The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered Tom Ford, Pedro Almodovar, Kenneth Lonergan, Noah Oppenheim, Allison Schroeder, and Taylor Sheridan for a Writer roundtable interview. Here are some of the highlights:
Somebody said all writing is autobiography. True or false?
ALLISON SCHROEDER: "True, to a certain extent. You leave your imprint on every screenplay. I like to bring my take as a woman to all my female characters, and that hopefully makes them a little more layered and complex, certainly with Hidden Figures. I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes. So when this came along, I thought: "Yes, I know this world. I know the smell in the cafeteria of NASA.""
NOAH OPPENHEIM: "My mother grew up in Scranton, Pa., in the tiniest two-bedroom apartment you could imagine. But she saved, from the time she was a little girl, every newspaper and magazine about Jackie Kennedy, and particularly the ones in the aftermath of the assassination. And when I would go to my grandmother's — my grandmother still lived in that apartment — I would be in my mom's old room, and I discovered this box of memorabilia, and I was just struck by it, as a little boy, looking at this beautiful woman. And then as I got older, as some boys get into baseball, I got into politics and American history, and I was fascinated by the Kennedys. So I suppose [Jackie] has its seeds in my own story."
TOM FORD: "Isn't there something always autobiographical, though? You're writing the words these people are speaking; they have to go through your filter, even if you're imagining you are Jackie. [Susan, Amy Adams' character in Nocturnal Animals,] is quite literally me. Every time you write, you're writing that character through your lens."
KENNETH LONERGAN: "But interests do exist outside of oneself, and [so does] trying to understand them and see patterns in the world that other people don't see, simply because everyone sees the world from his or her own point of view. In that sense, it goes beyond being strictly autobiographical. I get to see the world the way Pedro Almodovar sees it, and he's also seeing things that are not within himself but outside himself that attract his interest. It's this nice combination of sharing someone else's experience but also sharing their experience of things that are not simply a direct reflection of that person's personality."
PEDRO ALMODOVAR: "I don't mean [my films to be] some verification of my life. No, sir."
LONERGAN: "But you're not writing about yourself at the time. One of my favorite movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is about someone who's in love with flying saucers and outer space and spaceships — which I also am. And it's a very unusual movie because all it's about is a guy who meets a flying saucer and then tries to find it again —"
OPPENHEIM: "— and abandons his family in the process."
LONERGAN: "That's the wrinkle in the story. But I overlook it, as you have to overlook some things."
What did your acting experience bring to your writing?
SHERIDAN: "A tremendous amount. As an actor, and not a great one, I had to do a lot of work to make it seem believable. Exposition in dialogue is something that you do a lot when you're on television, like I was, and it gave me an allergy to that. [Now] I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. And having an understanding of what dialogue is easy to say and what’s hard to say, that's helpful, too. You find yourself playing the scene in your head and hearing them talk, and, "No, he wouldn't say it that way," and it just refines itself."
LONERGAN: "I really don't know what’s going on if I don't hear it embodied by actors. And I can't just show up at the beginning of rehearsal without having heard it a few times already."
FORD: "One actor can deliver the line, and it sounds perfectly natural, and one actor can deliver the line, and it just doesn't sound believable."
ALMODOVAR: "Julieta [which originally was meant to star Meryl Streep] would be completely different if I did it in English [with a different actress]. Once I decided to make the adaptation in Spain and in the Spanish culture and language, I changed a lot. I really even forgot the original short stories by Alice Munro [the book is based on her work] for a simple [reason]: In Spain, there's a guilty complex or the sentiment of guiltiness. And the family culture here [in America] is very different from the Spanish family culture. The language pushed me to do it in a very different way."
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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