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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.

Q&A with Thea Sharrock and Anjana Vasan

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

Thea, I’d love to start by hearing about your first exposure to the script.
Thea Sharrock: I was sent the script by Studio Canal, and they said look, we have a new spec script by a guy who’s never written a screenplay before, and we think it’s great. And I thought, oh that’s interesting. Then they added, by the way, Olivia Colman is playing the lead, would you like to read it? And I was like, um, yeah, I’ll be reading that one. And they needed this process to happen in a certain way, quickly, due to Olivia’s availability. They didn’t tell me it was a comedy, they didn’t tell me it was based on a true story, they didn’t tell me all the kind of usual stuff that you would pump into a director beforehand. Basically, I went in blind and I read it and it was amazing because I could hear Olivia’s voice in my ear and in my head.  It made a huge difference because Edith is such a complicated character. Already having Olivia in my mind made the first read not only much clearer but it also gave me the freedom to laugh out loud. It’s not very often that you get a script that makes you laugh out loud on the first reading. I just knew. I thought the writing was wonderful, and I knew it was a great script for actors. What I love most in my job is working with really great actors. This was going to be a great vehicle for actors. So that’s what drew me to it.

This was going to be a great vehicle for actors

And Anjana, can you tell us how you came 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! And she went, no, no, no, you read the script, I’m going to set a meeting with Thea. I was like yes, of course of course, and I did all those things. Thea and I met and we really got on and we had sort of the same idea, the same approach, it was a good vibe. We were on the same page. And before I knew it, I was filming the movie. It all felt quite organic and easy. And usually it isn’t; usually you send a tape and you never hear back. Maybe you find out you’re not in the movie when they announce the cast or you see the movie. But this felt like a genuine conversation and a collaboration. And Thea was assembling the most like wonderful group of actors.

You mentioned that you didn’t know it was a true story when you got the script. How did that aspect come into play?
TS: Anjana, it was one of the first things we talked about, wasn’t it? Because Gladys was a real woman. And we talked immediately about how that comes with a level of responsibility. It’s a responsibility when you’re telling someone else’s story, but at the same time, we of course also wanted our own free range, so we needed to strike a balance. And the story is absolutely bonkers. The fact that it’s real, it still makes me laugh. It makes me laugh at British people because I think we’re mental. For example, how about if I told you that the whole invisible ink thing was true? And so was somebody hiding in a post box. Also true. I’d love to say that we came up with those embellishments, but they were already there. This is a story that was waiting to happen. The other thing I’d like to add is that Anjana was wearing a full yellow jumpsuit, a bodysuit, when we met. And when I say yellow, I’m talking like canary yellow.  So if you think I wasn’t going to cast her on the first meeting, you don’t know me well enough!

AV: Yeah, I didn’t do method dressing, clearly. I didn’t think about that. I should have dressed up more like what Gladys would have worn!

TS: If you’d actually shown up to a coffee shop in that…

AV: You know, what I really loved about Jonny Sweet’s script was that, yes, it was based in history, but it felt like it had one foot in the 1920s and one foot now. Something about the way the dialogue worked; it felt modern. I think I love that sort of element of irreverence within the history. I think we’re used to seeing very quaint period pieces and I think this story sets it up as if it is that, but then it completely subverts expectations and feels quite fresh.

How did you approach the visual nature of the film, keeping in mind the time period? 
TS: For me, aesthetically, two things are really important. One is the use of color. The other thing, which is combined within that, is how you work together with your DP, your production designer, your costume designer, and your hair and makeup designers. If we all work very closely together, and everybody understands what it is that I’m looking for, you are more than the sum of your parts. We build the aesthetic together. I think that you have to be even more careful of that when you do a period piece. Because we’re not living a hundred years ago—we’re living right now. That imagination that you need to make somewhere look and feel like it’s a hundred years ago, you’ve got to be coming from the same place and understand those aspects in the storytelling. I knew, for example, that I wanted to keep away from red in the palette as much as possible, so that every time you saw the letterbox, it would really pop. Those kinds of things are subtle, but they mean a lot to me. Some people notice them, lots of people don’t, and that’s totally fine, but it’s something that hopefully adds to your enjoyment of the film.

The character arc of Gladys is terrific. I felt completely different about her from the beginning to the middle to the end.
AV: A lot of that is in the script and it makes it easy when it’s charted properly, and the production details help. Thea and I talked about this. At the beginning you see someone who’s sitting up a bit too straight, a bit too buttoned up. It’s almost like she’s wanting to demonstrate that she can do the job. We also wanted her hat to be slightly too big, because it’s the first woman police officer in Sussex and they wouldn’t have had a perfect fit. She’s trying to fit into a place that isn’t quite accepting. And she’s trying to fit into the uniform. And then you realize that in some ways it’s quite restricting on her because the system and the men around her aren’t letting her do her job and follow her instincts. So actually you see a different side to her when she isn’t in uniform and she’s a bit freer. There’s more of a sparkle to her, I think, when she isn’t in the uniform and you see her brain ticking away. I wanted to chart the physical journey of what that might have been like. By the end, you see someone who is a different person than at the beginning. There’s a bit more to her than meets the eye.

Absolutely. And one of the things that makes this so effective are all the tone changes throughout the film. How did you make the comedy and drama work so cohesively?
AV: That’s probably the hardest thing, getting the tone right.

TS: It is, but the truth is that when you shoot something you break it down, right? You break it down scene by scene, and moment to moment within that. We would always know because we’d rehearsed it, we talked it through. If it was a scene with Anjana, we would have talked beforehand about what we wanted to achieve for the character in that scene. We’d discuss it at length, before shooting, right before shooting, and during shooting. You always know going in. Okay, this is the one where we reveal that her dad is everything to her. For Gladys, so much of her past is an obvious given even though nobody else ever talks to her about it. We were really aware of that going in. I would say for me, the shooting of it on set was never a problem because we always knew what the aim was.

What was more difficult, a much bigger challenge for me, is that you have to keep the whole film in your head all the time. The work that you do in prep is absolutely crucial in that you feel confident that you have a good hold, as much as you possibly can, on the thing as a whole. You need to know when you’re going to have your poignant, dramatic moments and when you’re going to have your laugh-out-loud moments. And then you shoot it with that plan as much in place as possible. Where it gets crazy is in the edit. Sometimes, lots of that works out, and sometimes, lots of it just doesn’t. There are laughs that you didn’t realize were going to be there, and there were laughs that you were sure were going to be there, but they aren’t!  And something you leave room for, something you hope for, is that actors will always bring something extra. However hard you’ve tried to anticipate everything, good actors will always bring something extra. Finding those moments in the edit is amazing. There’s nothing more exciting than an editor saying to you, I’ve recut that scene. Have a look at this. It can be so different from one cut to the next, even with a very short scene, something that’s 45 seconds. You use different cuts, different angles, and you can go from a comedy to a drama. That’s the power of it. And so, tonally, it was really in the edit that I had to keep the ship steered in the right way. And even then, it’s very easy to lose your way. The really scary part is when you start to let other people come in and watch it. If you have a trusted producer, you let them come in, and that’s when you really start to learn—through an audience, of course. But yes, without question, the challenge of maintaining the right tone for this film was the biggest and most important part of the job.