The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered Jordan Peele, Aaron Sorkin, Darren Aronofsky, Anthony McCarten, Emily V. Gordon and Fatih Akin for a writer's roundtable interview. Here is an excerpt:
Is an autobiographical film easier or harder to write?
GORDON It was both. It had been five years since the events of the film, and that helps tremendously because you're far enough away that you can look at it and still feel it, but not so much that it's overwhelming you. If you see someone create a piece of art while they're still in the throes of going through something, it feels too vulnerable for you to be watching — which can be beautiful. But we didn't want this to feel like an overly intense kind of movie, [where] you feel in danger while you're watching.
JORDAN PEELE The power of story is that it is one of the few ways we can really feel empathy and encourage empathy. [With] all the disasters going on in the world today, the worst on a social level seems to be this lack of empathy, this lack of being able to understand each other. We become enemies, we push each other away. Built into the idea of story is the idea that you have a protagonist. When you have a protagonist, the whole trick that all of us are trying to do is bring the audience into that protagonist's eyes, and a good story is one of the few ways we can really [make] somebody feel for somebody else because they're experiencing it through entertainment.
ARONOFSKY That's the power of cinema, that you can make a film about a 6-year-old girl in Iran or an 80-year-old guy in the U.K., and if the filmmaking is working, you can completely connect.
GORDON When I was watching Get Out [a horror film about an interracial romance] in the theater the first time, it was an audience of mostly white people, and at the end, when the police car rolls up and the lights go on, I heard the audience go, "No!" I thought, what a great thing, that we've gotten an audience of white people to be upset about seeing a cop car because they know this is not going to be good, whereas normally the police car means everything's going to be fine.
PEELE You know, I was worried at several stages during the writing that this would be this horribly divisive project where maybe I'd lose black people because we're victims, and that's hard to watch. Maybe I'd lose white people because white people are the villains, and that would be an assault. And one of the most fulfilling things to see was how an audience would go in with their preconceived notions, but by the middle, they were all Chris, they were all the main character.
SORKIN I'm curious: I had heard that there was a time in your writing process when the police car showed up — and it was the bad ending that we all feared it would be. Is that true?
PEELE That's true. I wrote the movie primarily during the post-racial lie [in] the Obama era, when everyone was saying, "Hey, we're past racism. We did it." And so the movie was originally meant to be a wake-up call to say: "No. Guess what?" By the time I had made the movie and started showing it to people, the country had evolved and woken up a little bit. Black Lives Matter was out there. We had attention to the racial issues. It was impossible to entertain the post-racial lie. And it became very clear by showing people the movie that they needed a hero, they needed the movie to be an escape. What I love about that moment you're talking about where the police show up [is] the audience does all the work of the original ending. And then I sort of have my cake and eat it, too.
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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