We Need to Talk About Oscar

Writer-director Isabella Ivos built ‘None the Wiser’ out of a painful toothache, and she lays out how ideas born from everyday moments like that one survive the journey from notes to script to finished film. Placing the short beside her earlier ‘Robotica,’ where a woman surrenders her humanity to survive, Isabella turns to why the dread of leaving a piece of yourself behind keeps drawing her in, here through a young woman at the edge of adulthood who is about to lose her sense of play.

The story drops from a sterile dentist’s chair into a sedated dream, and Isabella explains how that cold, clinical start shapes the look of everything that follows. With cinematographer Barton Cortright, a previous guest on the show, she built a visual language that avoids the usual dream sequence tricks and keeps the anesthesia state tied to the body. Isabelle Grill and Zoe Ziegler face each other as two versions of one person, and she tells us what made their meeting feel like real inner dialogue instead of theater.

At under seven minutes, the film plays closer to a tale than a conventional short, and Isabella talks about how that framing let her bend pacing in the edit in ways a waking world story would resist. Its polished, high concept imagery points toward a first feature, so we close with the forthcoming challenges of upholding a controlled aesthetic once far more voices crowd the set, and the very first job she expects to hand off to someone else.

(Photo credit: Marcus Maddox)

For ‘Powwow People,’ filmmaker Sky Hopinka and his collaborators built the very gathering they filmed, a powwow held over three days at Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. Sky recalls the first obstacle that made the project feel less like a shoot and more like hosting a community event. Coordinator Gina Bluebird-Stacona anchors the weekend, and he describes how watching her work up close shifted his understanding of what it takes to create a space where people feel safe.

Drumming and dancing hum constantly beneath the film, yet its attention settles on the generations sharing time along the edges. Sky and cinematographer Shaandiin Tome describe the discipline that kept the lens there instead of chasing the spectacle at the center. The central figures appear as voices over the footage rather than through sit down interviews, and Sky pinpoints when that approach took hold. With emcee Ruben Littlehead and Arena Director Quanah Matheson already steering the day, he also explains how control of the room’s rhythm got shared.

Jamie John, a nonbinary dancer taking part in the traditionally female Jingle Dance, brings tradition and change into the same frame, and Sky details how the two worked together so that their presence felt like pure celebration. The film then settles into a half hour unbroken take of a Northern Traditional dance special, and Sky pinpoints the moment he knew everything else could fall away. He also lays out the missteps he sees well meaning documentary crews make when entering Indigenous gatherings, missteps this film was built to avoid.

Creator Jesse McKeown built 'Below' around a premise easy to sum up in a sentence, a sea creature terrorizing a small town, and explains how he kept that pitch from overshadowing the family drama and economic unraveling he actually wanted to tell. Having spent years visiting Newfoundland and growing attached to it long before cameras rolled, he talks through the strange task of shooting the place he loves in a way meant to feel threatening and dread soaked on screen.

Jesse walks us through how he and his crew worked to avoid the flattened, gray-blue look often applied to coastal or remote settings, aiming instead for something textured and alive. He set the story during a Come Home Year, a real Newfoundland tradition that pulls former residents back into town, giving him a built-in way to stage friction between people who stuck around through hard times and those returning from elsewhere.

Jesse also reflects on premiering the opening episodes at TIFF on a massive cinema screen, even though the show was conceived for television, and how designing for home viewing shaped his choices around both open water sequences and tighter interior scenes. At its core, he frames the show's real threat as change itself, a community watching its industry and way of life slip away, and considers how his own years navigating a constantly shifting television business fed into how he wrote these characters reacting to losing theirs.

(Photo: Courtesy of Netflix)

Writer-director Thomas Leisten Schneider makes his feature debut with 'Love - Love,' moving from the quick turnaround of commercials and shorts like 'Point and Shoot' into a much longer, more demanding shoot. He reflects on the unexpected challenges of holding onto a singular vision over that extended timeline, and on growing up between France and the US, a background that shaped his outsider's fascination with the road trip as a distinctly American form, and with the bleak, otherworldly quiet of the Salton Sea as a setting.

Much of the conversation centers on directing Haley Joel Osment as Andy, a character living with schizophrenia, and how Thomas balanced guiding that performance with trusting what Osment discovered on his own, including a moment on set that reshaped his sense of the character entirely. He also discusses casting Beck Bennett as Jeff, a brother pulled suddenly into caregiving while still searching for his own footing, and how he used the absurdity of the entertainment industry to offset the story's heavier emotional terrain.

Thomas connects his theater background to the rehearsal process he built for both actors, aiming for something true beneath the film's shifts between humor and pain. He also unpacks the title's tennis roots and how they tie into Bruce's past as a disgraced professional, before reflecting on how far he's come since his first day on set and what that journey revealed about his voice as a filmmaker.

Writer-director Paula González-Nasser spent years location scouting before making 'The Scout,' her feature debut following Sofia, played by Mimi Davila, through a single frantic workday. Paula reflects on whether scouting for a film about scouting changed her process at all, and whether her professional instincts made her hyper aware of every space she chose for Sofia to enter, or whether she had to consciously set those instincts aside.

The city around Sofia moves fast, but time slows the moment she steps inside a stranger's home, and Paula walks through the pacing and blocking choices behind that shift, protecting a sense of quiet within scenes that otherwise sit inside a hectic day. She also unpacks the irony of making such a measured film under the same high pressure conditions indie sets usually produce, and what it took to keep her crew from falling into the very chaos the film observes.

Paula gets into the toll of constantly watching and drawing from strangers without fully showing up as herself, and whether that same transactional dynamic extends into independent filmmaking more broadly, including any observational habits she's had to unlearn to stay present as a director. Turning to how younger creatives have responded to a film this honest about the industry's exhaustion, she weighs whether that honesty makes the path ahead feel more daunting or more navigable for them.

Writer-director Liz Sargent built 'Take Me Home' out of the life she and her sister Anna have lived, expanding her Sundance short into a feature. Liz opens up about what it means for her work to sit so squarely inside her own family, and whether any line can realistically exist between directing a project and living it, between being someone's director and being their sister once the camera rolls.

The short still stands on its own, and Liz looks back on it now with the feature finished, considering how her feelings toward that earlier piece have changed and whether the longer process gave her new appreciation for choices she made the first time around. She also gets into how a feature schedule, so much longer and heavier than a short, reshaped her working rhythm with Anna, and what pulled her toward telling this as fiction rather than documentary.

Anna acts opposite a seasoned ensemble here, and Liz describes how she built a set where her sister felt secure and genuinely creatively empowered among them, along with the accessibility practices her crew adopted to make that possible for everyone. She closes on the film's ending and the hopeful world it imagines, and whether offering audiences that vision makes the current state of care systems land even harder for her.

Writer-director-star Greg Vrotsos shot 'Situations' entirely within Silver Lake, and considers how uncommon it's become for a film to present Los Angeles as itself rather than a stand-in for somewhere else. He also unpacks the space between what he anticipated directing would feel like and what actually filled his days on set, plus whether the experience reshaped opinions he'd carried for years as an actor working under other directors.

Several scenes place Greg's character, Nick, in conversation with himself, and he identifies who or what served as his counterpart in those beats. He addresses his instinct to withhold emotional explanation and let the audience fill in what a character feels, and describes how his eye as a photographer informed the visual distance he and cinematographer Trevor Wineman maintained between the lens and the people on screen.

Greg also reflects on what playing a man trying to climb out of a creative and romantic slump revealed about his own habits as a performer, including instincts he found he could finally drop. We wrap by considering whether completing a film rooted in frustration over the scarcity of stories about adults in their thirties and forties actually eased that frustration, or simply underlined how rare those human scale stories remain.

(Photo: Courtesy of Liam Brown)

Joe Swanberg sets his first feature in nearly a decade against the vast landscapes of Anchorage, Alaska, a marked departure from the cramped apartments and coffee shops that have long defined relationship dramas. Joe reflects on what it meant to trade those intimate confines for bush planes and sprawling terrain, and how directing on that scale changed his day to day approach behind the camera.

Known for building loose, outline-driven scripts that let dialogue emerge in the room, Joe considers whether a larger crew and the added complexity of shooting in Anchorage forced him to tighten his structure, or whether his cast still found room to reshape scenes on the fly. He also touches on returning to 35mm for this production, and what that format brought to a story centered on people navigating their messy thirties from a more reflective, slightly older vantage point than his earlier work, without slipping into easy nostalgia.

This marks Joe's fourth collaboration with Jake Johnson, and he weighs in on how their long partnership keeps evolving, particularly given how closely this story draws from his own life. Joe also opens up about directing Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith, who had no prior films of his to measure this experience against, and what that dynamic looked like without any shared history to lean on.

(Photo credit: Mitchell Hansen)

Orlando von Einsiedel, the Academy Award winning director behind 'The White Helmets' and 'Virunga,' turns to romance with 'The Cycle of Love,' recreating PK Mahanandia's 6,000 mile bicycle journey from Delhi to Sweden. A dedicated London cyclist himself, Orlando reveals whether he pedaled alongside actor Chirag Lobo during production, and considers which strict verité habits he had to let go of once staging unscripted, actor driven scenes became central to the process.

Real strangers encountered along the route add another layer of unpredictability, and Orlando explains how he steered those spontaneous exchanges whenever they risked pulling too far from the emotional heart of PK's original trip. With little archival footage surviving from the actual 1977 journey, he leaned instead on a collection of handwritten letters and keepsakes, pointing to the single object that resisted translation to screen more than any other. He also weighs whether spending years immersed in a story anchored by a childhood prophecy altered his own outlook on fate versus coincidence.

Having built a career largely around documenting conflict, Orlando discusses the different creative muscles needed to render pure joy on screen without tipping into sentimentality. We close on the film's handling of caste based discrimination, describing his work with Dalit advocacy groups and one piece of guidance from that partnership that changed either a moment on set or a choice made later in the edit.

Director Jess Zeidman previously wrote 'Tahara' for Olivia Peace to direct, and this time stepped behind the camera herself, working alongside cinematographer Leo Gallagher, who moved up from gaffer on that earlier project to DP here. Jess unpacks what shifted in her instincts now that every creative choice landed on her desk, while Leo identifies which lessons from his prior work translated most directly to this larger undertaking.

Built from more than 40 interconnected vignettes and a cast of over 20 named characters, the film demanded a different kind of groundwork than anything shorter form requires. Jess and Leo describe negotiating how self-contained each segment should feel against the urge to thread them together, and how they mapped out a shoot this sprawling in setting and tone without boxing themselves in too rigidly.

Filmed over roughly a year across real New York locations with a lean crew and actors dressed in their own wardrobes, the visual approach, including mounting the camera on a Lazy Susan, had to carry a lot of narrative weight, whether each vignette earns its own distinct look or the throughline comes from one unified way of observing all these different lives. Jess and Leo close by reflecting on how laughter, both from crew during production and later from audiences, became a kind of compass throughout the process, guiding what ultimately made the cut and confirming when a scene had found its truth.