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Q&A with Laura Piani and Camille Rutherford

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.

Laura, let’s start with the title. I had to laugh—Jane Austen doesn’t wreck anyone’s life… or does she?
Laura Piani: It all started years ago, when I worked night shifts at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. I was surrounded by aspiring writers, actors, and musicians—we all felt a bit out of place. Literature was our refuge, but it could also trap us. That tension—between inspiration and entrapment—was the seed of this story. Later, I told our producer how much I missed art-house romantic comedies like the ones Richard Curtis made in the ’90s. I wanted to bring that spirit back, but with a personal lens. I was grieving when I started writing, and I wanted to make a comedy that could still hold that emotional weight.

Camille Rutherford: I related to Agathe immediately. She doubts everything—her intelligence, her talent, her worth. That’s a feeling I know well. My sister is a novelist, and watching her write her first book really informed my connection to this role. It took her five years and she doubted herself the entire time. I felt like I had lived this story with her already. And I love that the film demystifies what writing looks like. It’s not glamorous—it’s difficult, lonely, and often full of self-doubt.

Shakespeare and Company was the first piece of the puzzle

Were there particular scenes that were especially hard to pull off?
CR: The ballroom scene was definitely a challenge. We only had one night to film it, and I had never done a period dance scene before. I was nervous—I didn’t know the steps, and it’s more technical than it looks. But Charlie Jansen, who plays Oliver, is a wonderful dancer. He helped me a lot.

The film moves between French and English beautifully. Can you talk about how that multilingual structure came about?
LP: I wanted the film to reflect who I am—a French woman going to England. I didn’t want to copy an English film. I also love when films embrace the texture of real language. If the story works, the audience accepts the shifts. It was a challenge for casting though—we needed actors who could switch languages effortlessly. That gave us more freedom in the edit, too. Sometimes I kept French dialogue, sometimes English. It was very instinctive.

What about the locations? Shakespeare and Company is such a touchstone for you—how did filming there come together?
LP: Shakespeare and Company was the first piece of the puzzle. I’d dreamed of filming there before I even had a script, and they said yes, which was rare—they don’t usually allow shoots anymore. We filmed at night when the shop was closed, which made it feel magical. As for the writers’ retreat in England, I did research and visited Chawton, where Jane Austen lived. But we couldn’t shoot at the real place, so I created my own fictional version. The house we found wasn’t perfect—it had broken stairs and peeling wallpaper—but that’s what I loved about it. It felt lived in. I wanted the retreat to feel sincere, not luxurious.

You’ve mentioned the importance of music in the film—can you talk more about your choices?
LP: Some of the pieces were in the script from the beginning. The Schubert piano pieces, for instance, are what I listen to when I write. I also wanted a silly pop song that the two friends could sing in the car—a moment of pure, relatable joy. The Italian song we chose made no sense since she’s heading to England, but I liked that absurdity. And then there’s the original score, which was composed by Peter Pell. We talked a lot about “In the Mood for Love”—that feeling of restrained longing. He created a theme that nods to that with its first few notes, then becomes something completely its own.

You mentioned poetry earlier, and of course the film ends on a powerful poem. How did Frederick Wiseman come to be the voice behind that?
LP: That poem was a starting point for the film. I had filmed the poet Jack Hirschman reading it at Shakespeare and Company years ago, and I always wanted to include it. Sadly, he passed away before the shoot. I didn’t want an actor—I wanted someone with a poetic soul. I’ve known Fred for years. We met by chance on the street in Paris, and I thanked him for his films. We became friends. When I told him I didn’t know who should read the poem, he said, “What about me?” It was perfect. He’s not a performer, but he has such presence. And he brought a little humor to it too, which I loved.

Camille, what was it like performing the flirtation scenes—especially given how subtle and Austen-like they are?
CR: Honestly, I was nervous. I’m not great at flirting in real life, so acting it can feel awkward. But we had rehearsal time, and that helped. We could experiment, even mess up, and just find a rhythm. By the time we filmed, we trusted each other. And Laura’s writing gave us so much to work with—it’s never over-the-top, always restrained and real.

THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TO HOST AWARDS GALA TUESEDAY, JANUARY 13, 2026 IN NEW YORK CITY

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New York, NY (April 28, 2025)  – The National Board of Review announced today that they will host their annual Awards Gala on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, in New York City. The evening will be hosted by Willie Geist, host, NBC News’ Sunday TODAY and co-host, MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate excellence in filmmaking with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Best International Film, Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Performance, Directorial Debut, and Outstanding Achievement in both Cinematography and Stunt Artistry. Additionally, they award signature honors such as the NBR Icon Award, NBR Freedom of Expression, and the William K. Everson Award for Film History.

Additional details about the event will be announced at a later date.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to the support of cinema as both art and entertainment. Each year, this select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics participates in illuminating discussions with directors, actors, producers and screenwriters before announcing their selections for the best work of the year. Since first citing year-end cinematic achievements in 1929, NBR has recognized a vast selection of outstanding studio, independent, foreign-language, animated and documentary films, often propelling recipients such as Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road into the larger awards conversation. In addition, one of the organization’s core values is identifying new talent and nurturing young filmmakers by awarding promising talent with Directorial Debut and Breakthrough Performance awards as well as grants to rising film students. With its continued efforts to assist up-and-coming artists in completing and presenting their work, NBR honors its commitment to not just identifying the best that current cinema has to offer, but also ensuring the quality of films for future generations to come.

Join the conversation @NBRfilm

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Press Contacts:
Shawn Purdy / Alicia Mohr / Lindsey Brown – APEX PR
shawn@theapex-pr.com / alicia@theapex-pr.com / lindsey@theapex-pr.com

Q&A with Daniel Minahan and Bryce Kass

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of On Swift Horses.

Can you talk about coming across this book and deciding to make it into a film?
Daniel Minahan: My producer Peter Spears and I were looking for material to make a feature together and I knew that I wanted to make a love story. We were passing books back and forth and Shannon Pufahl’s novel came to both of us at the same time, coincidentally. I started reading it and I was about halfway through when I realized that I felt really excited by this story. I called Peter and he said, Oh I’m reading it too. By the time we finished it, we knew we wanted to approach Shannon to obtain the rights. That was during lockdown. Then we reached out to Bryce about adapting the novel. We had worked together before and he came on board.

Bryce Kass: It was definitely during summer lockdown that I read the book. I was immediately struck because I had never seen characters like this before. Right away I knew there was so much to play with. The book itself is actually very different than what we see on screen, but it’s incredible—it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Shannon is a special, special writer. But the book has alternate timelines and flashbacks, and a lot of it was interior. For me, that was helpful because I felt like I knew these characters inside and out, including their family histories. Other sort of inflection points, from the point that they were born to growing up in their adolescence to where we meet them in the movie were so well described. I think that probably also helped the actors when they read the book, because the characters are so well drawn already. In some ways it was just about dramatizing and externalizing this stuff to make it cinematic.

DM: Yes, it was giving them a voice and making them active. Right away when we started talking, Bryce knew exactly what we needed to do to compress this very sprawling epic novel. The book was beautiful because I felt like there was something familiar about it. I felt the influence of great queer writers—there was a bit of Gore Vidal and there was a bit of James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith, and so Shannon was kind of dipping into all of that. Not to mention all the different film genres that I think it hints at, like film noir and melodrama and the gambling. As a director, that looked delicious and challenging. We all felt compelled to adapt this.  

I think of it as a different kind of Americana

What was the research process like? I loved the part with the bulletin board at the end and I’m wondering where that idea came from.
BK: The board was in the book and when I wrote the script, I was living in Chicago. Chicago is the home to the Gerber Hart Archives, which is an incredible resource. It goes back to the turn of the century, pretty much. You have all kinds of actual saved postcards, letters, photos from similar kind of dead letter boards. Going to see that in person and researching queer life in the fifties and sixties was a great resource. A lot within the Gerber Hart Archives is about Chicago, but it also goes further afield. There was some stuff about Vegas and Kansas, but with San Diego, I had to look further. I looked at a lot of old newspapers from all those locations. The hardest piece to research in terms of queer life in that moment was Tijuana. It was a bit of a black box. I listen to a lot of music when I write, so I was just trying to find queer music. And that led to these gay cowboy bars, they have a lot in LA.

DM: Ranchero bars.

BK: Ranchero bars. They’re amazing. There was a whole history that I traced back through that music and those kinds of spaces. Back in the fifties and sixties, they were usually in port cities because when people got out of the military, they would settle in and around those areas to get jobs.

DM: Shannon shared some of her research with us as well. We got a sense of what San Diego looked like in that time period. And our remarkable production designer, Erin Magill, did a deep dive. There were so many queer bars at that time. And many of them were characterized by bird names. If you saw a bird name or a bird on the sign, like The Toucan, you’d know. There were all different ones. This one was named in the novel. It’s not a real place and it’s meant to be an SRO where you meet somebody in the lobby and you go up to a room or people live there and leave their doors open and would hook up. That was interesting—I think of it as a different kind of Americana. We have the housing development, but then we also have the underbelly. We have the rooming houses and the cruising parks and the gay bars and the backroom card games and the walkways above the casinos. It was a side door into this type of American experience.

You talked a little about all the genres and tones that the book encompassed. The tone felt very consistent, but I was also on my toes throughout. How did you approach it?
BK: For me, I always begin from a place of character and really getting into those character’s heads and getting their voices to a place I can believe. In Shannon’s book, there is already a sense of a world that’s very kind of noir infused. One of the things that we really wanted to try and make sure we got right was that even though it was noir, there was a reality to these moments. I think genuine intimacy is very uncertain. It’s shaky and strange. You never really know what’s going to come next. Hopefully it did keep you on your toes, because these characters are in their early twenties. They’re impulsive. They’re just doing what comes next. We wanted to have a movie that followed the shape and the form of what it was like to be young in that time. And there is a real sense of improvisation to what’s going on next, like, where are we going? What’s happening next? The audience is going on this adventure that’s shaped by the impulses and the desires and the fears of these people in this place.

DM: We talked a lot about this. Bryce was with me on set most of the time, so it was like having a second brain with me. One of the things that we really strove to do is to make the slang from the period—which does sound a lot like noir dialogue, like Sam Fuller, especially with the people at the track and the casinos—was to make that accessible and not to hit it too hard. It was a delicate balance. That was exciting and it was a good challenge. And thankfully we had actors who were really seasoned and very talented. Then the other thing that I think about with this film, especially when I see it now, is like, wow, what a bold idea to make a film about this subject without irony; it’s very big-hearted and quite earnest. I think that’s part of its charm and we’ll see if people enjoy that. That was important to me, not to undercut the experience of these characters with something to stylize.

Q&A with Ryan J. Sloane and Ariella Mastroianni

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Gazer.

When did you decide to make this project together?
Ariella Mastroianni: Well, Ryan and I, we grew up together. We’ve known each other since high school, and we immediately bonded over films. But we didn’t have anyone in our families who was connected to the arts, so I think that’s why we gravitated towards each other. You know, when you find someone… “you’re my person!” So, yeah, we were always just nerding out about films and we knew that we wanted to work together in some capacity. We just didn’t know when. Or at what point.

Ryan J. Sloane: We’re also very picky. So we didn’t want to, you know… we dabbled with short films – Ariel would always star in my little terrible super eight short films – but, you know, we ended up just getting lost in the shuffle of life, working day jobs that we hated and struggling to pay our bills and get healthcare. I still don’t have it! Haven’t been to the doctor in a minute. But you know, when the pandemic hit, we kind of buckled down and said to ourselves, “listen, this is an opportunity.” I was still working –  I was considered an essential worker, because I was working in a prison –  it was horrible. Um, but, you know, we, we saw this as an opportunity to sit down and actually do this. And we said to ourselves, “nobody’s waiting for us. No one’s going to give us an invitation.” So we were revisiting films that we love, and that we’ve been talking about for years. Everything from, you know, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Antonioni’s Blowup, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning… And we were trying to figure out why we were so attracted to these films. And we discovered that these films share a structure called the Spiral Structure. And that was kind of the key that unlocked it. We essentially got into production in April of 2021, and committed to shooting on weekends in April and November for as long as it took, pretty much whenever we had the money.

I’m grateful that we had a team around us who cared as much as we did

What was your writing process like, as co-writers? What was that process like?
RS: Oh gosh. Well, Ariella was furloughed…

AM: Yeah… so I was working at the Angelica Film Center as an assistant at the time. And then when the pandemic hit, I was furloughed. So suddenly I had my days. And Ryan and I have no formal background, like we have no formal training. So the beginning stages were just a lot of research, a lot of studying, and a lot of trial and error. If I recall, that was the good bulk of the beginning. But I would try to write as much as I could in the morning. And then when Ryan came home from working in the prison, we would get together and review where my head was at and then just continue writing together. But that process took about a year and a half. Um, and… you know, Ryan and I would do covers in Atlantic City, singing. And we would do that from 10:00PM to 2:00AM and we would have 30 minute breaks. And on those 30 minute breaks, we would go back into the script and start writing. So the process changed. It evolved. It was a big learning process.

I was struck by the way the port locations play such an important role in the film. Can you discuss the choice to set the film in those places, and what your personal connections, if there are any?
RS: You know, again, being an electrician, I’ve been doing residential electrical work and commercial electrical work since I was like thirteen years old. And I’ve just been around those areas, driving in a truck or going into people’s homes or working in this business or that business, and there’s something voyeuristic about that. You’re constantly watching people, you’re constantly being led into people’s homes and seeing the way they live and the way that they experience life. And I always felt like Jersey was so cinematic. Obviously I’m not the only one. I know Hollywood’s interested in moving there now, too. So it was kind of just like this… it was really important to me, because right now everything’s being gentrified and they’re building these sort of Lego-style apartment buildings, these tiny little boxes and charging people $6,000 to live there. I wanted to capture what was left before it was gone. So that was kind of the rush to get into production by April, 2021. You know, even in terms of the phone booths and the payphones, they’re getting rid of all those. I think they got rid of all them in 2021. We actually had to buy a phone booth! I was the proud owner of a phone booth for a while. And we were lugging that thing around in, in my electrical van, and then it weighed a lot, and then running it across the street on a little hand truck. It was just important to capture what was left of home before it was completely changed and gentrified, you know?

Ryan is credited as the editor, but I get the sense that both of you probably had a hand in that work. Can you discuss your approach?
RS: Yeah, I mean… just to put this in perspective, because we shot on film and we had no money. So it was important that we did a lot of rehearsal and, um, you know, Ariella was coming from a theater background, but I was not. But a lot of the film directors that I love, they all came from theater and I studied the way that they directed and the way that they handled rehearsals and so on. So I approached it in a very similar way, which saved us a lot of money. Ariella had one to two takes throughout the entire film. Because that’s all we could do. Everything was storyboarded. What you see is what we did, to the point where there were certain conversations that I would say “cut,” we’d move the camera, and then we’d start the scene over. I’d tap the DP on the shoulder to start recording in a specific area. We’d get what we need, cut, move on… You know what I mean? Um, and it was. It was detrimental to the process to, to do that, no doubt. Because Ariella’s doing one or two takes and then immediately calling in lunch. Yeah. The we would take a break while we’re loading a magazine and I would go pick up lunch, you know? That was kind of the process that we were going through.

AM: Yes – I got stressed. It was… but you know what, we did this film with a handful of our friends. So even though Ryan and I wore many hats, our friends who worked in the film also wore many hats. You know, our camera department was three people, including Ryan. It was him and our DP and a gaffer. So everyone was running around the whole time. Because like Ryan said, because we were shooting on film, we had limited takes. Everyone, everyone on the set was just really focused. And I’m grateful that we had a team around us who cared as much as we did.

Q&A with Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Jay Ellis

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Freaky Tales.

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?! I became a Too $hort fan—of course, growing up in Oakland, you have to be. And being a ten-year-old kid in ‘87 and hearing that Sleepy Floyd game on the radio where Greg Papa is calling the play-by-play and he says, Sleepy Floyd is Superman, it always meant something to me that the underdog can still pull it off, maybe once. We had no business winning any games in that series against the Lakers.

I had been pitching Anna versions of a movie called Freaky Tales for years, right? Right. Most of them were pretty bad and not worth exploring here, but once we landed on the chapters I think things really opened up creatively.

The specificity creates the universality

Anna, you’re not from the Bay Area, so what drew you to the project?
Anna Boden: Like Ryan said, he’d been pitching me versions that I was not interested in for years. You know, he listened to that song as a ten-year-old boy! Well, he played it for me when I was a woman in my twenties, it did not have the same effect on me. I was not like, oh yeah, we gotta make this movie! I think what opened it up for me was when I started to think about it more from the young women’s point of view and listening to Don’t Fight the Feelin’ and hearing that song. Thinking about that, we created a fictionalization of an idea of how this song might have come to be and that’s what the second chapter is, into the Too $hort part of Freaky Tales and the underdog storyline. That got me excited. Then we started to think about like all these stories as being these underdogs overcoming the bully and that was the theme that pulled us throughout and that felt more universal. It certainly is absolutely 100% a love letter to Oakland and its culture, but it also had something that felt more universal to me.

There is something familiar about these locations and characters and themes that speaks to this specificity, but also this universality. Can you talk about finding that balance between those two?
RF: When we were writing the script, I wrote in all the places that I grew up going to—Loard’s Ice Cream shop, the Oakland Coliseum for sports, and Gilman, of course, Gilman, which I didn’t actually go to because I was afraid of the punk rock scene at that age. But I learned more about it as I got older and had so much admiration and respect for it. That first chapter is the closest we come to a true story in the movie, which is that they were being harassed by neo-Nazi skinheads around ‘87 and they stood up for themselves and they defended themselves and they had a fight out in front of their venue. The locations were key. And the Grand Lake Theater! I grew up going to movies at the Grand Lake, and we got to shoot there, and then we had a big screening there last week and the roof blew off the place. It was amazing.

Jay, you’ve worked with Anna and Ryan in the past. What made you sign onto this film?
Jay Ellis: First of all, getting the opportunity to work with Anna and Ryan. Seeing how they work, I felt super comfortable, and I really enjoyed the process. When this came around and I read the script, I was already in from a relationship standpoint, from a working standpoint. Then I got a chance to read the creative, and my mind was just blown. I couldn’t visualize anything that was on the page! I was like, how does this happen? What, how does he do this? And how do they do that? It was one of the most original things that I had read in a long time, and that got me really excited. I feel like part of my job as an actor is to fall in line with a filmmaker’s vision. I could very much see the vision and I understood that we were going to be dropped in a place in a time. Like you said earlier, specificity creates the universality because we know people like this in all these cities we live in. People who love their team and have their crazy sports moments. I mean, we were just outside talking about how Toronto was dead quiet when the Raptors won that championship because everyone was indoors watching that game. There’s someone in Toronto who will write their version of that game years from now. That specificity in this story really excited me and it was an easy yes.

It’s really interesting the way you treat action and violence in the film. What sort of conversations did you have about that?
AB: We started the movie as very grounded and in a very authentic time and a place, and we took the look from a 16mm doc-style Penelope Spheeris The Decline of Western Civilization style. We wanted it to feel very grounded. And then as soon as that fight starts, we wanted it to explode into another sphere and feel like, pow! You take the two feet that are grounded in reality and then have one of them fly off into outer space. There were little clues earlier, that this film had one foot in reality and another foot a little bit outside of reality. But for the people who hadn’t picked up on those clues, now everyone’s going to know that this is not totally grounded in reality. That came with that first moment of violence with the slingshot in the eye and then the blood splashing on the camera. We wanted it to happen that way because we wanted the violence to be fun and we wanted people to be able to laugh at it. We didn’t want it to really hurt. We wanted the neo-Nazis to get their due and for people to be able to feel cathartic about it, but in a safe way. So we can all applaud and have fun with it. The guy gets burnt, but then he gets back in the car, you know? That design has a bit of a comic book-y playfulness to it, but it’s still gory and bloody at the same time. So not comic book-y in a Marvel kind of way, where we didn’t have any blood, but comic book-y in a very different kind of way where we got to have a lot of blood!

Jay, what’s it like playing a character that is based on someone real, but also a completely different version of him?
JE: Yeah, there’s obviously a fictitious side to his story. Ryan and Anna had sent over a couple interviews and specifically the interview that Sleepy Floyd did during that game or after that game. I remember watching it over and over again and trying to get the tilt of my head right and make sure my mustache was thin enough, and he has this big wide smile. I thought about the mannerisms and the physicality a lot. As we were going through the fight choreography, I pitched Ron [Yuan]—our stunt coordinator—that I wanted to do a crossover because Sleepy has this big crossover in the basketball game. So we do this crossover move and then we kind of work it into the choreography. It was this fun moment of trying to blend Sleepy’s quick, wide crossover into this fictitious side of him where he’s also this martial arts master who has all these weapons.

That was a lot of fun. There’s also this big monologue that I have as I walk down the stairs for the Psytopics commercial, and trying to get into his accent was also a fun thing to think about. I wanted to pay as much honor and respect to him because he has a record that still stands today, but then to also make the character very much my own as well. I feel like I got to do that a lot more on the fictitious side, while still honoring who he is as a person.

Could you talk about the collaboration with your cinematographer in terms of approaching each one of these four distinct stories in different visual ways?
RF: Like Anna said, we wanted that punk chapter to feel like a 4:3 ratio, with a grainy 16mm film look. By the end, we really go into anamorphic widescreen, like a Kung Fu movie or old Western. The path along the middle feels like traditional eighties cinema with some 1:85 aspect ratios. In terms of the colors, we wanted washed out for the first one, and when we get to the ladies in the second chapter, the colors are really popping with them and that was fun. Do you remember the specific conversations we had with Jac [Fitzgerald, Cinematographer]?

AB: We pulled a lot of different references from different films and photography and tried to pinpoint one thing for each chapter. I also remember us really struggling about whether we should go black and white for the third noir chapter, with Clint. But also knowing that none of our eighties references were black and white. We wanted it to have a distinct look, but instead we went distinct from the second chapter by choosing a very different kind of color timing and palette— a different color palette in terms of the clothes and the lighting. We tried to keep it more authentic to what our references were in order to maintain that consistency, even though there was this temptation to make each one look very different!