How did you find this story?
David Lowery: It was a true story about this guy whose life was too good to be true in terms of a narrative.


How did you find this story?
David Lowery: It was a true story about this guy whose life was too good to be true in terms of a narrative.

For a summer blockbuster, this film has some really nice, quiet character moments.
I don’t think you can watch a film that is full of explosions and care about it if you don’t have some care about the people that it is happening to.

What was your experience working with the author of the memoir on which the film is based?
Oliver Hermanus: The first thing I did, when I was certain I would tackle it, was I met with [author Andre Carl van der Merwe] a few times.

Your character is particularly interesting because he comes across as an avatar of our current president, only more articulate and charismatic. What was your approach to him?
John Lithgow: I choose to take that as a compliment

Do you think Nicolas Cage’s casting creates an expectation with the film? And if so, did you intentionally subvert those expectations in any way?
I think it does create an expectation. Certainly, people have certain types of films that they associate with Nic Cage. But we never set out to subvert anything

here did this idea come from, and how did the project get moving?
Max Walker-Silverman: Umm… that’s the most reasonable question in the world, and I’ve never figured out the cleanest answer to it.

How did you get on this project? How did it come to you?
John Krasinski: So I was about to start pre-production on Jack Ryan, and some of the producers on Jack Ryan were Platinum Dunes, and they said, “Would you ever act in a genre movie?” And I said, “Oh no, I can’t do that, I don’t do horror movies.”

Can you talk about adapting your own book for the screen?
They initially approached Dan Fogelman, who’s a very established screenwriter. And he actually flipped it back to me and said he thought I should do it. At that point I just assumed I was talking to someone who was insane, and that this would be a terrible mistake.

Mr. Sachs, can you tell us about developing the story?
Sachs: This is my fifth feature, and all of my films – while not strictly autobiographical – are very personal to me, and connected to my own life on some level.

Eliza, when did you first start to think about making this remarkable film?
Eliza Hittman: I first began thinking about this film in 2012. I read a newspaper article that was all about the death of Savita Halappanavar, this woman in Ireland who died after being denied a life-saving abortion.

I’d love to hear how you developed the script.
Andrea Pallaoro: Well, it’s a film that I had envisioned as part of a much larger exploration on the traumas and the dynamics of what it means to feel abandoned and the consequences of that.

What was involved in the production of making such a visually and sonically rich film?
At the Tour de France we had a full ten cameras, and we were able to put a camera inside the car, sometimes two, and then at every stop along the way we had three cameras in every car.

A.V. Rockwell: I really wanted to tell a story, especially for my first film, that recognized my coming of age experience in New York City…

We’d been trying to cast Sam for months. And we were having a really hard time. My younger sister was, at the time, an eighteen-year-old senior in high school. Almost as a joke, I asked her, do you know any actors? Like, help me out here! And that was how I found Lily. I still can’t believe that’s our story.

This is a movie that shows real love for the Bay Area. Where did the story come from?
Ryan Fleck: Well, it starts with that Too $hort song, this really nasty song called Freaky Tales that I heard way too young, maybe nine or ten. I grew up with hippie parents. We had Beatles records and Janis Joplin and then my friends played me Freaky Tales and I was like, What is going on?!