogue input do you allow the actors?

Hambalek: Not with the story, but I definitely allow them a different take on the dialogue. They rarely do some improvisation.

Kouguell: Marielle’s sudden telepathic powers force her parents to tell the truth about their lives. There is no privacy. You created a compelling triangulation between Marielle and her parents with shifting alliances.

Hambalek: That is what the film is about: how does surveillance change your behavior, and as you said, how would feelings change for each other, how would those feelings play this double-edged game. That’s always the center of it.

Kouguell: Let’s talk about the genre. It’s a drama with comedic moments. It’s edgy. Sometimes there’s a wink to the audience, such as with the incorporation of music. How do you see it?

Hambalek: I never really think about genre. This film has a supernatural edge, but I didn’t want it to have horror elements. I wanted to create a feeling in this film so the audience doesn’t know how to take it. I like when a situation or a scene can be many things at once.

Kouguell: Yes, and that’s very effective. Without giving away too much, the film allows the audience to impose their own ending.

Hambalek: I would love people to see the film with an open mind and take away what they want; that will be great.

Susan’s Interview with “Villa Encanto” Writer and Director Joel Perez for Script Magazine

June 23, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

Susan Kouguell interviews Joel Perez, recipient of the COLECTIVO, a new filmmaker program through Tribeca Studios and the Miranda Family Fund, about his short film Villa Encanto at Tribeca Festival.

Susan Kouguell

Villa Encanto is a story about grief and belonging told through the eyes of a young girl navigating her rapidly changing world in 1960s New York. When her life is uprooted after her mother’s death, she’s brought to a Puerto Rican summer resort in upstate New York and rediscovers joy, identity, and community through music.

—Joel Perez

In 2020, co-writer Sol Marina Crespo sent Joel Perez an article about Las Villas and they decided to write a story in that setting. A draft of the then TV pilot was read aloud with actors in Los Angeles in the summer of 2021. When Joel was contacted about submitting a project to COLECTIVO, a new filmmaker program through Tribeca Studios and the Miranda Family Fund, Joel and Sol adapted Villa Encanto into a short film script and it was accepted into the program. It went into several months of script development with Tribeca Studios and the Miranda Family Fund teams.

COLECTIVO selects a cohort of three emerging filmmaking teams to receive funding, mentorship, and the opportunity to world premiere an original short film at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. With guidance and training from Tribeca Studios and the creative team of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Luis A. Miranda, Jr., and their extended network, each participating filmmaker produces an original short-scripted film, highlighting Latinx stories and/or talent in front of and behind the camera.

It was an absolute pleasure to speak with Joel Perez about his short film, the musical drama Villa Encanto. Full disclosure: Joel was my screenwriting student in the Tufts University Drama and Dance Department years ago. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch, and it’s been an incredible joy to see his career soar.

Kouguell: With your extensive musical background as a singer and actor on Broadway, films, and television how did that inform your directing?

Perez: As an actor I know the kind of set I like to be on, and the direction I like to get, so I don’t want a toxic workplace and try to let everyone shine.

I’m always thinking about music, whether I’m on set or in the edit room. When we wrote the script, I didn’t expect to think I was making a musical.

Kouguell: You also wrote the lyrics to the songs.

Perez: We were going to use pop songs from the era but that was too expensive. It was a blessing in disguise. I collaborated with composer Jaime Lozano to write original music and make them our own; it was reflective in the story.

Kouguell: Tell me about your writing process with Sol Marina Crespo.

Perez: Sol, who also plays the owner of the club, sent me this article in 2021 about Las Villas— summer resorts built by and for Puerto Rican families in upstate New York. As a Puerto Rican, I’m always looking for stories about Puerto Ricans and I didn’t know this place existed.

We wrote this originally as a pilot for a TV show, we did a reading, but we never got the green light. When I had the opportunity with COLECTIVO, we reimagined it as a short. We trimmed some characters and focused on the father and daughter story. We had a couple of months of script development with Tribeca and the Miranda Foundation, and it changed quite a bit. In production we had to think about how to stay within budget.

Kouguell: The father/daughter story is very powerful, relatable, and is successfully executed without melodrama.

Perez: On set it was a subtle turn with the character of Teresa to show she is not a petulant child; she is seeing her father for the first time as a broken person who’s hurting too. It’s a fine line not to dip into melodrama and not spoon-feed the audience, and that came from the edit. It was the first time I worked with our editor Cecilia Delgado who was the editor of Boca Chica.

She loved the music and resonated with the father and daughter dynamic.

Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration with producer Helana Sardinha.

Perez: Helana was a producer on the Disney Launch Pad short; that’s how we met, and she was incredible. She ran such a great set. We then worked on my short The Upper Room, and then applying for this program we had to apply with a producer. Many of the team from The Upper Room, the DP, first AD, department heads, and PAs, came back to work on Villa Encanto.

Kouguell: You shot this period film in four days on location. That’s quite a feat!

Perez: We had a lot of meetings with our production and costume designers, hair and makeup, did many mood boards and location scouting. The COLECTIVO program was hands-on; they gave us notes, we shared rough cuts of the film, and it was great. This film was done on a low-end budget.

Kouguell: On another creative note, you play Overlord Valentino in the animated series Hazbin Hotel.

Perez: I always wanted to voice a character in an animated series. After 10 years of wanting to break in, it happened.

Kouguell: As always, it’s wonderful to catch up and I’m excited to see where your artistic journey takes you next.

To learn more about Joel Perez visit his site.

Susan’s Interview with ON A STRING writer, director, producer, and star Isabel Hagen at Tribeca Festival

June 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

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.

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.

Susan’s Interview with GOVERNMENT CHEESE Filmmaker Paul Hunter for Script Magazine

May 6, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

Watch the trailer here.

Susan’s Script Magazine Interview with MEANWHILE Documentary Director Catherine Gund

March 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

TRAILER

Meanwhile opens Friday March 14 in selected theaters. Visit their website for more information about the film and screening schedule.

Susan’s Interview with ‘A Complete Unknown’ Editors Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris

January 16, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

For Script Magazine

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.

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?

Morris: [laughs] Right.

TRAILER

Susan’s Interview with ‘The Brutalist’ Filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

January 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

Susan’s Interview with Oscar-Nominated ‘Nickel Boys’ Writer and Director RaMell Ross and Editor Nicholas Monsour

December 13, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

Susan’s Interview for Script Magazine

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 County aesthetic 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.

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.

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.

Nickel Boys, key art poster — 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.

Trailer

Susan Kouguell Interview with ‘WICKED’ Writer Winnie Holzman

December 3, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

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.

Interview with ‘Wicked’ Editor Myron Kerstein

Su-City Pictures East, LLC

Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell

Category: INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS & FILMMAKERS (page 1 of 5)

Interview with ‘Wicked’ and ‘Wicked: For Good’ Co-Writer and Executive Producer Dana Fox

In this wide-ranging interview, Dana Fox discusses collaboration, the challenges and joys of adapting from source material, and creating emotional authenticity and thematic depth.

Susan Kouguell interviews Frédéric Hambalek about his new feature film ‘What Marielle Knows’ at Tribeca Festival

Susan’s Interview with “Villa Encanto” Writer and Director Joel Perez for Script Magazine

Susan Kouguell

Susan’s Interview with ON A STRING writer, director, producer, and star Isabel Hagen at Tribeca Festival

Susan’s Interview with GOVERNMENT CHEESE Filmmaker Paul Hunter for Script Magazine

Susan’s Script Magazine Interview with MEANWHILE Documentary Director Catherine Gund

Susan’s Interview with ‘A Complete Unknown’ Editors Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris

Susan’s Interview with ‘The Brutalist’ Filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

Susan’s Interview with Oscar-Nominated ‘Nickel Boys’ Writer and Director RaMell Ross and Editor Nicholas Monsour

Susan Kouguell Interview with ‘WICKED’ Writer Winnie Holzman

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Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell

Category: INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS & FILMMAKERS (page 1 of 5)

In this wide-ranging interview, Dana Fox discusses collaboration, the challenges and joys of adapting from source material, and creating emotional authenticity and thematic depth.

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