SBIFF: Heavy Hitting Writers on Their Craft at SBIFF
PRESENTING SEVEN OSCAR NOMINATED WRITERS AT THE ARLINGTON ON TUESDAY NIGHT, the Santa Barbara Film International Festival hosted a panel of talented, well versed writers of all cultures, career arcs, and backgrounds.
Helmed by IndieWire’s Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson, it was a lively panel — entertaining, funny, and insightful, covering the creative process, the craft of screenwriting, and working with your heroes. Thompson, who has a long and reputable background in film criticism, proved to be a deft interviewer, drawing the panel out to talk in depth about their work. Making the truth your own was a theme that ran throughout the night.
Samy Burch (May December) had to navigate the fine line between telling a true story and finding the deeper truth in fiction. May December contextualizes the scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau (the school teacher who seduced a 13-year-old boy), and added in complex layers about who gets to tell one’s story and how that can re-traumatize the victims. Considering the movie’s moments of acidic comedy, for Burch, “calibrating dark humor” within a story about the devastating fallout of sexual abuse, its survivors, and perpetrators, was a delicate undertaking.
Perhaps the funniest person on the panel was Dave Hemingson (The Holdovers), whose wry sense of humor was front and center as he discussed meeting director Alexander Payne, one of his heroes. He described the “long winding path” of The Holdovers from TV pilot to the big screen as a slow burn, thinking nobody will make this, but it being well worth the wait. A love letter to his late father, Hemingson spoke of grief and healing, saying, “You get stronger in broken places.”
As for art imitating life, the inspiration for Celine Song’s Past Lives was rooted in her own experience. She described being in a bar, sitting between her current partner and a past boyfriend, and feeling like “a portal between my past, present, and future.” Her movie is a meditation on themes of what if and what could be; and sometimes, she said, “There are moments when you have to say goodbye.”
When it comes to obsession, Cord Jefferson (American Fiction) spoke at length about being consumed by the work. He would not leave a scene until it felt done, possessing some kind of completeness to it, before moving onto the next. While that might seem too methodical, other writers talked about juggling several projects at once, and in Arthur Harari’s (Anatomy of a Fall) case, having no boundaries at all between one’s private life and the telling of the story.
Jefferson also addressed the challenges in adapting a novel into a screenplay, especially when taking the rich internal life of characters in a novel and finding how to show that in a film. American Fiction is fairly straightforward, however, in comparison to Poor Things. Tony McNamara managed to adapt a strange and surreal story, and walk right up to the line of squeamish and inappropriate moments, and still keep the audience invested in the tale. He indicated that Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, allows you to find your way, and is more a committed collaborator than your traditional director.
With such a strong group of screenwriters present, the panel offered a lot to digest for would-be writers in the room. No matter who gets the Oscar this year, the career arc of everyone on stage seems to be on the rise.
