Talk about the inspiration for this piece.
Anderson: There’s this writer Stefan Zweig, who I had never heard of up until six or seven years ago. I read “Beware of Pity” – which I loved – and I thought about trying to adapt this book. But then I read more of his fiction and I kind of liked many of the pieces, and then his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” ended up inspiring the whole setting of the movie. So I ultimately decided to do something Zweig-like, instead of adapting only one of them.
Can you describe your writing process for this film?
Trey Edward Shults: It started when I wrote this in 2014, and it comes from a personal place of having a rough relationship with my biological father who suffered with addiction.
Can you talk about the origins of this project?
Tony Kushner: Steven told me the story that’s the core of the movie on the first day of filming Munich, in 2005, in Malta.
This is something of a personal story, correct?
Ari Aster: The beautiful thing about genre filmmaking and the horror genre in general is that you can take a personal story or feeling that you need to work through and push it through this filter
It is obvious from the first frame that a tremendous amount of work went into this film, even by the high standards of feature animation. Can you discuss the seven year process?
Tomm Moore: The story development went hand in hand with the art development.
How did this project manifest?
Leo Scott: I was editing a half hour comedy where Val Kilmer was playing himself as a motivational speaker in this sort of parallel universe. It was such a great performance, so bonkers and I wanted to tell him that.
Can you talk about that decision, and how you thought about the various meta elements of the project?
Theo Anthony: That idea of accounting for the act of observation in observing is something that I’ve always been drawn to, as a big science nerd!
What drew you to the role of Gladys?
Anjana Vasan: My agent sent me the script and said Thea Sharrock wants to meet you, have a read, and Olivia Colman’s attached and before she could finish saying Olivia Colman I went, yes!
What drew you to this story?
Adam McKay: We had done a movie with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg called The Other Guys, and the goal of that movie was to do a comedic parable of the collapse.
How did your filmmaking process begin?
Stephen Basilone: When I started my career, I had a writing partner for a very long time and we started off writing features.
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Hold Your Fire. The film took place in my old neighborhood—I lived a block and a half from where those events took place, right on the J line. It’s a major intersection, a very busy hub. To me, this is […]
Can you talk about working with your cast?
You have to have great actors. You have to cast great people to get great performances.
What were your first thoughts, after reading the script?
Simon Rex: I was just like… whoa. Whoa. WHOA!
Can you discuss the process of adapting the book for the screen?
James Gray: The book is a meticulously researched thing. Immediately you realize that you’re in for it if you change something factually and of course I had to, because it’s a movie.
When did you first start noticing a disconnect between Yogi Berra’s reputation and the player the stats showed him to be?
Sean Mullin: I think that’s what this was all about. When I started doing the research, I was like, wait, this guy was criminally overlooked.