This week, The Hollywood Reporter has released the full uncensored video for their writers roundtable featuring Academy Award screenplay nominees Jordan Peele (“Get Out”), Aaron Sorkin (“Molly’s Game”), and Emily V. Gordon (“The Big Sick”), in addition to writer/directors Darren Aronofsky (“mother!”) and Fatih Akin (“In the Fade”) and “Darkest Hour” scribe Andrew McCarten.
The conversation is, as always, wide ranging with Aaron Sorkin giving his typical well thought out answers, at one point noting, “I read a review of ‘Molly’s Game,’ and the critic noted that I’ve done a bunch of nonfiction movies in a row about Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs and now Molly Bloom, but what I really do is use these characters for parts and make my own thing. When I do nonfiction, it’s not documentary. It’s a painting and not a photograph.”
Aronofsky, discussing the genesis of his film “mother!,” said, “It was the eighth year of Obama … I had never really [planned] to make a reflection of what’s happening; most of my things have been character studies. But then that’s what’s interesting because the reactions you get are all over the place. I’ve had everything from ‘This is an anti-immigration film’ to ‘This is a portrait of Mother Earth’ to ‘This is about the creative process.” The varying reactions seems to be what Aronofsky likes so much about the reception to his movie.
While Peele wrote his film “during the post-racial lie [in] the Obama era, when everyone was saying, ‘Hey, we’re past racism” but “by the time I had made the movie and started showing it to people, the country had evolved and woken up a little bit” leading to Peele changing the ending of the film.
When discussing reactions to their films, Gordon noted, “If you saw the movie of what actually happened to my husband and me, it would be a terrible movie and you would not enjoy it.” She goes on to start a discussion about how exactly to narrativize true life stories and when to draw the line between fact and fiction that is quite interesting.
Check out the entire discussion below and stay tuned for next week’s cinematographer roundtable.