You both had so many roles in making this film. How did you two connect to make this film during Covid?
Mark Duplass: Natalie and I were acquaintances; friends of friends who had met a few times and I think we had the sense that we respected each other’s work and we had hit it off and liked each other. I knew I wanted to work with her and ideally share the screen with her at some point, and we hadn’t really had that opportunity.
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. You chose to make this film fairly soon after Anthony Bourdain’s death. Did your perspective change over the course of shooting? Morgan Neville: Well yes, it changed because there was so much I learned. […]
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?”
Can you talk about your scriptwriting and research process?
Writing can come with all sorts of weird blocks, so part of it for me is outsmarting those blocks
Mr. Turner seems to use a wonderful shorthand of grunting in the film at times to communicate his point.
He did grunt, but – and we also have this in the film – he was capable of great articulacy and a great number of classical references.
Your character is particularly interesting because he comes across as an avatar of our current president, only more articulate and charismatic. What was your approach to him?
John Lithgow: I choose to take that as a compliment
Do you think Nicolas Cage’s casting creates an expectation with the film? And if so, did you intentionally subvert those expectations in any way?
I think it does create an expectation. Certainly, people have certain types of films that they associate with Nic Cage. But we never set out to subvert anything
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Mitchells vs the Machines. This film has been long in the making and is clearly a heartfelt project. Mike, can you tell us how it all started? Michael Rianda: Sony had approached me about making a movie and because […]
Michael, how did the script find its way to you?
It came to me through Arlie [Day], our producer and casting director. What I like to think she saw it in for me was that the great subject of the film was empathy. It’s about how to look at other people’s lives and experiences uncolored by any sense of judgment.
How did you get involved initially with the film?
I got a call from my agent while I was in the middle of a different project, and he let me know that Alejandro wanted to meet me. And at first I was pretty disappointed, because we just couldn’t figure out how it’d work from a scheduling perspective.
How did you develop this story?
Aaron Sorkin: I like claustrophobic spaces and compressed periods of time, especially when there’s a ticking clock. I like being behind the scenes, in this case literally behind the scenes.
When an actor does Macbeth on stage, they get to experience the character straight through. How was it playing it in a film?
It’s just a normal thing, really. It’s such a rare opportunity to do something in chronological order when filming; it just never really happens.
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Changing the Game. Michael, I understand you came to the project when a friend shared that they had a child that was transgender. How important was it to make this film in order to become that much more of an […]
The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Florence Foster Jenkins. The opening scene is really beautiful, and frames the story so well. Can you discuss how that was conceived? Meryl Streep: Well, it’s interesting that you mention that scene, because the script that we both received […]
Did you find it helpful to engage with the previous iterations of the story when you were preparing for this film?
Nicholas Britell: Well, what was interesting, actually, was that when Benjamin first told me that he had this inspiration to to do Carmen, my first instinct was that I actually didn’t want to adapt or rearrange Bizet at all.