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Category: SCRIPT MAGAZINE ARTICLES (page 1 of 13)

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

January 16, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

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

January 14, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

Susan’s Interview with ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Award-Winning Writer and Director Mohammad Rasoulof

January 13, 2025 / sucity / Comments Off

For SCRIPT MAGAZINE

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.

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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.

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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

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 that Jon 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.

Wicked is out now exclusively in Theaters.

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Susan Kouguell Interviews WICKED Editor Myron Kerstein

December 3, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

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.

Kouguell: You’ve edited several movie musicals, including In the Heights and tick tick…BOOM!. (I interviewed screenwriter Steven Levenson for this publication).

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. I always 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.

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.

Wicked is now out exclusively in Theaters.

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Academy Award Winner Steve McQueen Talks about His New Film BLITZ

December 3, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

In this wide-ranging discussion Steve McQueen delves into his writing process and inspirations, his current installation work, and how they inform Blitz.

Susan Kouguell – Script Magazine Nov 25, 2024

Blitz follows the epic journey of George (Elliott Heffernan), a nine-year-old boy in World War II London whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to his mom and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in East London, embarks on an adventure, only to find himself in immense peril, while a distraught Rita searches for her missing son.

Last year I had the pleasure to interview Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter about their documentary Occupied City for this publication. McQueen’s work stretches across various mediums, including narrative features, documentaries, visual and video art. In our wide-ranging discussion we delved into his writing process and inspirations, his current installation work, and how they inform Blitz.

[L-R] Elliott Heffernan as George and Saoirse Ronan as Rita in Blitz (2024).Courtesy of Apple

Kouguell: In Occupied City you examine the ramifications of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and in Blitz , you explore the German Blitzkrieg of London. How did each of these films feed into the other if at all? Was the release timing of the two films intentional?

McQueen: The release time is not necessarily intentional but what I think linked them is childhood. My children were born and went to school in Amsterdam. Living in Amsterdam, I felt I was living with ghosts (from WWII). My son went to a former Jewish school and my daughter went to a school that was an SS interrogation center in the past. It was really kind of interesting in that sense of these sorts of beginnings and these sorts of narratives at the same time, and what was going on in these lived spaces.

In London, with the character of George, I was concerned with the German Bombers and his location, how he was going to be evacuated, and the danger he would be in there just by being a Black child.

Kouguell: You were inspired by a photograph of a Black child in an oversized coat, bulky suitcase in hand, standing alone in a train station.

McQueen: That was a starting point. I was a war artist in Iraq in 2003 and that was a trigger of wanting to make a movie about the war. Being a civilian in war is obviously confronting. How we experience war in general is through the media, which is obviously very abstract and I wanted to bring war home to make it more real. We’re numb to it and somehow I thought the 1940s Blitz would be a way in.

Kouguell: Blitz is your first solo feature writing credit. You worked with author and historian Joshua Levine, who wrote The Secret History of the Blitz to ensure historical accuracy.

Steve McQueen on the set of Blitz (2024).Courtesy of Apple

McQueen: I actually wrote the script before I met Joshua or read his book. I was doing my own research. I wish I was using his book at the time. It wasn’t a case of him telling me stuff, it was a case of researching and then refining that. It was very interesting because I would go back and check certain things and then he would add certain things, and so forth.

Kouguell: Tell me about your writing process.

McQueen: I’m dyslexic so I use a Dictaphone. I would work with my assistant and we would start for two hours and take a break and go back for two hours, and then I would do some work on my own and then dictate to her. It was great. It was exciting. It’s about sound, as well as everything else. I was able to hear it back. For me, it’s very oral.

Kouguell: You describe Blitz as a Brothers Grimm-type fairy tale. We’re seeing the world through George’s eyes and through his gaze.

McQueen: It’s more to do with how fairy tales are told to children. No holds barred. Children were not seen as idiots but as small adults. How the Brothers Grimm went about it in some ways was kind of very dark. There was a tale. I felt that it was extraordinary how they didn’t pull any punches with children. A lot of Blitz is done at night. There’s a dream quality to it. I just love that suspended reality.

Kouguell: You co-wrote the song Winter Coat with Nicholas Britell for the film. How did that come about?

McQueen: My father, when he died, I got left his winter coat. I love the idea when Saoirse’s character is singing this song in front of the women in the munitions factory. These women are maybe missing an uncle or a father or brother or a loved one. Everybody has an idea and understanding of it because putting on a coat is like an embrace, its arms wrapping around you and keeping you warm from the coldness. The coat is a keepsake, it suggests an absence but it’s also about a presence.

Kouguell: Your current gallery show at Dia Chelsea, includes a powerful video installation entitled Sunshine State, in which you narrate a story of racially motivated violence told by your father against images of the actor Al Jolson in blackface in the film The Jazz Singer, the first talkie. Let’s talk about the influence of experimental films, such as Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1926), in Blitz.

McQueen: With the First World War and this new technology of film, people were grappling with the huge effects of the War. I think that a lot of the avant-garde or the Dadaists and Surrealists came out of that because the war was so beyond horrific. These Dadaists and Surrealists were playing with the newest technologies in film and that was exciting for me.

Seeing this Man Ray film, I thought it could be interesting to take out these pieces from this film because the two images I have in the beginning of Blitz are the X-ray images of salt crystals, the bed of the sea and then we cut to some daisies.

The daisies appear three times in Blitz. It is the sort of nostalgic idea of how things should be, and how things could be. There was that symbol of maybe hope in the end or the possibility of hope. I mean that’s all we got, isn’t it?

Blitz is in select theaters and on Apple TV+ .

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Susan Kouguell Interviews ‘Leap of Faith’ Director Nicholas Ma for Script Magazine

November 11, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

Filmmaker Nicholas Ma discusses the process behind making the documentary, from his collaboration with Morgan Neville, the writing process in editing, and discovering the through-line to tackling tough subjects with the pastors, and more.

Susan Kouguell for Script Magazine

I had the pleasure to speak with award-winning director Nicholas Ma about his new documentary Leap of Faith . This poignant film follows 12 diverse Christian pastors in Grand Rapids, Michigan of varying theological, racial and political identities and ideologies. Brought together by Michael Gulker of The Colossian Forum, the pastors struggle with some of today’s most contentious issues. The divisions between them become apparent and test both their common belief in the universal importance of love and kindness and the bonds they build over the course of a year.

Nicholas Ma is an award-winning director, writer and producer based in Brooklyn. Ma produced the WNBA documentary Unfinished Business (directed by Alison Klayman), which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. His feature directorial debut, Mabel (San Francisco International Film Festival, 2024), which he co-wrote with Joy Goodwin, was awarded the Sloan Prize.

Nicholas has been a DOC NYC fellow and Film Independent Fellow.

Director Nicholas Ma and film participants.Photo by Moguel Photography/ Courtesy Picturehouse

Kouguell: Leap of Faith is about faith but it’s universal. It’s not about one particular religion. The seed of this project started with the 2020, Wall Street Journal written by Janet Adamy, which introduced you and Morgan Neville to the Reverend Michael Gulker, a Mennonite minister based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Ma: Something you just said struck me. The film is about faith but it’s universal and I completely agree. Morgan Neville and I made a film together Won’t You Be My Neighbor? about Fred Rogers and that movie was universal but also about faith. I think there’s a way we think of faith as something that narrows us and says we’re part of a smaller group, as opposed to something that broadens us.

That’s what was so interesting about the WSJ article, Michael Gulker was saying we all have specific opinions that sometimes contradict each other but what if there was a way of that being true and also our being in community together. There was this interaction between faith and universality, which I think is countercultural in the humanist community and the faith community.

Kouguell: Talk about your collaboration with Morgan Neville in this film.

Ma: Morgan is one of those filmmakers who has a capacious understanding of the form of documentary, he’s like working with a master chef. He’s a wonderful mentor. Morgan was so helpful with his farsightedness to bring everything to life, such as the direct-to-camera conversations that have a special continuity to them. Instead of being prescriptive, he would offer suggestions, such as ‘Here’s what I think you’re trying to do and here’s how we can make it better’.

It was a curious process for him too. He’s such a prolific director and it’s been a long time since he’s worked in this vérité space and it was energizing for him too.

Kouguell: Did you work from a script?

Ma: Tamara Maloney is my editor; she’s such a brilliant human, editor and writer and I’m so grateful for her. There is almost a suspicion: what does it mean to write for a documentary? There is no narration in this film. If you’re trying to reveal the truth, to distill the truth of something that occurs over more than a year into 90 minutes, there’s a part of that that immediately requires a kind of writing, and with this film, even more so.

Nicholas Ma, Producer, Writer, and Director of LEAP OF FAITH (2024).Courtesy Picturehouse

Often in documentaries you can find specific moments, for example: let’s take a two-minute chunk out of this scene and that’s really it. Whereas here, it was actually about distilling a conversation that happened over a course of 90 minutes into a scene that is three minutes long. That requires looking at each conversation, and asking, how are we layering this to find the through-line into three minutes, and then do that repeatedly with each conversation.

We had to work so much from the transcript in order to see what is the broader argument made here and how do we do justice to that broader argument into something that doesn’t feel like shorthand, which I think is gesturing at an argument that you already know or feels fragmentary. Figuring that out was really challenging.

What we discovered was if you’re going to do something that has such complicated and contentious ideas at its core, you have to do justice to that argument but you also have to give enough space on either side of it in order to digest it. That was a huge part of the writing process as well.

Kouguell: That space was indeed there to give the viewer time to consider and digest. It was also evident that you did not have an agenda as filmmakers. In the film, you tackle tough subjects, including sexuality, gay marriage, policing, and racism. I imagine some of the pastors might have been reluctant to share their thoughts for fear of consequences from their parishioners. There’s a lot at stake here. Talk about building trust with the pastors.

Ma: The pastors all knew how to not say something if they didn’t want to. They’re very practiced at it. The leap of faith for them at that moment was to choose to say something they didn’t know how to say. How do you say that thing that you don’t know how to say?

I think what allowed us to really be vulnerable was having a shared question. The question wasn’t, ‘How are we going to resolve our differences about sexuality’, the question was, to put it into universal terms, ‘Can we all belong to each other or are some differences too great?’ What made it possible is that it’s possible for either answer to be true. It’s not like I needed the answer to be one way or they needed the answer to be another way. It was an exploration. It allowed us to say, there can’t be an agenda here because we don’t know the answer. It’s up to us to choose what the answer is.

That’s also what led to all the surprises in the film. Everyone was making these decisions as they went along, ‘Do I belong to you, do I want to try?’ You see that kind of fumbling that we’re so afraid of in this world. We feel like we have to get the right words, the right engagement or it’s better not to do it all. They definitely said we need to be careful but also, what does that mean and what are the consequences of doing that. It doesn’t always look pretty.

[L-R] Pastor Line Exercise; Artie Lindsay, Dr. James Stokes, Joan VanDessel, Ashlee Eiland, Tierra Marshall, Ben Kampmeier, Kim DeLong, Chase Stancle, Troy Hatfield, Andrew Vanover, Molly Bosscher and Cornelius Ting, LEAP OF FAITH (2024).

Courtesy Picturehouse

Kouguell: The line exercise the pastors do requires them to respond to questions only by stepping forward or backward, is a critical dramatic moment in the film.

Ma: Yes. They have to walk towards or back to each other. The movement is physically happening and the question is, can it happen less literally too.

Kouguell: Your father, the world-renowned cellist, Yo-Yo Ma has performed at various events in support of this film, as well as appearing with you and Morgan on many broadcast interviews. How is it to be working together in this way?

Ma: We share a common yearning, a belief that we want the world to feel more whole and want to be part of that. I think the film brought us closer. He’s a spirit animal for our project.

I think about the experience of sitting in a concert hall, listening to him play and you look around and see people who have been emotionally moved, and you also know that you don’t know who any of them are, and none of them know who you are, and you may believe all sorts of different things but you have been moved by the same experience. It’s what I hope for with a movie like this. It’s going to challenge you more than a piece of music because you do hear opinions and see people act in ways you do or don’t agree with, but my hope is that at the end of it, you watch it with someone you don’t know and you look around and ask what could that mean as possible?

Leap of Faith is now out in selected theaters across the country.

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Examining Relationships in ‘Hard Truths,’ ’Việt and Nam’ and ‘Happyend’ at the 2024 New York Film Festival

October 16, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

At the New York Film Festival, ‘Hard Truths,’ ‘Việt and Nam’ and ‘Happyend’ are strikingly different from each other in tone and execution yet they do share a commonality – their examinations of relationships are striking and thought-provoking.

Susan Kouguell Senior Contributing Editor Script Magazine

At the New York Film Festival, Hard Truths, Việt and Nam and Happyend are strikingly different from each other in tone and execution yet they do share a commonality – their examinations of relationships are striking and thought-provoking. Moreover, these relationships are familial: Hard Truths (which centers on the family’s dynamics with the protagonist in constant crisis); Việt and Nam (a secret couple and mother in search of the father) and Happyend (two teens and their friend group form alliances, forming their own type of family unit).

Hard Truths

Written and directed by Mike Leigh, Hard Truths is a compelling drama set in contemporary London. Leigh’s protagonist Pansy, (Marianne-Jean Baptsite) is relentless in her venomous anger and rages towards her husband, young adult son, her polar opposite sister, and anyone else who crosses her path. Pansy’s pain is palpable and Leigh and Baptiste have created a character who is unsympathetic and ironically and successfully empathetic.

Not unlike some of Leigh’s past films, Leigh began this project without a script and built the story and characters through months of rehearsals with the actors. This character study shifts between the various family members and the psychological repercussions of Pansy’s actions. The plot is unpredictable and there are no neat and tidy resolutions, thus resulting in a powerful and satisfying film with notable performances.

Việt and Nam

Banned in its home country of Vietnam, Việt and Nam, written and directed by Trương Minh Quý, is a poignant drama that confronts the legacy of the country’s war decades earlier. Set in the early 2000s, coal miners Viet and Nam are secret gay lovers, living in the shadows where past horrors hover in the present. Television news broadcast stories of the missing and the family members searching for information to help locate them, set up the pilgrimage Nam, his mother, Viet, and a family friend embark on to find the site of where Nam’s father was killed as a soldier.

As coal miners, the lovers’ job is digging into the earth; the metaphor of excavation and the unearthing of a horrific past is seen in contrasts of the lush landscapes and the dark caverns where a sense of timelessness unfolds. The film’s slow pace may not be for everyone, but it is effective and allows the characters time and space to explore their relationships and their generational trauma.

In the post-screening talk, Trương stated that he began the script in 2019 and how the casting process further enhanced the script: “I searched for people who have a real story that somehow matches the character’s story. I can then develop the character from their real stories. Like the character who is a veteran, he’s a real veteran and his confession at the end is based on his real story.”

Happyend

Set in the near future of Tokyo, Happyend written and directed by Neo Sora, is a layered coming-of-age drama about the rise of political consciousness in a group of teens.

Neo Sora’s portrayal of these high school friends is relatable as it encompasses humorous events (students’ pranks) with an overshadowing sense of fragility as the ever present threats of earthquakes and an oppressive and invasive educational and political climate escalate. The unstable ground shifts as does the relationship between the two protagonists, childhood best friends, when they choose divergent paths.

In the post-screening discussion, Sora stated that it took seven years to write the script, and although this film was not autobiographical, his own life experiences were influential and inspired this work that he described as the rise of political consciousness.

‘Blitz,’ ‘The Room Next Door,’ and ‘Suburban Fury’ at the 2024 New York Film Festival

October 16, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off

These three films highlight three directors with varied voices and approaches to storytelling.

Susan Kouguell Senior Contributing Editor Script Magazine

Blitz, the closing night film of the New York Film Festival directed by British director Steve McQueen and two of the Main Slate films The Room Next Door directed by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar and the documentary Suburban Fury directed by American filmmaker Robinson Devor, highlight three directors with varied voices and approaches to storytelling.

Blitz

Written and directed by Steve McQueen, Blitz centers on the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old bi-racial son, George (Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the maze of a city under siege of 1940s WWII London.

George’s odyssey to reunite with his mother is Dicksonian in a quest for survival. The amount of time (several days?) in which the plot unfolds is briefly referenced but it doesn’t quite seem accurate; perhaps it’s an intentional choice to reflect the blur and almost unbelievable events that unfold. The tone and images, and the thematic determination of a young male protagonist seen from his POV was somewhat reminiscent of Europa Europa directed by Agneszkia Holland whom I also interviewed for this publication. Both films chronicle racism and identity in WWII, and challenge the viewer to enter their respective worlds with a distinct vision.

McQueen’s previous film, Occupied City , a documentary with Bianca Stigter (both of whom I interviewed for this publication) also portrayed a capital city, in this case, Amsterdam, under siege by the Nazis. In interviews, McQueen explained that it was somewhat accidental that these two films were released back-to-back.

In press conferences, McQueen noted that “it was important to me that the movie be an epic. The reason it was important is because of scale. Seeing the Second World War through the eyes of a prepubescent child was important to give us a refocusing of where and who we are now. It is echoed in wars going on now…and with the recent race riots in the UK, the film has so much relevance to what’s going on now, even though it’s set in the 1940s.”

It’s interesting to note that currently on exhibit and running through the summer of 2025 at the Chelsea Dia gallery in New York City, McQueen is the featured artist. His piece Sunshine State (2022), a two-channel, dual-sided video projection is described as a story about McQueen’s father to examine notions of identity and racial stereotypes. This work, along with another video piece and his photographs, underscores McQueen’s range as a visual artist and filmmaker who consistently pushes boundaries of storytelling.

Blitz opens in theaters on November 1 ahead of its streaming debut on Apple TV+ on November 22.

The Room Next Door

Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed the film, his first English-language feature, which is loosely adapted from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. The film centers on Ingrid (Julianne Moore) a best-selling writer and Martha (Tilda Swinton) a war journalist; their friendship is rekindled and tested when Martha makes a life-altering request to Ingrid.

At the press conference, Almodóvar stated that the book was unadaptable because of the many details, but was interested in one chapter in particular: “When Julianne’s character goes to the hospital to see her friend. I was interested in the two women reuniting, and their need to talk.” He added that he set out to develop these two women from “a generation that I love; the mid-1980s.” When discussing the inclusion of Damian (John Turturro) in the script he explained that he used his character to voice Nunez’s environmental concerns “and how dangerous neoliberalism is linked with the far right. It was important to give that message in a country that will have an election soon.”

The Room Next Door opens theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on December 20, 2024, followed by a limited release in select US cities on Christmas Day, and a January 2025 wide US release.

Suburban Fury

In 1975, Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in San Francisco and served 30 years in prison. Moore, the only person interviewed for this film, is the unapologetic subject of Suburban Fury a documentary by Robinson Devor, Moore tells her own story: from housewife (several husbands) and mother (several children), to FBI informant to would-be assassin, all of which are set against the backdrop of the era’s political unrest and militancy, including the Black Panthers, and Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

At the press conference, Devor and his team discussed uncovering relatively unseen archival footage, the choice to avoid familiar music soundtracks of the era, and filming Moore (over the course of 11 days) in unconventional locations such as a 1970s-era Suburban station wagon. Although the assassination attempt occurred almost 50 years ago, the film is timely.

The inclusion of numbers integrated between various sequences of scenes was an interesting device but the intention was unclear and didn’t have a clear payoff. Moore is the definition of an unreliable narrator of her personal story and her involvement in historical events, leaving the viewer to decide what is fact and what is fiction.

Su-City Pictures East, LLC

Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell

Category: SCRIPT MAGAZINE ARTICLES (page 1 of 13)

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 ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Award-Winning Writer and Director Mohammad Rasoulof

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

Susan Kouguell Interviews WICKED Editor Myron Kerstein

Academy Award Winner Steve McQueen Talks about His New Film BLITZ

Susan Kouguell Interviews ‘Leap of Faith’ Director Nicholas Ma for Script Magazine

Examining Relationships in ‘Hard Truths,’ ’Việt and Nam’ and ‘Happyend’ at the 2024 New York Film Festival

‘Blitz,’ ‘The Room Next Door,’ and ‘Suburban Fury’ at the 2024 New York Film Festival

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Category: SCRIPT MAGAZINE ARTICLES (page 1 of 13)

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