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Q&A with Jane Shoenbrun and Brigette Lundy-Paine

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of I Saw the TV Glow.

Jane, this film has so much depth and vision. It’s obvious how much thought and work went into it. Can you talk about where the inspiration came from?
Jane Schoenbrun: Thank you. I know, it’s crazy. They take a lot of work. I made my first film right before the pandemic. It was called We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. And I made that film after working in the New York independent film world for about ten years. I think I knew more than most filmmakers about the ways in which the system isn’t necessarily set up to support radical art making. And I made my first film for no money. I made it in the woods with like ten people. I’m glad I did that so I could make a movie that was fully on my own terms. And I’m really proud of it; it was such a deeply personal film, but I think by starting my fledgling film career by doing a project like that, it allowed me to make something this radical with the budget. And through the process of making World’s Fair, I figured out I was trans. I think that film was very much me looking for myself through the process of trying to unpack why I was so scared to make my own work as an artist. By the time I finished that movie and it premiered at Sundance, I had come out, I had started to physically transition, and I was very early in the process. And this was also when TV came out onto the page. It was a very intense time not only because early transition is a very precarious time, but it was like a complete reappraisal of everything that I had thought of as my life as like a 32-year-old married quote unquote straight person. It was also this time of possibility, but in a very fledgling way. Early transition, you’re running very quickly towards something that you kind of can’t even imagine yet. It’s very raw, and so much of what felt raw about it was trying to recontextualize everything that had happened over the first thirty years of my life instead of thinking of it as… just how life is. It almost felt like so many of the things that I thought of as home were actually keeping me from myself, because I knew that the price of entry to that world was repression.

Writing this movie in the first month or two of physical transition while all of that was so present, and none of the good parts of transition had really started yet—like meeting Brigette—I was just really trying to capture it. I was trying not to necessarily explain it to an audience, but to make something that felt as overwhelming and did justice to the complexities of it without watering it down. To aid audiences. I loved television as a kid and it made sense to return to this sort of fixation of being so obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I cared more about those character’s high school experiences than I did my own. It felt like a natural way to continue talking about the ways that we cope before we’re ready to see ourselves as trans people.

what felt important to me was really believing in what Maddy believed

Brigette, what was your first impression of the script?
Brigette Lundy-Paine: I had met Jane on Zoom, and I think I read the script right after, and watched World’s Fair at the same time.

JS: At the very same time?

BLP: Oh yeah, I was like [imitates going back and forth between the two]. I was really moved by the script because I felt that it was like being at the mouth of a cave and I was only seeing the very beginnings of what it would mean to me. And I felt the colors and the vibrations of it so vividly and palpably in a way that I hadn’t been reading in other scripts in a long time, or maybe ever. I also just loved the character of Maddy right away, and I loved the way that the teen dialogue was used. It was familiar, but it felt very self-aware. I could just feel how smart Jane was and how I would get to say these things that I’d read in scripts before, like “I’m getting out of this town,” but I’d get to say it with real devastation! And I really loved meeting Jane, which lent itself so much to my understanding of the script, and then there was no turning back.

I really appreciate how earnest your performance is. Did the two of you have discussions about the allegory of the film, or did you play it very directly based on what was in the script?
BLP: We had a lot of discussions about the allegory. Jane and I would meet every week for a while, and they would tell me about the character of Maddy, and their ideas about Maddy, and then they told me the sort of lore of TV Glow and what The Pink Opaque meant within the story and the world of the show. And I think that the trans allegory was very natural for me to play. I always knew that that would be a part of doing this character but what felt more important to me was really believing in what Maddy believed. And really understanding the literal extremes she went to in order to save herself.

The use of color and the look of the film is so unique. Did you have any idea what you were going to see on screen when you were playing it?
BLP: Sort of. Jane is a very detailed and precise filmmaker and so much of the preparation for the film was about the color and the shape of it. Jane and their friend Albert Birney spent two weeks or so in Baltimore. Albert is an amazing artist, and they drew like every shot of the film…

JS: Like twenty shots, okay! That’s all there was. We didn’t count it.  

BLP: And then later, Jane and Eric [Yue] did the same thing with photographing every shot.

JS: Yes. There are some big differences between making a movie for no money and making a movie with actual resources. But you do lose certain things—I missed a lot of what I got to do with no money and the nimbleness that that buys you. Not in terms of what you end up seeing on screen, but in terms of, mechanically, what a crew can pull off. Because having a lot of people in different departments makes nimbleness harder on set. Shout out Elias! But I knew that what it did buy me was this opportunity to paint and create beautiful images and worlds that aren’t just like, “oh I like that building so let me go shoot it.” And, yeah, Albert and I made these collages that he then animated, just tinkering with the most detailed little things, like the color of the green of the grass, and when the TV is burning…

The green of the vegetables in the grocery store when Maddy and Owen reconnect was really beautiful too.
JS: Well, that was actually just a location scout find. I had a totally different idea for that scene, and we were on our way out, and then I was like, wait, there’s something weird about this place. And it was the giant vegetables printed up on the wall!  I was like, I must film that.

BLP: What was Owen going to make with those leeks?

JS: Soup?

BLP: Soup!

JS:  He eats raw leeks. It’s free from the midnight grill.

Speaking of actually having a greater scale and a greater budget, what was the coolest special effect that you got to deploy in this film?
JS: I mean, I loved making the monsters. From the very beginning, I remember thinking, for the next film? Let’s go monsters. Just getting to create monsters from scratch and in the way that we did it with a lot of practical makeup effects and people in the makeup chair for like ten hours for one shot. Watching that process come to life and really trying to take a creative role in it was so rewarding. One thing that was very important to me with special effects in the film—whether it was practical or CGI, because we did a bunch of both—was that I really wanted it to feel handmade. The goal wasn’t Marvel-like, state of the art contemporary quality. The goal was something that feels within the realm of my personality. The CGI people made the mistake a few times of showing me an early rendering before they were done, and then they would have their fleet of amazing animators make it look really good. But I always took a camera phone picture of the earlier version that they had showed me over Zoom, and I would tell them we had to bring it back to that. So I forced them to take the 2024 state of the art work to like 1994 state of the art. Whether I’m conscious of it or not, I think I’m pulling from this lineage of seeing weird stuff on the internet and what sticks with me or haunts me are indelible images that aren’t necessarily showing you the most or the clearest view. It’s fuzz and it’s atmosphere and it’s distortion. With Mr. Melancholy, especially at the end of the movie when you see him, that was one that we tinkered with obsessively to try to make it look both really good and impressive, but also… wrong in some way.

Can you two talk about working on that pivotal scene at the planetarium with Brigette’s monologue?
BLP: The transition from teenage Maddy to Maddy coming back was delightful to prepare for. There’s three Maddy’s. There’s baby Maddy at fourteen who’s sort of an emo skater kid, hasn’t quite landed in the physical world but knows she has something to protect. And she has complete childlike wonder about The Pink Opaque show. And then second Maddy is like Courtney Love, she’s angry and punk. She’s experienced abuse in the home. At least we assume she has an abusive stepfather. I can never actually tell if she’s joking about him breaking her nose. But she’s definitely familiar with violence in a way. Then, when she comes back at the end, she’s been completely transformed into a different being. As she says in the monologue, “I’m me again.” And what that “me” felt like to me and Jane, what we talked about, was this creature that’s almost crawled out of the gutter. But she also feels to me a little cowboy like Harry Dean Stanton or like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, but less plucky. She’s got something to say. The planetarium scene was broken up into five sections, I think. Emma Portner, who played the monsters, did some choreography on it, and that was super effective even though it was so simple. We worked on it for a year. I had a lot of time with it so I knew it really, really well. By the time we got there, I was able to just open my mouth and it spilled out.

JS: Bridge is such a wonderful performer and human being and when I met them it was very early in the process, and I wasn’t even thinking about casting. I was just incredibly moved to have the opportunity to explore transition and evolution of self with them and give them the freedom to build the character. Watching them, I realized that it was amazing.

Q&A with Michael Showalter and Cathy Schulman

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

What made Michael the perfect director for this film?
I’ve been a longtime fan of Michael’s, and as a matter of fact, early on in the process I reached out to him in hopes that he might be able to get involved from the very beginning.

And when we finally sold the movie to Amazon, the script had been developed, and Anne Hathaway was already attached. And so it was after we got to Amazon that we started talking about directors. I just find that Michael’s movies are an incredible cornucopia of tones. He sort of fondly calls this movie a “rom-com-drom.” And there’s probably more “-oms” that could be attached, because one of the things that I love about his directing – I’m sorry I’m embarrassing him saying this in front of him – is that he takes each scene and treats it as its own thing. If this scene is a dramatic scene, or if that scene is a comedy scene, or if another scene is some combination of the two, or whatever it might be… he allows each to have whatever true integrity it needs to have, and I think it’s the combination of those tones that creates a certain grounded integrity that allows you to work within a genre, but also to be elevated.

And so we can’t even call this a rom-com because there’s so many reasons why it already breaks that model. And I think that’s really what Michael brought to it. I should also just say that from the beginning, one of the things that struck me about the book was that (unlike a typical romantic comedy, where the woman is choosing between two men), she wasn’t doing that here. She was choosing between which kind of happiness to have. And what intrigued me and made me want to do it was that I wasn’t sure which option I would have picked for myself: the “self-actualization in the yurt,” or, “going to go about trying to fall in love again.” And I was starting to think the yurt seemed just fine to me! And so, I thought it was really interesting to make the choice not about one man versus another man, but about how to live out your happiness, and probably any version could have been okay.

these movies teach me a little bit about the kind of person that I want to be

Michael, your filmography is a murderer’s row of incredible roles for women. Is that a conscious thing that you’ve tried to do throughout your career?
MS: No, not consciously. But I do think I oftentimes find women characters more interesting, for myself. I don’t know exactly what that’s about. I could come up with some theories, but, um, Yeah. Does that answer your question?

What’s one of those theories?
MS: Oh, okay. Well, I like characters that are misunderstood, maybe unseen, in some way. I feel like I can relate to those characters. I need to relate to them in order to tell their stories. And so I think I relate in this case to both characters, both Hayes and Solène, who feel like they’re more than what they seem to be to outside observers. And maybe it’s to themselves or to each other. Like, it’s not all conscious, but maybe both characters have more to them than what the world sees, or on some level, it’s like needing to be seen in some way. A lot of the women characters that I’ve directed tend to have that through-line, whether it’s Sally Fields’ character in Hello My Name is Doris, or certainly Anne’s character here, and they’re a character who isn’t being seen fully seen and wants to be seen more. I guess I relate to that.

It feels like we haven’t seen a genre movie like this – with a major star like Anne Hathaway in the lead – in quite a while. When did you start to see that maybe there was a gap in the market?
CS: I’m not sure I was aware of the gap! I do think it’s true that we all need a movie like this, though. We were developing this during the pandemic and I think the need for togetherness, happiness, love… like all of that was feeling really, really necessary. And we kind of kept having to wait to make this movie because we had these huge crowd scenes that are hard to manage during COVID… And we also had a lot of intimate scenes, which were also hard to manage during COVID. So I feel like it was kind of coming back around in some ways. And I’m very much like Michael in the sense that I love to work in genres, too. I just like to try to do a twist on them. Like I look at my own movies: The Illusionist is a whodunit, but it’s dressed up. Or, you know, The Edge of Seventeen is a YA, but it’s slightly different. Or, you know, Crash is a melodrama, but it’s different. I try to look at it kind of like, you know, “what can we do to twist it?” And I felt like there could be a twist on a rom-com that specifically dealt with an older woman as the protagonist. That was what was intriguing to me. You know, I had a kid at the same time we were shooting this, a teenager, while we were developing this and really questioning why Anne’s character keeps being compartmentalized. You can be this or you can be that, or you can be this, but you can’t be everything. And I just liked those ideas of sort of bringing that back into the conversation.

You’ve made send ups of rom-coms and you’ve made more earnest ones and everything in between. What brings you back to romance as a genre so often?
MS: Well, I love the genre. There’s so many things that the genre offers: it’s dramatic, it’s funny, there’s opportunities for incredible performances. I feel like it can be about something. There’s social commentary. There’s all the things: great music, great costumes, great production design. Like it has everything that I look for as a storyteller. And I’ve been talking a lot about romantic comedy as a genre, or rom-com-drom, or rom-dramedy, whatever you want to call it. And I also just like the genre. I like the tropes of the genre. They’re comforting to me. And something I like to talk about is the difference between tropes and clichés, because to me there’s a very big difference. Or “convention” could be another word. Tropes and conventions, if done correctly, are great to me.Cliché, I find, is when you do the trope or the convention, but you don’t know why you did it. So it’s in a movie, but you don’t get the sense that the filmmaker even knew what it was doing in the movie. But I love convention. I love tropes. So those earlier movies, even though they’re kind of poking fun at it, it’s coming from a place of love. Obviously, this movie is filled with references to other films that I love. Most, most notably, Notting Hill. I just feel like the genre has meant so much to me. All the movies that I grew up loving, whether it was When Harry met Sally, or Say Anything, or… or the list is really quite long.

Certainly, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral…  these movies teach me a little bit about the kind of person that I want to be. They teach me about what kind of an adult I want to be. They teach you about life, loss, love, career, family. All these things that I need, these tools that I need as an adult, these kinds of movies have the potential to address.

Q&A with Ethan Hawke

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

Can you start by telling us about your exposure to Flannery O’Connor throughout your life?
Ethan Hawke: I was first given Flannery O’Connor by my mother, who was trying to prompt the inner feminist in me. Because all I was doing was reading guys. When I was getting ready to film the movie, I had to bring some of the books down with me. The script was already done, but I looked through my bookcase and pulled down a different copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, which I realized was given to me by Julie Delpy in the summer of ’94 when we were doing Before Sunrise, and I was like, ah! All the feminists in my life have been giving me her for years. But I really didn’t get deeply familiar with her until my daughter Maya did a whole season on Flannery O’Connor in her junior year of high school. She fell in love with Flannery, and she started discovering she wanted to talk to me about it. And so it was through my conversations with Maya that my awareness of her work deepened.

A movie about Flannery O’Connor would have to be a movie about imagination

I imagine exposing yourself to her work in preparation to make a movie is a very different experience, in terms of revealing something else about her as a human being.
The whole thing happened so strangely. Maya had discovered a book that was published not too long ago by Flannery called A Prayer Journal, which was a journal of her letters to God as a young woman, as she was kind of seeking to discover herself. And when Maya was auditioning for theater school, she adapted some of these journals into a monologue as an audition piece. That was really fun and cool, and when Stranger Things kind of blew up, Maya was still thinking about this character that she had played and wanted to explore it more. She thought about getting the rights to the work and she approached my wife—who’s my producing partner—and I and asked if we would produce and direct a movie about it. And your first thought, when a young person that you respect says something like that to you, you say yes. But as I thought about the little I knew about Flannery, I wondered what movie could possibly be there? All I knew was that she was sick and she fed chickens and she wrote. There’s not much of a life there to dramatize. Then I started rereading all her work and realized that her imagination and her faith are both so incredibly powerful and the intersection of the two was so interesting that we could make a movie about that. A movie about Flannery O’Connor would have to be a movie about imagination.

Talk me through your process of identifying which stories you’re going to use. I know “Parker’s Back,” right? The energy of that story is so incredible.
Yeah, most of us aren’t familiar with all of them, but I went through the canon and I was really looking for several things. It’s kind of like a peacock fan. Each feather is individual, but seen collectively it becomes something else, and I thought that each one of these stories could represent an aspect of her and I thought about which part of her is in these stories. I read them all looking to see which ones would tell me something about Flannery O’Connor. And they also had to reveal something so that it would make sense to have Maya and Laura [Linney] play aspects of their characters. Maya was 24 when we were making this, and Flannery was diagnosed with lupus at 24, so that seemed obvious, right? Let’s focus on this death sentence that she got. We’ll build a movie around those couple months, and we’ll kind of explore her imagination in that time period. I was looking for things that she would be thinking about when she realizes she’s trapped back in Milledgeville. Oh, a doctor’s office, wanting to strangle her mother… alright, let’s put that there. We kind of built it that way.

The trailer you use to open the film is a beautifully constructed way to introduce us to Flannery. The humanity of her, the humor, and the gothic.
Thanks. I did a Brecht play years ago, and Brecht had this idea that audiences struggle with, but it’s kind of profound, which is trying to make the experience of being in the theater not like falling asleep. Like, you can go to sleep and we’re going to entertain you and tell you exactly how to feel. But he really wanted to invite the audience into the experience and remind you that you’re watching a play all the time. It’s arresting and confusing. The one adaptation that was made of Flannery’s work in her lifetime was The Life You Save May Be Your Own with Gene Kelly. When asked about it she said, “Well, it’s possible to imagine that it could have been worse.” And that really stuck with me, that quote, because I realized she would hate a movie being made about all this. It was important to, right off the bat, remind the audience that we’re making a movie. This is not Wikipedia, this is not a documentary. This is a work of art. We wanted to do two things simultaneously—to set up the fraudulence of film, and to set up that Maya and Laura are going to be double cast. We wanted to get that going in the audience’s mind early, so that it wouldn’t be confusing later. And, that there’s something punk about Flannery’s work. There’s something irreverent and witty and weird and unsettling. And I thought we had to try to cinematically match that.

Can you discuss your process of working with your co-writer Shelby Gaines? How did you discover the character of Flannery together?
Flannery was a complicated woman from the Jim Crow South. There was so much complexity to being an American artist of that time and that era. And she felt that she was sentenced to death at 24. She died at 39, but she didn’t live a year of her life certain that she would see the next year—she was faced with mortality at a young age, and she felt trapped in Milledgeville, Georgia. Shelby and I were writing this movie for Maya. If Maya had been 38 when she wanted to do this, maybe we would have written a deathbed movie. I mean, that was an obvious end to the story. But Maya was 24, and Flannery was diagnosed with lupus at 24, so we decided to center it there. She hadn’t really been published besides one story in Partisan Review before the end of the movie. So, we basically felt like this whole movie was leading to a final moment. Shelby had this insight, knowing that she really didn’t want to be in Georgia. She put her typewriter against her dresser, and she turned her typewriter away from the window, and Shelby was hypnotized by this. She had a line above her typewriter, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Which we kind of took to mean, wow, that she didn’t have to go anywhere. We’d let the movie build to her realization that she could bring the world to her, that everything was inside of her. The movie is really about her acceptance of her diminishments. That she was going to lose her health. She wasn’t going to be a social person. And that that was going to be okay. And that seemed like a profound realization for the whole movie to build to. And we kind of used her life’s work to imagine first drafts of the stories, when she had the idea for those stories.

THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TO HOST AWARDS GALA TUESEDAY, JANUARY 7, 2025 IN NEW YORK CITY

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New York, NY (April 16, 2024)  – The National Board of Review announced today that they will host their annual Awards Gala on Tuesday, January 7, 2025, in New York City.

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, Outstanding Achievement in 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

# # #

Press Contacts:
Shawn Purdy / Alicia Mohr / Lindsey Brown – SLATE PR
shawn@slate-pr.com / aliciam@slate-pr.com / lindsey@slate-pr.com

Q&A with Bertrand Bonello

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

I heard that your first idea, or one of the first images that you had, was the green screen prologue. Why was that the right way to start the film?
Bertrand Bonello: It’s the first thing I wrote. Because for everyone, or for every audience, green screen is related to the idea of virtuality. And so at the beginning, the audience knows that not everything would be real. There would be some virtuality in the film. If you enter directly into the 1910 part, for example, it looks like a period film. If you have the green screen first, you know it’s going to be a little more twisted. The second reason is whatever the story is, you have Léa Seydoux like for three minutes alone in this green ocean, and it’s a way to say, “my subject is her,” you know, besides the story. And also, as in this scene, you have an element of me as the director talking and saying, “okay, are you ready?”
You are really entering the subject and when you enter the scene after that, the long, long scene in the party in 1910, you enter it loaded with something.

it’s more and more difficult for me to find films that bring me a cinematic experience

Even though you’re changing formats and you’re shooting different aspect ratios, you managed to keep it so cohesive as a whole. How did you accomplish this?
BB: Well, the decision was to say, “okay, the present of the film is 2044, and it’s going to be a square ratio, 1.33, because it’s meant to take away space, in a way, you know. And to make it so that the characters are a little more trapped. Then when you go back to the past, you open it up. Like if the past was a refuge or a movie, you know. So you go back to 1.85. And inside that, the 1910 part is shot in 35mm, because we needed this kind of sensual texture. And 2014 and 2044, the digital and the sharpness and coldness of digital were perfect.

Did you sense that there was a difference, because of those different camera techniques, when shooting those scenes with the actors?
BB: Well, I really started my career on film, you know. So when I switched to digital with Nocturama, I didn’t change my way of shooting. I still do like three or four takes, not more than that. It’s not like I let the camera run. And so for me it doesn’t change a lot. Thing is, for the crew, I realized that when it’s 35mm, everyone is a little more concentrated. When you say, “I’m ready,” everyone’s ready. You know, it’s not like you do one shot and afterward you say, “ah, I’m going to add a mic,” or stuff like that. They don’t do that. So, and even for the actors, it’s good for concentration because everyone knows it costs money.

How much did you talk to your actors about how you were going to shoot it? How much do you discuss things like production or themes with them beforehand?
BB: You cannot imagine a bigger difference in approach between two actors than the one between George and Léa. George, for example, I mean he is someone that really needs and wants a lot of explanations and prep and stuff like that. So like, I don’t know, two months before the shoot, we had huge exchanges of emails and he wanted to be sure of everything. Like if I enter the room at that moment… do I do it this way or that way? In this line I have, does this word mean that or that? Do you have only one meaning or underneath meaning? You know, he wants everything. Then he disappears and works on his own. And Léa, to the contrary, she doesn’t want to know anything. Well, she’s, I think she’s a little scared of intellectualization, you know. She likes to arrive on the set and, you know, sometimes she doesn’t know even what we’re going to shoot. So I just explain to her the heart of the scene, and just before I say action, I say like three or four words, you know, just to put her in the mood. And usually it works. She likes to discover the scene while she’s acting. And when it doesn’t work, she comes to me and says, “Okay, anyway, Gabrielle, she’s your character. You know her much better than I do. Just do the scene for me and I will imitate you.” So that’s what I do.

I’m fascinated about the way that you use melodrama in a world that you’re creating that’s emotionless. Is it a fear of yours that maybe cinema also is becoming a little emotionless?
BB: Yes, more and more. I’m going to talk a bit more about French cinema, but more and more people are obsessed with the subject of films, much more than the films. And I don’t really care about the subject of films. I’m interested in movie experiences, you know? And about who is doing the film, much more than what the film is, you know? Do I have, like, an experience as a spectator? Is it a real story? So, it’s a big movement, this, this this way. That just, that scares me, but it’s more and more difficult for me to find films that bring me a cinematic experience.