Can you talk about the collaboration between the two of you in terms of writing, producing, and performing this?
Rafael Casal: Yeah, Diggs, can you?
Daveed Diggs: I mean we’ve been working on this for ten years at this point with our two producing partners the whole time, Jess and Keith Calder.
What are the origins of the script?
Gus Van Sant: I live in Portland, Oregon. I had moved there, I think, in 1982. I had made a couple of films, and John Callahan was a visible, local character.
Let’s start from the beginning. Where did this come from?
Boots Riley: I knew I wanted to write something that happened in the world of telemarketing.
The letter’s from a five year old boy and it says, “Dear Mr. Rogers, are you for real? Are you for real or not?”
This is something of a personal story, correct?
Ari Aster: The beautiful thing about genre filmmaking and the horror genre in general is that you can take a personal story or feeling that you need to work through and push it through this filter