5 days ago
15
I always get a kick out of moderating my favorite panel of the year at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where I grill a sampling of the year’s Oscar-nominated screenwriters. Three of the six nominees on the stage on Saturday, February 14, adapted their screenplays.
Clint Bentley followed up last year’s Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Sing Sing” with “Train Dreams,” which won Best Feature, Director, and Cinematography at the Spirit Awards the following day. The movie, which he wrote with his writing partner Greg Kwedar, is also nominated for Best Picture, Cinematography, Song, and Adapted Screenplay Oscars. Kwedar and Bentley, who directed, based their narrative on the novella by Denis Johnson, which spans the life of a lonely, taciturn man from 1917 Idaho to Washington in 1968.
While Will Patton provides some voiceover, Bentley credited Edgerton with carrying the movie. “Joel can say so much with his face and with his eyes,” said Bentley. “I love… taking this story of what would be seen from the outside as a little life and showing — without overly dramatizing it — the magic and the specialness and the depth of that simple life and the beauty of it.”
For “Frankenstein,” which has earned nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor, writer/director Guillermo del Toro finally took his lifelong obsession with Mary Shelley’s character and made it his own. After letting the project gestate over decades and after many false starts, he finally felt ready to tackle a movie that had long frightened him. “I wanted to make it a period movie,” he said. “I wanted to make it an opera. I wanted to make it big. And I said, ‘Fuck it. I either do it that way or I don’t fucking do it.'” In the end, Netflix‘s Ted Sarandos made it possible.
‘Frankenstein’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection“Frankenstein” tracks the arcs of two main characters, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his creation (Jacob Elordi), over the course of the movie, which is part horror fairy tale, gothic romance, and epistolary novel. Del Toro wanted to give the creature a voice, and at the end found grace for both. “It’s extremely important for me in the time we live in to show two sides of the same thing,” he said. “To open with a creature that almost destroys a ship, kills six people, and you go, ‘Oh, what a monstrous creature.’ And by the end of the movie, you know why he did it. Because we live in a world that tells us who we are, and we say, ‘Fuck it. We’re much more than that.'”
For Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” which is nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress for Emma Stone, and Score, “Succession” writer Will Tracy turned the 2003 Korean movie “Save the Green Planet!” into something American, current, timely, and funny. Tracy had never written an adaptation before when Ari Aster gave him a Vimeo link. When he finished the script, they sent it to Lanthimos, who came up with the title “Bugonia.”
Tracy changed the genders of the lead characters, among many other things, and thinks the kidnapper (Jesse Plemons) of the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Emma Stone) has legitimate grievances. “What I didn’t want to write was the movie about the kind of online, toxic incel male guy that you read about in The Atlantic or whatever. I just didn’t give a shit about that. I wanted to approach him as someone who had a pretty good argument. It was important to me that he wasn’t crazy… Even if he does monstrous things, I don’t think of him as a monstrous character.”
‘Bugonia’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett CollectionThree of the writers penned original screenplays. Ronald Bronstein co-wrote with director Josh Safdie “Marty Supreme,” which is nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture, Actor Timothée Chalamet, and Original Screenplay. Bronstein is up for three Oscars as producer, co-writer, and co-editor. He also co-wrote and co-edited the Safdie brothers’ “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), in which he starred, “Good Time” (2017), and “Uncut Gems” (2019).
Bronstein described a combative writing process. “You’re bringing personal ideas to the table, and then immediately the other person is just taking the idea and tying it to a chair and beating the living hell out of it and trying to get it to confess all of its weaknesses,” he said. “The characters we’ve created won’t submit to our preordained goals. You’re trying to capture all of the maddening complexity or chaos embedded in human communication…If there’s one organizing principle that connects all the work, we’re trying to make work that feels like it’s being written while it’s unspooling in the projector in front of the audience.”
He also swears he loves his rascally protagonist, loosely inspired by ’50s table tennis ace Marty Reisman. “I operate under the belief that if you zoom in close enough to any individual on the planet,” he said, “no matter how aberrant their behavior might be, if you can understand their position and how they arrived at that position, then you’ll find grounds for empathy. He’s the best at a thing on the planet that gets no respect. I would not wish that on my worst enemy.”
‘Marty Supreme’Courtesy Everett CollectionDirector Jafar Panahi shot Palme d’Or winner and French Oscar submission “It was Just an Accident” in secret in Iran, eluding the authorities, who have yet again sentenced him to prison. Over the past 15 years, he has been imprisoned, blindfolded, interrogated, and put under house arrest with a 20-year ban on making films. The travel ban was lifted, and he went to Cannes and has been traveling with the movie. He plans to return to Iran after the award season.
Sound was the key to figuring out how to tell the story of a group of ex-prisoners who think they recognize their former interrogator, but aren’t positive because they never saw him, he said: “Everything that I wrote in this script were the real experiences that I had, either come across myself or heard through my friends. And it was exactly what was happening in the society that I felt was necessary to go into the script of this film.”
“Sentimental Value,” which traces generational trauma within a show business family and won the Grand Prix at Cannes and six European Film Awards, is up nine Oscars including Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay. This marks Norwegian writer Eskil Vogt’s sixth script with director Joachim Trier, following their Oscar-nominated “The Worst Person in the World.”
Collaborators since their college days, Vogt and Trier take their time to develop each story. Once they finish mapping it out, Vogt sits down and types out the script in one go. They started with a story of how two sisters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) experience their family upbringing in different ways. Eventually they expanded the intergenerational drama to include multiple perspectives, including their filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård). They even turned the Oslo family home into a character. “With this idea of the family house, you have a perspective of 130 years,” said Vogt. “You can see how short a lifespan is, and it’s interesting to see the characters’ drama in that perspective, because it is a film about reconciliation, not necessarily about characters who hate each other hugging at the end, but characters who have issues, and at the end they’re closer. And if you remind how short our lives are, you feel more that need of reconciliation, because the clock is ticking.”
Next up: Bentley’s partner Kwedar is directing their romantic drama “Saturn Returns,” starring Will Poulter and Rachel Brosnahan, for Netflix. Del Toro has several projects on the burner: a stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Buried Giant”; a rewrite of “The Count of Monte Cristo” as a gothic Western; and he and Scott Frank are adapting the 2016 Spanish thriller “The Fury of a Patient Man.” “I’m going to be very unadorned, handheld, no cranes,” he said. And Panahi has a script he has wanted to direct for five years that is ready. “I just have to find a way to make it,” he said, “because it’s no longer a film that could be made underground.”
Everyone else is just waiting for the Oscars to be over.
English (US) ·