Archives

Q&A with Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of F1 The Movie.

This is an exceptionally immersive film. Can you talk about working with all your partners around to the world to get this made? It’s a huge undertaking.
Jerry Bruckheimer: That part was about a year-long process. We brought in Ehren Kruger, who wrote Top Gun: Maverick, to write the screenplay based on Joe’s [Kosinski] idea for the story. First, we went to Brad, pitched the idea, and asked if he was interested. And he said, I’m in because I’ve always wanted to make a racing movie. In fact, Joe almost made a racing movie with him! Then we pitched it to nine different studios and Apple was the one who gave us the tools for the way Joe wanted to make the movie. Those tools were no green screen, none of that. And Brad made it a stipulation—if you want me to make this movie, I’m in the car. We made a deal with Apple, and they said, all right, we’ll take that chance if you really believe you can make it safe and put Brad in that car while being smart about it. Joe took Brad out to track before he started anything. He had Lewis Hamilton there and they put Brad in a car and they asked Lewis, what do you think? Lewis said, he’s a real athlete, he can do this. And then Lewis took him for the ride of his life, spun him around the track. Which is insane, the way they drive.

Then we had those pillars together and then we went to London, Brad, myself and Joe, and pitched what we wanted to do to Stefano Domenicali, who’s the head of F1. Joe, being smart, didn’t do storyboards. He made a video. He showed them what he did in Top Gun. In other words, we didn’t have Russian jets. So what he did is he took the F18 and skinned it with a Russian jet. He showed him that piece of work, that film that he did, then he took one of their races and took our car and skinned one of their cars, so Stefano could see how our car integrated with F1. The other obstacle was, since Lewis is with Mercedes, what’s going to happen to the nine other teams? There are ten teams, two drivers to each team, and it’s the only sport where your teammate is also your competitor. We had to clear that hurdle too. And we did the same process with all the team owners, team principals, and eventually the drivers. Brad, Joe, and I stood in front of all twenty of the drivers and said, here’s what we want to do. We showed them the same video. During that season, Red Bull was really in competition with Mercedes. And since Mercedes was going to build our car, Red Bull thought for sure that they were going to be the villain because they hated each other that season. It took a year to convince them that the competition was going to be between our two drivers, not between other teams.

Eventually throughout the year, they kept seeing us at races and we went through this for two years before we started shooting. Then we had the actors and writers strike in the summer of 2023, and we had to shut down. But the good news is that Joe got to shoot all the second unit while the actors were out. He went out and shot a lot of interesting racing stuff. And then we came back the following year when we finally had the actors back. Meanwhile, Red Bull kept seeing us at the track, all the time. And Joe built a garage that was right in between Ferrari and Red Bull. We were the 11th team in the sport. We were integrated, just like you were integrated into this movie. It was fascinating to watch how this amazing sport operates because they travel. There are over twenty races all around the world, and they move their garages. They move all their cars. We were part of it, shipping our cars and our garage all over the world. It was really a daunting task. And then you had to do the driving and that was on the tracks while there were races. What we would get is time between the qualifying and practice races—they would give us ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and sometimes nothing. We had to make up for the nothing somewhere else. But it was such a great experience because in the end, what you saw was our two actors driving those cars every time we cut to them in the car. That was not green screen. That was them. When you cut to the outside of the car, that was also them driving. Over the course of four months prior to shooting, they became expert drivers. Not that they could compete in a race! Because our car is an F1 body with an F2 engine. And when you jump from an F2 engine to an F1 engine, it’s like almost going from a car to a rocket ship. Even with an F2 driver who’s a champion, it takes him at least a week to be able to understand the steering wheel and how to propel this car because they’re so difficult. These twenty drivers are the best in the world.

Everything that happened in this film racing wise, happened in F1. Through the course of history, every kind of gimmick that Sonny did in the film, an F1 driver did. Eventually we got all these stories from the team principals and the drivers themselves. The socks were a great example. The head of Williams told me he had a driver that brought mismatched shot socks to the track, and it was the first race he ever won. So he never changed.

We all want to have second chances

The visual design of this film is incredible, but I’d like to talk about the emotional design, because I found that to be incredibly compelling. Can you talk about constructing the opening?
Joseph Kosinski: When JP and Sonny first meet each other, it feels like you couldn’t find two more different people. They’re two different generations. They have two completely different backgrounds. They feel like they have nothing in common, but what you find over the course of the film is that they are the same person. Ruben’s character is the first one to point it out. When Sonny’s complaining about Joshua in the ice bath, Ruben points out that Sonny was all those things at his age. What I like about the film is it’s about two people who feel like they have nothing in common finding out that they actually have a lot in common. The main thing they have is this passion and talent for racing. The difference for Sonny Hayes is that something happened in his past that derailed him and he never got that dream of winning an F1 race. He thought it was lost forever. He made mistakes along the way and when he sees this kid who reminds him a lot of himself about to make the same mistakes, he’s able to use his experience and impart some wisdom and get Joshua Pearce on the path to being a great team leader, which Sonny already is. That’s the heart of their relationship.

Where do you find Sonny Hayes at the opening of this film? This was something that we actually had wrong the first time. In the first draft of the script, we opened and found Sonny Hayes at the Baja 1000 race, which is the now the last scene of the movie. Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff, who is the team principal of Mercedes, said you can’t go from Baja to Formula One. It’s impossible. It’s so different. There’s no way a driver could make that leap. That’s when Lewis said, why don’t you start him in endurance racing? And there’s this famous endurance race in Daytona called the “24 Hours A Daytona,” where they drive all night long. And what that unlocked for me was that we would find Sonny in his natural habitat in a US race in Florida. It’s IMSA style, which is the endurance racing where it’s a little closer to Nascar, which Jerry knows something about. Then we’re going to take this American icon and we’re going to drop him into the world of Formula One. And when Sonny shows up on that track fifteen minutes into film, it should feel like this a guy who’s walking onto another planet, you know? I love that contrast of bringing this outsider in. Brad’s the only American in this film, which is very true to Formula One. It’s a very international sport. It’s not a very American sport.

In a film like this, the instinct is to get to the racing right away, but you let the film breathe.
JB: Well, the racing is minor to me. We’re great—we can do that. We’re great at making action, but it’s the emotional connection that we have with our characters and with the audience that makes the movie special. If we can get you to feel something, if we can tell you a story that makes you connect with our characters and gives you an emotional response, then people are going to see that movie.

We had a bunch of blind preview screenings, where people have no idea what they are going to see. Then there’s a focus group, twenty people in the room. The first question they ask the focus group is, how many of you were aware of F1 or have been to an F1 race? One hand went up. Then they asked them, how many you are interested in watching a race or going to race? Every hand went up. Racing is what the energy is, but it’s the characters journey through the racing world that makes it interesting. Sonny and JP fight, but then they come together and build a team to win. We all want that in our lives. We all want to have second chances. We all want to have the ability to work with a great team and win. And that’s what we’re trying to convey to audiences.

Could you talk about developing the aesthetic of the movie? I’m particularly interested in how you integrated the lighting at the stadiums.
JK: I think the aesthetic was very much inspired by the world of Formula One. My entry was through Mercedes. We shot a lot of scenes at their factory. You can see how the aesthetic is very clean, very minimal, very high-tech. In terms of the lighting, I said to Claudia [Miranda, Cinematographer] that when we’re at the track, we’ll have to work with what we have, we’re not dragging lights around. I was excited to use this sort of available light approach and work with what we had. We were shooting during real events, which meant that instead of having a few hours to shoot a scene, we might only have eight minutes. But I didn’t want it to have a documentary feel. I didn’t want to feel like we just ran out there and hosed it down. We did a lot of pre-planning, rehearsal, and blocking with a stopwatch while having cameras preset so that I would never have to sacrifice compositionally what I wanted to do stylistically with the movie. We just had to be very much prepared to have the actors walk into a setup that was ready to go.

Q&A with Celine Song

Posted on by

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

Congratulations on this incredible film. I want to start with your producer credit. What does that role mean to you?
Celine Song: Being a producer can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it’s financial, but for me, it meant being in the creative trenches—casting, budgeting, locations, all of it. I learned so much from Past Lives, where I was already doing that work in an informal way. On Materialists, I made it official. It’s my original script, so I wanted to be fully involved from day one. And it wasn’t just about control—it was about responsibility. If I’m going to write about how money and value influence relationships, then I have to be accountable for the way the film itself is made, down to who we cast and how we frame the story. Being a producer let me shape the world onscreen in a way that felt authentic and complete.

it broke my heart even as we filmed it

I read that you worked as a matchmaker before becoming a filmmaker. How did that influence this film?
CS: In my twenties, I worked as a matchmaker for six months. It started as a way to pay rent, but it ended up being one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. When you ask someone what kind of partner they want, you get startling honesty—more honest than they are with their therapists! You hear what they desire, what they fear, what they think they deserve. And it made me realize how commodified romance has become. People shop for love like they’re shopping for apartments. They treat relationships as transactions. That time in my life gave me raw material—not just stories, but insight into how deeply our self-worth is tangled up with how we’re perceived. Eventually, I had to stop matchmaking because it distracted me from writing, but it shaped my understanding of human vulnerability in profound ways.

Speaking of performance, Pedro Pascal gives an incredible, heartbreaking portrayal. That final scene—was it as emotional on set as it is on screen?
CS: Oh, completely. That moment when Harry returns to his pre-surgery height is quietly devastating. It’s not about height, really—it’s about watching someone’s perceived social value evaporate in real time. Even if the audience doesn’t care about those metrics, they recognize how the world does. Pedro brought so much empathy and nuance. He understands objectification deeply—he’s lived through it in the industry. That’s what Materialists is really about: how commodification dehumanizes us, especially when we start internalizing those values. And Pedro didn’t just perform that scene—he embodied it. The silence, the resignation in his posture, the vulnerability in his eyes—it broke my heart even as we filmed it. It was one of those rare moments on set where the entire crew went silent because we all felt it.

I noticed how many of your scenes feel like conversations that suddenly take a life-altering turn. How do you write that way?
CS:I call them “transformational conversations.” It’s my favorite kind of moment in cinema. You think it’s just a casual dinner or an everyday chat—and then by the end, your entire worldview has shifted. I wrote the beer-and-cooking scene first—where Lucy and Harry first talk, and then John arrives. That triangle held the whole story. Another early scene I wrote was the breakup argument at the barn wedding. Those were the emotional cornerstones. I don’t outline rigidly. I daydream. I imagine the emotional shape of a moment before I write the dialogue. I think about what’s at stake, what needs to be revealed, and how the characters might resist revealing it. The structure comes from how people try to hide their truth—and how it eventually slips out anyway. That tension is where the best scenes live.

The film’s shot selection is so restrained and deliberate. Do you plan that all in advance?
CS: Yes—and I do it with my cinematographer, Shabier Kirchner. We’re creative soulmates. We shot list every frame together. But we also leave room for discovery. For example, that negotiation scene at the restaurant, where Lucy and Harry are essentially discussing terms before going home together—we shot that like a business deal. It’s in a wide two-shot that allows the actors to perform the entire scene, theater-style. I hate over-relying on close-ups. I trust actors. I love giving them space to move, to reveal things physically. Blocking is storytelling. When Lucy chooses to lean forward or stay back, that’s part of the narrative. And we always ask: does the shot respect the emotional truth of the scene? That’s our guiding principle.

Shooting in New York must have been a challenge—how did you make that happen?
CS: It was a fight! New York is difficult—permits, paparazzi, limited space. But this story couldn’t take place anywhere else. New York is the perfect contradiction: it’s where dreams and brutal reality coexist. The rent is astronomical, the living conditions can be rough—but people are here because they’re chasing something intangible. Love, ambition, meaning.

Materialists is about how we put a price on everything—ourselves included. So we had to be honest about the setting. We scripted everyone’s rent and neighborhood. We updated those numbers based on the market. There’s power in specificity. I wanted to make a film where the backdrop isn’t just pretty—it’s economically and emotionally truthful. And A24 believed in that. They trusted me to make a film that was both deeply personal and logistically ambitious.

Q&A with Christopher McQuarrie

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

You mentioned the first act was the hardest to edit. Can you expand on that?
Christopher McQuarrie: Every time we finish one of these movies, we’re at the premiere and in that moment where the film ends but right before the credits start, Tom will lean over and say, “we could do better.” We came away from Dead Reckoning knowing not only that we could do it, but we had to do it. Our first instinct was to make a shorter, tighter movie. The simplest way to cut a lot of time out of the movie is to cut the team out of the movie. The reason these movies have expanded from Rogue Nation to Fallout and Dead Reckoning is that we keep adding characters and we don’t sell those characters short. We’re adding more and more emotional arcs to the story. And the setup to emotional payoffs is what’s adding length to the movies because of the number of characters involved. I was determined after Fallout to give every character an emotional arc at least as good as Ethan’s was in Fallout. We had ways to short-circuit this narrative by telling a nonlinear story and to get you more quickly into the story. Within ten minutes of the movie, you were at Mount Weather with Angela Bassett, he was on the plane, and you were catching up to elements of act one as the story went on. It didn’t work. We then put the story in completely linear order. It didn’t work. One of the problems was that in all of those scenes, someone was referring to the Entity and you didn’t yet know what the Entity was—unless you had seen the previous movie, which we don’t ask you to do.

Over the course of making these movies, we’ve become clearer about the things you must have in the movie. For example, you need the team to be together as a group for a minute. You need to feel them as a team. You don’t need a big scene where they’re all sitting around the table making fun of each other. But you need to feel them as a team before the movie blows apart. Things like that we knew we could do very efficiently. Hayley Atwell’s introduction in the movie was shot two months ago. Because of the nonlinear structure, we had an idea for a short-circuited entrance for Hayley into the movie. You would primarily meet her in the torture chamber where she and Ethan get chained up. It created a series of problems. The writing was there, and the performance was there. But visually, you were first meeting this character shackled to a poll. She had no power. She had no agency. As soon as we saw the movie with an audience, we realized what we needed to do, and we shot that intro pickpocket scene in one day. After having made four of these movies, I knew the scene could not exceed two and a half minutes. We hit all the buttons we needed to tick in that scene. It’s setting up what will make Grace absolutely invaluable to the team later.

The essence of action is suspense

Can we talk a bit about the set pieces? Everyone looks forward to the incredible action scenes in these films. I particularly loved the submarine sequence and the off-screen torture room escape.
The off-screen fight in the scene we call the torture chamber—both literally and figuratively—was a very hard scene to shoot. We were aware of time constraints, so we came up with this clever idea of playing the fight off camera and making it more about character. We were patting ourselves on the back and Tom rehearsed it with Hayley, and Tom’s fight was much shorter than what you see on camera. I was recently asked a very good question, which was, how much time do I allow for Tom to recover from his stunts? And the answer is none. There’s no time to recover from anything that he’s doing in this movie, simply because with a pandemic and two strikes, we were never not in a state of catching up with the crisis of Dead Reckoning playing all the way through to The Final Reckoning. This is the picture I want put in your head before you can really understand the granular answer to your question.

[Writer] Erik Jendresen and I always knew Tom would return to the Sevastopol and that was going to be my signature scene, and the aerial was going to be Tom’s. We also knew that James Cameron and other filmmakers had done scenes—very effective and iconic scenes—in submarines and realized that once you flood this thing with water, you’re just swimming through it. It’s kind of ghostly and the hazards are specific and it’s kind of one note. However, if portions of this had been sealed and Ethan was having to move water through the submarine, you’d now have opportunities for him to go through the submarine in two states, one fully flooded when he’s imagining what the submarine will be, and then partially flooded when he’s moving through it. And then somebody got the idea of, wow, what if it started rolling? Now you just say something like that without ever thinking of the material costs or the two-and-a-half years that it would take to build a 1,000-ton fully submersible, 360-degree rotating, 45-degree pitching in both directions gimbal attached to two giant derrick cranes over an 8.5 million liter tank, and to which it could be submerged that they’re building behind my trailer while I’m going to work every day! And knowing that the physics are such, that you can’t actually plan the sequence until you build this gimbal and turn it on and see what it does. That’s how the submarine sequence started.

Then we designed Tom’s suit, which is cinematically great, in that it’s lit from inside and you can see his entire face. But it’s horrible in terms of the efficiency of getting oxygen to the person wearing the mask! Tom’s accumulating CO2 in his mask and he becomes hypoxic after about twelve minutes in the mask. That’s complicated further by the fact that the rim light around his mask is causing glare on the face shield from inside. So, you can see Tom but he can’t see you, nor can he see anything in the submarine that he’s swimming through while he’s doing that sequence. He goes through, he rehearses by sense of feel without it rotating. He doesn’t know where the torpedoes are going to be on the day. He gets a sense of where he can safely go by feel and by spatial awareness. He puts on the mask and my first AD says, “mask is going on” into my little Bluetooth headset, at which point I look at my watch and I take this bezel and I set the minute hand to whatever minute it’s on, knowing that in twelve minutes, I have to cut. The AD is there every two minutes, “two minutes in the mask.” We’re still moving Tom into position. “Four minutes in the mask.” I know at ten minutes, if we’re not calling action, I have to stop and pull Tom out and we’ll have to start the whole thing all over again.

And I also know that Tom being Tom, he’s going to push himself. From my experience of Tom being on the airplane wing where he also could only be for twelve minutes because the air is hitting him so hard from the propeller that while he’s breathing, he’s not actually getting oxygen. The molecules are dispersed. I got on the wing myself and experienced this firsthand. It’s horrific. You are breathing, but you’re not really getting oxygen and you’re being pounded by winds at 140 miles an hour. And Tom knew that if he didn’t get the shot in those twelve minutes, we would just have to go back to base, land, re-brief, come back, and do it all over again. I’ve got Mary Boulding, my AD, in the helicopter with me saying “four minutes on the wing.” She’s keeping track of all that. The plane, in order to be maneuverable, can’t fly with a full load of fuel. The pilot John Romain is constantly telling you “three minutes of fuel,” “eight minutes on the wing,” and John Romain can’t land when Tom is on the wing. Tom has to get back into the cockpit and because Tom hasn’t gotten the stunt, I will fly up next to him, open the door of the helicopter, stand out on the skid, and call cut. Tom looks at me and goes “twelve minutes on the way,” so then he goes twenty-four minutes on the wing and is so physically exhausted that he’s laying on the wing with his head and his arms hanging off the leading edge of the wing. And unless Tom signals us, we don’t know that he needs help. But we can’t tell if Tom is conscious or not. We can’t tell if he isn’t signaling us because he doesn’t need help or if he isn’t signaling us because he’s unconscious! We’re waiting for him to lift his hand, but he’s so exhausted he can’t even do that, and the pilot is saying, “I have two minutes of fuel” and we’re flying back to the FOB and waiting for Tom to get back into the cockpit so that we can land the plane. That’s a snapshot of what shooting those two sequences were like.

Then there’s fight where he’s in the missile compartment with the Marine who’s trying to kill him, and the Marine slashes that hose and the air comes hissing out of the hose and he shoots it in Tom’s face and that’s what kicks the fight off. Well, I made the mistake of asking the question, What’s the hose doing for the rest of the fight? We left it on, and everybody cleared the room and immediately you saw that it filled the room with this violent vapor and everything looked really cool. We knew we were intercutting it with a house on fire and it suddenly created a greater sense of the connection between the two environments. One small problem though, the air coming out of the hose is compressed carbon dioxide. It’s CO2! I went to Tom with an iPad after I had done a camera test and I said, I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t show you this, I know this was supposed to be a break but look at this. And Tom looked at it and he went, Fuck, that looks really good, we’ve got to do it. Tom and the stuntman Thomas, with whom he is fighting, are holding their breath throughout that entire fight. All that physical exertion, everything that they’re doing. We set everything up, we turn the air on, Tom holds his breath and he starts fighting and the CO2 as it accumulates starts to freeze on the floor and it’s spitting bullets of crystallized CO2, and they’re getting splinters of CO2 in their skin and in their eyes. This day that was supposed to be his break from the torpedo room! That’ll give you a sense of what he was going through physically.

I love the idea of the film being an organic process and allowing the movie to speak to you. When you are shooting these sequences, what are you watching for and how does that affect the design of the set pieces?
We’re not watching those things while we’re making the movie. We’ve watched them so many times and absorbed them and dissected them. We’re not really watching for the logistics. We’re watching it for the situations that Ethan gets into, and what creates humor, what creates empathy, what creates tension? The essence of action is suspense, and the essence of suspense is not creating a scenario where the audience thinks that’s impossible. The truth of the matter is you know how the movie is going to turn out. You know that if Ethan is getting in the submarine and we’re an hour into the movie, you know where this sequence is going. You can presuppose the outcome of that sequence. In the first five minutes of any movie, you’re signing a contract with the audience and you’re telling them the kind of movie that it’s going to be. In the case of a Mission: Impossible, there are a lot of sequences that might seem scary, but you know it’s going to end well. Just because of where we are in the timeline. But I have to create a situation where you cannot imagine how it will possibly end. That’s the suspense. The other element of suspense that’s free that nobody really talks about is if the movie is working, if movie has got you and it’s affecting you, some part of you is thinking, God, I’m really having a good time, please don’t mess this up. Just don’t blow it. I just want to enjoy the whole movie. That is a layer of suspense that you are feeling that you only get the first time you watch the movie. That is something of which we are acutely aware. We don’t rely on spectacle. All of this action would be spectacle if you didn’t care about those characters, and you only care about these characters because of the onerous amount of setup that the movie requires.

Q&A with Laura Piani and Camille Rutherford

Posted on by

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 TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2026 IN NEW YORK CITY

Posted on by

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

# # #

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