Writers Jesse Eisenberg, Mona Fastvold, Peter Straughan, and More Trade Secrets from Their Oscar-Nominated Films
Every year, I enjoy grilling the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Writers Panel, the smart folks who wrote the best movies of the year. Three of this group of Oscar nominees adapted their screenplays.
For “Conclave” — nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor Ralph Fiennes, and Supporting Actress Isabella Rossellini — Peter Straughan elegantly adapted Robert Harris’ 2016 papal thriller. He captures the political chess game of pitting the pieces against each other, which lets the audience try to follow who’s winning. But he also focused on one cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) and his interior journey facing doubt. Straughan started out as a playwright but moved to writing films like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” when he figured out how much more money he could make. He did make some cinematic changes: He added more explosions. (“I would quite like to go back and do some theater at some point,” he said.)
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For “Nickel Boys,” documentary producer Joslyn Barnes rejoined her “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” director RaMell Ross, adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2019 novel. The immersive and emotionally powerful movie, up for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, devised a new way to portray point-of-view onscreen for this story of two boys abused at a southern reform school.
“The way that [Ross] and our cinematographer, Jomo Fray, came up with shooting was to try to align the audience’s subjectivity with the subjectivity of the characters,” said Barnes. “We had to then also devise a way to write it. And so the other proposal alongside of this was to do no coverage, to just shoot it in what we call ‘oners,’ which is just one take, basically.”
For “Sing Sing,” nominated for Best Actor Colman Domingo and Adapted Screenplay, Clint Bentley and his writing partner Greg Kwedar, who directed, based their narrative on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. They worked closely with people who were incarcerated there as they kept seeking greater verisimilitude to the people they were portraying. At the movie’s end, when Colman Domingo’s character leaves Sing Sing after 25 long years, he’s picked up by his cohort Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who plays himself in the movie. In this case, throwing out the dialogue was the best scenario.
“We wanted to show, in the end of the film, that it wasn’t about this triumphant moment on stage,” said Bentley. “It was about what they were doing in the day-to-day in that program with each other and where they were finding healing.” Next up, they co-wrote “Train Dreams,” which just got picked up by Netflix at Sundance, this time directed by Bentley.
The panel, meanwhile, featured three original screenplay writers.
One is written by married writing partners. “The Brutalist” screenwriter Mona Fastvold created with her husband, director Brady Corbet, this portrait of a Hungarian holocaust survivor and architect (Oscar nominee Adrien Brody) who struggles to achieve the American dream. “We wanted to explore a story between an investor and an artist,” she said. “So, we’re filmmakers.”
They wrote and wrote and wrote this screenplay, and Fastvold couldn’t stop fussing with it, she said. And it had to be three and a half hours long. They both shoot second unit on each other’s films. Fastvold is a director herself, including 2020 Venice premiere “The World to Come.” She’s already finished directing the upcoming musical “Ann Lee,” a biopic about the founder of the American Shaker community.
For “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in this original dramedy about two cousins (Eisenberg and Oscar nominee Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland to visit their ancestral homeland. Making the tonal shift from a comedy of two sparring cousins to a concentration camp visit was the most difficult challenge, Eisenberg said.
“When I was 16, I wrote my first script, which was about Woody Allen,” said Eisenberg, “changing his name to Woody Allen. The script got sent to people, and ultimately he threatened to sue me. And I assume it won’t be the only time I’ll be sued for writing something. But to this day, it is.”
These days, Eisenberg’s writing process involves him pretending not to write a particular thing, whether a short story or play or screenplay. He writes emails to himself, and eventually, if a story takes a feature-length shape, he inputs them into Final Draft. Next up: Eisenberg stars in “Now You See Me 3.”
For “September 5,” Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum wrote — with his old film school comrade Moritz Binder — this true story focused on the ABC Sports newsroom during the 1972 Munich Olympics, when terrorists kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes. After the writers interviewed Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), who directed the live telecast from the ABC Sports newsroom, they threw out their first script and focused entirely on the ABC coverage of the unfolding tragedy. Having Sean Penn as an American producer helped them land their cast, including Peter Sarsgaard as ABC News chief Roone Arledge.
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