MovieMaker

David Shields has given hundreds of interviews to promote his 22 books on everything from race to sports to sex to J.D. Salinger to Donald Trump. He's kept a record of every question, and uses those questions in the literary collage of his 23rd book, The Very Last Interview.

Director Nick Toti and screenwriter Rachel Kempf (who are married) set out to turn the book into a movie, and succeeded. "The Very Last Interview" arrived late last year, and is set around Christmas — though the book has nothing to do with the holidays. It's a daring, challenging adaptation, in which Shields endures probing-to-cruel questions that also serve as a searing monologue.

The film questions the motivations of Shields (played by Chris Doubek) and his interviewer (Ashley Spillers), and in this talk we examine the "perverse dialectic" between interviewers and interviewees.

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Amanda Idoko's first two screenplays made The Black List, the highly esteemed annual survey of best unproduced scripts. Her first screenplay was made into the new film Breaking News in Yuba County, which features an ensemble cast that includes Allison Janney, Mila Kunis, Regina Hall, Awkwafina, Wanda Sykes and others. Amanda is also known for starting the #showusyourroom social media campaign, which encouraged showrunners and writers' rooms to post photos of their writing staff to show how they are participating in diverse and inclusive hiring.

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Portland Film Festival co-founder Joshua Leake went from accepting an award from Hugh Jackman while on the phone with his mom to co-founding the Portland Film Festival — one of MovieMaker's 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.

We talk about the joys of Portland, how to get into the lovingly curated festival, and some of the great ideas he's borrowed from other festivals to make sure Portland is always filmmaker first. Along the way we talk about pandemic-safe pod viewing, making a theater in a warehouse, Chuck Palahniuk, and much more.

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Andre Gower's documentary Wolfman's Got Nards looks at another movie—1987's Goonies-esque kids horror/comedy The Monster Squad—and the vibrant fan community that has developed around it over the years. The Monster Squad (co-written by a young Shane Black) was a bomb upon release, but thanks to video rentals and cable TV, it slowly built a massive following. It eventually became the kind of cult classic that tours internationally, with fans showing up in costume to shout every line of dialogue at the screen.

Gower is uniquely suited to have made this documentary—as a child actor, he was one of The Monster Squad's main stars. His doc looks at the road the movie took to becoming a cult classic, as well as the importance of fan communities and the connections between people with shared pop culture memories.

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Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby star in Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, about two pioneer women who fall in love. Casey Affleck, who produces and acts in the film, tells the story of how lunches at a "weird restaurant by the airport" helped lead to the creation of the Sundance and Venice film festival darling.

Fastvold also talks about shooting on film in the mountains of Romania, and she and Waterston describe the complex and original way they plotted out Waterston's narration of the film.

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Slamdance is a film festival for filmmakers, by filmmakers. In this episode, festival president and co-founder Peter Baxter and festival manager Adele Han Li share some intel on how it chooses films, what it values, and how it's changing.

Rather than retreat in the face of the pandemic, Slamdance — like many other festivals — has seized on the opportunity to innovate. This year one of its biggest additions is a new showcase called Unstoppable that focuses on films by moviemakers with disabilities.

In this episode we also learn about the Slamdance Bible, discuss whether indie filmmaking is harder now than it was in the booming '90s, and hear stories about a young Christopher Nolan — one of many filmmakers Slamdance helped launch.

Slamdance 2021 starts this Friday, and you can get a $10 pass ($5 for students) at Slamdance.com.

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Gary Oldman, simply one of the best actors ever, stars in Mank as Herman J. Mankiewicz, the brilliant but alcoholic screenwriter whose achievements include Citizen Kane.

In this interview, Oldman quickly shoots down the notion that he used to deliberately seek out wild roles, and explains how he utilized elements of his own past to play Mank. He also tells us where Citizen Kane ranks among his favorite movies.

If you like this episode, please subscribe, write a review, or ask Charles Foster Kane to write about it in one of his many newspapers.

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Wild Indian follows two young cousins on an Ojibwe reservation who suddenly become involved in something terrible.

Thirty years later, one of them (Michael Greyeyes) is living what seems, on the surface, to be a perfect life on the West Coast. The other, Ted-O (Chaske Spencer), finds himself in a very different place.

Wild Indian writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr. and producer Thomas Mahoney join us to talk about the film's origin, why Corbine doesn't think the film's title is provocative, and how fun it is to watch Jesse Eisenberg in awkward situations.

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Early in her career, Trina Wyatt launched the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal, and was the festival's Founding Director. She was a film producer and a studio executive before founding Conscious Good, a media company that produces and distributes entertainment aimed at raising people's consciousness. We spoke with Wyatt about CGOOD TV, which is a new streaming platform dedicated to conscious entertainment.

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The Reckoning, directed by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Game of Thrones) follows a woman named Grace (Charlotte Kirk) who loses her husband during a plague, becomes the target of her landlord's advances, and is accused of witchcraft when she rejects him.

Then things get worse.

Marshall and Kirk talk about whether real-life events motivated them to make a story about a witch hunt, whether they changed anything because of COVID-19, and what it's like to work with someone who is also your partner in life.

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