It was fascinating to learn that you had already been in the process of making a film about wildfires when the camp and woolsey fires occurred. Can you tell us about that?
Lucy Walker: That’s right. The reason I was able to really embed, and I knew what I was looking at and could just jump in, and start asking the right questions was because I’d actually been working on the film already for about a year at that point.
Mr. Weitz, did you write this role for Ms. Tomlin knowing she’d play the part?
Paul Weitz: Yes, I— well, no, I didn’t know she’d play the part!
How did you get involved with this film?
This project actually just came to me—Katie [Couric] got in touch with me out of the blue with an email that simply said, “would you be interested in doing an Inconvenient Truth on food?”
Can you talk about conceiving this story, and you’re writing process?
Noah Baumbach: It was inherent in the title that we are asking, “Does anyone really know what the story of a marriage is, and if that story has an end of sorts, does it mean it wasn’t a marriage?”
How long did it take for you both to adapt your own experiences for the screen?
Emily Gordon: We started writing this five years ago, which is five years after the events of the movie.
How did you two come to work on this project together?
We started working on what we thought would be a triptych, looking at sex, birth, and death on screen from a women’s perspective. We started the one about sex and it was an avalanche of ideas and people and different actors that we wanted to speak with, and that’s really where it began.
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of I Used to Go Here. What was the inspiration for the film? Kris Rey: I found the inspiration for the movie when I was on tour with my last film [Unexpected] four years ago. I got invited to a bunch […]
How did that expansion work? How do you open up that short story?
Kogonada: I had the best experience a filmmaker can have with an author.
Sometimes as a documentarian, you don’t have total control. But it this film you were able to script things and envision scenarios.
Kirsten Johnson: Honestly I was trying to engage in not being in control.
How did you get from First Cow to this story?
Kelly Reichardt: Well, both films were written with Jonathan Raymond and we started out with this idea of making a film of this little-known Canadian painter, Emily Carr. We wanted to focus on a ten-year period of her life when she was a landlord.
When you first read the script and found it to be based on a real event, what was your reaction?
John Boyega: I think I was just a bit shocked that I didn’t know about this specific event.
Ms. Varda, you say very early in your film that “chance” is your assistant. JR, would you say that you agree with that philosophy?
JR: Yes, definitely and that’s why we got along well.
How did you develop the particular visual language of this film?
It was really challenging. There were things that we felt were important early on that ended up boxing us in.
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Flee. How long have you known Amin? What was it like to hear the truth about his background? Jonas Poher Rasmussen: I’ve known him for twenty-five years. I grew up in this very small village in Denmark, with like 400 […]
Let’s talk about the story. What inspired this script?
I’ve always liked movies about streetwalkers. I mean, there’s been so many of them, from every culture.