Writer-director Paul Greengrass wasn’t interested in making a by-the-numbers historical reenactment with The Uprising. He wanted to tell the story in a way only he knows how to do — as an epic action film that felt immediate, raw and spectacular. “It sounds like distant history, but it really is not,” the filmmaker says. “In that story, you can see all the colors of today.That’s what I want this film to be about. It’s an action-adventure story. It’s got romance, it’s got politics, but most of all it’s the turbulent story of what happens when one farmer moves from the marshlands of East England into the streets of London in search of a better life.

“I was born into a cinema family who held a strong belief that films could change the world, or at least your perception of it. My Greek father read me myths; Walt Disney wasn’t allowed in our home. I grew up on tales of heroes making grand gestures, throwing themselves into fire, and Hephaestus forging weapons in a volcano,” says writer-, who co-wrote the screenplay of Sacrifice with  Will Arbery.

Director David Ayer believes that no great story should remain untold and once he read the script for Heart of the Beast, he knew that he wanted to be the person to tell this one. “It was simply one of the best pieces of writing I’d ever seen,” he says. “It didn’t just make me cry; it made me ugly cry. I’d have to stop and process a little bit, then start reading a few more pages.”

My friends and I filmed Idiots says writer-director Macon Blair. It’s a labour of love. Short money, long hours, sweat equity, cussed determination- you know the drill. It was always designed to be a broad, scatological, slapstick-y kind of a comedy but as time went on, and especially after the first version fell apart, it began to resemble more of a film about desperate people trying to do their not-great best, which is always going to be a soft spot for me; and in spite of the characters’ undercurrent of bitterness, I think of it as a fundamentally warm-hearted story about found friendships.

For Spider Island screenwriter Christopher Jolley, the answer lay in a lifelong fascination with survival stories and the primal fear of creatures we think we understand. “I’ve always been intrigued by the way fear works—how something as small as a spider can completely disarm us. The idea of an entire ecosystem tipping out of balance, of humans suddenly becoming the outsiders, felt like a powerful starting point for a story. What began as a contained thriller quickly evolved into something more expansive—an emotional, character-driven story set against an overwhelming natural force.

To create the significant creep factor for Insidious: Out of the Further, Chase also drew on his own life and his own fears, especially when he saw the way to juxtapose those fears with the everyday, normal, safe activity of human life. One example: the pillow fort that becomes an endless, inescapable labyrinth, with the dead closing in from two directions. “I find claustrophobic spaces absolutely terrifying. Even if I just have to reach under my bed, I feel closed in,” says writer-director Jacob Chase. “And the idea of a pillow fort becoming a nightmare … what’s the worst possible thing that could happen with that very normal, innocuous thing?” 

‘I had the idea of this story of these alpha dog characters and the setting of this garbage dump,” says writer-director Wes Anderson about the stop-animation Isle of Dogs. It sounds like a very odd thing to have to wait in the wings: a pack of dogs who lived in a garbage dump, but that was what I had. The story really could have been set anywhere but our big inspiration with the movie was to make it about what we loved in Japanese cinema and it grew into something more to do with all kinds of Japanese culture and our enthusiasm for it.’

‘I’d always wanted to make a dinosaur movie, since I was a kid,’ says Writer / Director / Producer David Robert Mitchell. “When I was walking through my neighbourhood, I passed an alleyway, and I imagined that there was a dinosaur there digging through the trash. And I thought, I want to write something that feels like this.  I want to make a movie that feels like this image in my mind… it was important to me that The End of Oak Street have all of the spectacle, the suspense, the action, and the personal stakes, all the things that you want from a popcorn movie.’

“I wanted to make a film that was a love letter to America on the 250th anniversary of America,” says writer-director Jon Erwin about Young Washington. “We talk about it at Wonder, telling stories that restore faith in things worth believing in, and America is one of those things. It’s not perfect, but it’s something that we can perfect together and we should celebrate together.”

Written and directed by Adrian Chiarella, Leviticus is an Australian coming‑of‑age romantic supernatural horror. “I wanted to make a movie where we explored homophobia, and homophobia is a type of fear, and horror is the genre of fear. That’s what it always does; it doesn’t matter if it’s a supernatural film or a slasher movie or some sort of psychological study. It’s about digging into the deep fears of the characters and expressing them in this genre that is a little larger than life. ”

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, from a script written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Justin Kuritzkes, Spider‑Man: Brand New Day is based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. “It’s the first time that Peter is operating alone,” Cretton explains. “Peter has always had a wonderful community around him, but now, because of the world-changing events at the end of No Way Home, he must do everything by himself. A huge part of the story is watching Peter undergo an emotional and physical transformation. The two are linked.”

Director Derrick Borte and his writing collaborator Daniel Forte approached The Get Out with respect. “We adapted The Get Out from Strip by Thomas Perry, and it’s this dark, kind of neo-noir world,” Forte says. During development, Borte and Forte revisited many LA noir benchmarks, layering the screenplay with nods for sharp-eyed cinephiles. Forte explains, “We talked about movies like Sexy Beast, Go, To Live and Die in LA… You speak the language of the world you’re in. I think we’re playing into all those pieces.”

Director Rod Lurie co‑wrote the screenplay for Lucky Strike with Marc Frydman. “I wanted to write a story about a man who is absolutely alone in war,”  says Frydman. “I wasn’t interested in glorifying war. The screenplay had to celebrate heroism without celebrating the war itself,” says Lurie. “Castle is not a superhero. He’s a guy who keeps going because stopping means dying. That’s the psychology I wrote.”

Written, directed, and produced by visionary South African filmmaker Robert Benjamin, Angels: They Are Amongst Us is a deeply personal project shaped by his 21‑year spiritual odyssey and his insistence on portraying divine encounters as lived, disruptive truth rather than symbolic uplift. “To see a project that took two decades to bring to life finally reach audiences across the continent is beyond humbling. It proves that independent filmmakers can retain their creative voice, maintain ownership of their IP, and still achieve massive, unprecedented theatrical distribution.”

“Whether it’s the narrative through-line of Odysseus or the singular episodes that make the entirety of the epic, The Odyssey underpins almost all of cinema,” Nolan says. “It’s certainly there in every movie I’ve ever made, to a degree I never before realised. It was a fun thing to discover as I got into the work of adaptation,” says Christopher Nolan of The Odyssey. “What I’ve been doing in my films over the years, whether you look at The Dark Knight or Interstellar or Inception, is taking fanciful ideas and grounding them in reality,” Nolan says. “If the films have worked, I think some of their power and appeal come from that they earned their worlds with an audience, so the audience could believe in exciting, outlandish things.”

With Evil Dead Burn, writer-director Sébastien Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard deliver a bold new chapter that deepens the mythology while quite literally setting the franchise ablaze. “Florent and I wanted to primarily focus on characters—fear and action would come later. So, we started with our homework and watched all of the early Evil Dead movies. We realised that they were obviously talking about death, but also about love. So, we thought that the death of love would be an interesting idea, and the impact on the in-laws would be kind of universal for an audience.”

“It’s my hope in retelling the Robin Hood story that we become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves and often come to take for granted in terms of what they mean and why people told them in the first place,” says writer-director Michael Sarnoski of The Death of Robin Hood. ” For those who might claim this isn’t their Robin Hood because he doesn’t conform to their worldview, I hope they can ask themselves, well, why not?”

“Disclosure Day plays to what people know because the whole idea is that powerful forces have been covering it up and trying to convince people that what we have heard over the years is not true,” says screenwriter David Koepp. “So it was important to Steven to not deviate wildly from the stories we have been told. That said, we also wanted to bring our own imaginations to it, so we have a lot of original ideas that riff on established tropes.”

Steven Spielberg began to write a story for Disclosure Day in the Notes app on his phone. “I began at the end,” Spielberg says. “Ironically, that’s how I started writing Close Encounters, too: I started with the last scene, then backed up and figured how to earn that ending, with characters that can take us on a very identifiable journey through all the mystery toward a final act of communion.

Power Ballad marks another major creative milestone for filmmaker John Carney, who both directed and co‑wrote the film with Peter McDonald. For John Carney, the story became an opportunity to explore what a love story looks like later in life, when youthful ambition has collided with adulthood, marriage, and responsibility. “It strikes me as interesting to go okay, take a musician and see where that musician is at in their life and go, what’s the love story now? He’s a 48-year-old guy who’s married with a grown-up kid. He lives in Dublin. Who does he love? What does he love? What excited him?”

“For me, Backrooms is the cumulative result of a societal exhaustion with this industrialised monoculture we’re slipping into,” says visionary YouTube creator, writer and director Kane Parsons. “Repetition and patterns in society become like sensory deprivation — eventually the brain tries to find meaning and construct from all the incoherent noise. When people are isolated from society, they become disconnected and conspiratorial thinking arises. How terrifying would it be if that was your existence forever, and all you could do is experience it over and over again?”

American screenwriter Zachary Donohue and British horror writer T.W. Burgess decided to combine efforts and create one together, Passenger! “We both had an affinity for films like The Hitcher.  But we began to wonder, why has no one done something which was supernatural-based?”  says Donohue. “We wanted to do something totally different,” Burgess says.  “It’s not just a ghost of a road, but something more malevolent and more all-encompassing.  So what does that look like?” 

“It’s a comedy, a coming-of-age story, a murder mystery, and a detective story where sheep have to solve the murder of their shepherd,” says screenwriter Craig Mazin of The Sheep Detectives. “The comedy comes from how sweet and confused they are. The beauty comes from how wise they are. And the heart of the mystery comes from how much they love their shepherd—and each other—even when they frustrate one another. As long as you stay true to the characters and the emotions that inspired Leonie Swann’s novel, you won’t go wrong.”

“With Obsession, I wanted to tell a story about how far someone’s fixation on another person can go. At what point does something we call love stop being love? And beyond that, what does the word “love” even mean? I wanted to take a story we’ve all seen before – a wish story – and ground it in the real world, flipping it on its head to make something completely new.”

“While our film is fictional, it’s based on lived experiences,” says screenwriter Devon Delmar of Variations on a Theme. “In many ways, these are variations on a theme. This community is still waiting, hoping and persevering, just as they have been since 1945. In this way, the film asks a difficult question. What does justice look like when generations have been made to wait?”

When Russell Crowe approached screenwriter David Frigerio with the story for Beast, he didn’t blink. “When the best actor in the world asks when you can come to see him, you don’t wait.” That night, he booked a one-way flight from Los Angeles. Fifteen hours later, I was in Sydney, ready to work. For two relentless weeks, we lived in the screenplay.”

“What was behind all of that was the beating heart of a man who wanted to bring joy,” Michael screenwriter John Logan questions. “When I started looking at Michael’s life, I did the due diligence that you do as a dramatist dealing with historical material. I went in and I read everything. And I looked at so much material on Michael, just hundreds of pages of notes he had written to himself, inspirational notes, song lyrics.”

“I wanted to make a movie that was nothing but dialogue, that would be two great actors and a great script and nothing else. I honestly thought it would be fast and simple,” says Mother Mary screenwriter and visionary director David Lowery. “Mother Mary is about how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful.”

“This is a movie that plays several different horror chords, and I’ve got history and renown for being someone who creates some pretty gory set pieces and some quite shocking imagery,” says writer-director Lee Cronin of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. “this movie is no different in many ways, but it also plays with psychology, dread and chills as well. I think when it comes to gore and to imagery that is really arresting and sticks in your mind, it has to be earned. It has to be based on context. I think for me, the simple equation is to find characters that people fall in love with, and then maybe you can start to turn the screw and do horrible things to them.”

“In your closest relationships, you should be able to share everything, from how you actually feel to who you actually are,” says screenwriter Kristoffer Borgli. “The Drama is about that idea getting stress-tested between two people who are head over heels in love, and who maybe never considered there could be more to the other person. It’s about the power of love — an emotional state you don’t get to control, and how complicated that becomes when your feelings are at odds with your rationale. When that balance slips, you find yourself inside a crucial dilemma.”

“When you adapt a first-person story, you lose that direct access to a character’s thoughts,” says screenwriter Lauren Levine. “The letters in Reminders Of Him gave us a way to bring that interiority back without it feeling heavy-handed. We also explored her notebooks as a way to show her guilt and her attempt to move forward.”

“This is the story of two disparate individuals from opposite ends of the galaxy, and through science, teaching, empathy and compassion, they work together to save the universe,” says screenwriter Drew Goddard of Project Hail Mary. “We were terrified we would have to simplify it for a general audience, but what we found was the opposite. The audience loved that the science was complicated and
challenging.”

“I’ve wanted to make Giant for many years, for many reasons. The most important being: one, because Naseem’s story, and his journey and relationship with life-long mentor Brendan Ingle, is as moving and heartbreaking as it is exhilarating,” says writer-director Rowan Dinar Athale. “I want the film to inspire those who still crave it, and still need it. And I want the world to once again celebrate one of the few British-Asian-Muslims in our history.

“The Testament of Ann Lee is a retelling of the life of the extraordinary true legend Ann Lee, one of the few female religious leaders of the 18th century,” says writer-director Mona Fastvold. “I was raised in a secular household, and yet Ann Lee’s prophecies—however implausible—moved me deeply. Not because I share her faith, but because I recognise in her a yearning for justice, transcendence, and communal grace. Her radical pursuit of a self-fashioned utopia speaks to the creative impulse at the heart of all artistic endeavour: the urgent need to shape the world anew.”

“I’m interested in the monstrousness I see outside of myself that I think is really kind of alive and everywhere right now. I’m also interested in the monstrousness I see inside myself. And at the time, I was particularly interested in that. I was like, “What is this terrifying stuff that I personally believe is in all of us?” And Frankenstein is a way to think about and understand that,” says writer, director and producer Maggie Gyllenhaal of The Bride!, a bold, gothic, and psychologically charged reimagining of Bride of Frankenstein.

“We’ve played it so many different ways,” says writer-director Kevin Williamson of Scream 7. “Ghostface is always a trickster. You never know what you’re going to get. “The goal is to constantly surprise the audience. I don’t want Ghostface to just show up and kill somebody. I love a good chase scene. I want the victims to fight for their lives. I want to see Ghostface go at it with someone audiences love.”

“At the heart of Die My Love is the complexity of love and how it can change and transform over time. I aimed to keep it grounded, human, spontaneous and funny at times, capturing the moments that feel small but carry a lot of weight. This film is for anyone who’s ever been in a relationship – there’s heartbreak and beauty in vulnerability,” says writer-director Lynne Ramsay.

“The central question of crime fiction for me is how does one try to live decently in an indecent world?,” says Crime 101 screenwriter Don Winslow. “So I often have characters with good intentions that they’re not always able to carry out. I like characters that have internal conflict. I like characters who are morally flawed. I’m not trying to write white knights. At the same time, I’m not trying to write totally dark villains. I like those ambiguities. I think that that is reality, and I tend to write realistic fiction”.

“Our Wuthering Heights is a period romance but it’s not niche,” says writer-director Emerald Fennell. “It’s a grand, epic, multi-plex movie based on what I believe is the greatest love story ever written. The cinema is a place to connect, and we’re giving audiences a way to feel something, to unleash any emotions they’ve been stifling. To reclaim romance via a devastatingly sexy film from a sexy book—as sexy a book as could’ve been at that time, and it still is today. Emily Brontë’s story gets under your skin. No matter how many times I’ve read it I find things that are new, or remember something that I can no longer find, and that destabilises me as much as it did when I first read it.” 

Veteran writer of short stories and screenplays, screenwriter Owen Egerton’s inspiration for Whistle is rooted in exploring what
frightens him most. And what scares him most is death. “Not just death in the vague sort of sense but my particular death, my personal death. So I came up with a story about people being pursued by their own particular death. Their own particular future ghost coming to get them.”

“I wrote this script faster than I’ve written anything,” writer-director Bradley Cooper says of Is This Thing On? “And then the filming, I was much more at ease than I’ve ever been. Because you get into a hole on the day sometimes, and maybe things aren’t working. But I just breathed through it, like, ‘It’s going to come. It’s going to come. Stay relaxed.’ The moment you crink up, you’re fucked. It’s like that in anything – stand-up comedy, a fight, sports. You’ve got to stay loose, and I was very loose through this whole movie.” 

“I don’t often have words to describe why I choose a project,” says writer-director Chloé Zhao. “I’m often guided by instinct, a tight pull on my heart center. Stories appear in my life as if they have chosen me and I have no choice but to surrender to them. Hamnet came into my life like a whisper that grew into a hurricane. By the end of the journey, I was tenderized. I had truly experienced what it feels like to live with an open heart in the eye of a storm – the beauty, the pain, the thrill at the edge of annihilation and the silence.

Send Help screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, like director Sam Raimi, have a deep-rooted appreciation for mixed-genre storytelling. “One of the reasons our taste is what it is, is because in our formative years we watched a lot of Sam Raimi movies,” Shannon says. “You know a Sam Raimi movie when you see it.” “We heard that Sam wanted to do an elevated thriller-horror,” Swift continues. “We looked in our bag, found our Linda Liddle concept, and put the pitch and screenplay together.”

Acclaimed filmmaker Johannes Roberts, the director and co-writer of Primate calls the movie his love letter to the first horror film he ever saw: Cujo. “For me, it opened up a whole new kind of horror based in real situations, not vampires and monsters,” he explains. “I instinctively understood the way that the director Lewis Teague and the cinematographer Jan de Bont were manipulating the audience — I knew right then that I wanted to direct films like that.”

Mercy screenwriter Marco van Belle explains that he melded old and new ideas for his forward-thinking script — and then watched as real life caught up with this kinetic mystery thriller. “When I found a news report about an AI judge being created in Estonia to handle decision-making in civil cases, I saw the incredible potential to reinvigorate the legal thriller/courtroom drama genre by framing a trial within an AI court.”

“Evil isn’t always going to put on a scary uniform,” writer-director James Vanderbilt says of Nuremberg. “It’s not always going to announce itself. It can be insidious. It can be – as Göring was – the nicest guy at the dinner party. That’s a much scarier thought than good guys versus bad guys.”

 “When I initially discussed 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, I told them, ‘I’m going to make it my own. I’m not going to try to make ‘a Danny Boyle movie.’ Because that’s impossible to make,” says director Nia DaCosta. “I could really put my imprint on it – to let my freak flag fly – and be visually adventurous and matching that with more classical filmmaking.”

“The American Dream is such a powerful story, and after the war, dreaming big became an international sensation alongside this new idea that individuals make history and play a crucial role in shaping and reshaping the world,” says writer-director Josh Safdie of Marty Supreme. “Marty represents the confidence, cockiness, and ambition that America expressed in the postwar years.”

“Sharing a brutal prison existence allows the two characters in this film to strip away all the markers and classifications society imposes on them – class, ideology, sexuality, gender – and see each other purely as individuals. It’s still a revolutionary idea, and I’m proud that people are responding to it,” says writer-director Bill Condon of Kiss Of The Spider Woman

“We want to push the boundaries of storytelling and captivate audiences,” says James Cameron of Avatar: The Way Of The Water. “The broader audience only cares about a story, the characters, and how the film makes them feel. I keep that in mind first and foremost every single day.”

“We root for underdogs because their struggle is our song. We need to see real people triumph over adversity — not just superheroes in capes. I need to believe, with all the problems we face in this country, that the American Dream is still possible,” says writer director Craig Brewer of Song Sung Blue

In Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson wrote mysteries so complicated that only Benoit Blanc could solve them. Johnson’s latest chapter, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, gives Blanc a run for his money, presenting him with his most layered and unexpected case to date. “This was the hardest script I have ever had to write,” says the twice Oscar–nominated filmmaker.

 “I think, for all of us, there’s a gap between who we are deep down and who we present ourselves to be, and this varies in terms of all the different roles we play in our lives. And as we get older and gain more experience, and maybe wisdom, how do we re-meet and redefine the person that we are?” says writer-director Noah Baumbach Jay Kelly, co-writing the screenplay with Emily Mortimer (in her screenwriting debut).

“Greg and I have been working together now for about 15 years, and we’ve written many scripts together. Train Dreams was unique because we had never adapted a work of fiction before. We try to bring a deep level of research to what we do, and this film was no different, but it’s hard to research something that’s about a time gone by, and also based on a work of fiction,” says Clint Bentley, who co-wrote the film with Greg Kwedar

“My dad really started to inhabit the characters, especially Ray, speaking as him during the writing process. That was when I realised this was going to be its own kind of special beast. Working with him taught me so much as a writer and storyteller; by the time we got to set, we had a shorthand for everything,” says screenwriter Ronan Day-Lewis, who co-wrote Anemone with Daniel Day-Lewis, inspired by the lingering scars of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

“Blue Moon is a chamber piece on the brutal architecture of artistic mourning… it deals with a trauma that is, in a way, two‑fold: not just a business split, but an artistic divorce between two men who defined an era together,” says writer-director Richard Linklater

“I’ve dreamed all my life of making rom coms in the vein of Lubitsch, Wilder, and Sturges,” says director David Freyne. “I adore that era when people believed rom coms could say everything, could be the deepest films, no matter how feathery their touch. And here was my chance. Eternity might be set in the afterlife, but what mattered to me is the characters are caught up in conflicts that feel very human and very true to our experienc­es.”

“My goal in expanding on Mason Deaver’s novel into a cinematic universe was to examine how acts of love, compassion, and service towards family—chosen and blood—could either endanger a child or embolden them to flourish, to offer audiences a contained and simple character study on becoming. It was important for me to tell this story authentically and not fall into the trap of dramatising Ben’s gender or coming out too much. Viewing anybody solely through the lens of their gender or sexuality diminishes their vast and complex humanity,” says writer-director Tommy Dorfman of I Wish You The Best

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is inspired by Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 novel of the same name. “I’ve lived with Mary Shelley’s creation all my life,” says del Toro. “For me, it’s the Bible. But I wanted to make it my own, to sing it back in a different key with a different emotion. Mary Shelley’s masterpiece is rife with questions that burn brightly in my soul: existential, tender, savage, doomed questions that only burn in a young mind and only adults and institutions believe they can answer,” del Toro explains. “For me, only monsters hold the secrets I long for.” 

 “Once I read the script, I jumped in. Regretting You is a coming-of-age story about relationships between parents and children growing up, like my previous films Stuck in Love and The Fault in Our Stars. I have always been, and always will be, attracted to movies about families, specifically kids discovering that their parents are fallible. That’s an important moment in anybody’s life,” says director Josh Boone.

“In the world that we live in now, people live in certain bubbles that have been enhanced by technology,” visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos says. “Having certain ideas about people is reinforced depending on which bubble you live in, creating this big chasm between people. I wanted to challenge the viewer about the things that we’re very certain about, the judgment calls that you make about certain kinds of people. Bugonia is a very interesting reflection of our society and the conflict in our contemporary world.” 

“Beginning production on Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is an incredibly humbling and thrilling journey,” says writer-director Scott Cooper. “Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ has profoundly shaped my artistic vision. The album’s raw, unvarnished portrayal of life’s trials and resilience resonates deeply with me. Our film aims to capture that same spirit, bringing Warren Zanes’ compelling narrative of Bruce’s life to the screen with authenticity and hope, honouring Bruce’s legacy in a transformative cinematic experience.”

“From 1985 to 1994, my mother worked for the British Board of Film Classification. Each day, she would watch a film to determine its appropriate level of censorship and then, at night, for my bedtime story, recite the plot to the movie she had seen that day. I would fall asleep, visualising these narratives, dreaming about the T-1000 or Nakatomi Plaza and then later I would get to see these characters
and locations realised on celluloid. This practice spawned an inevitable life-long obsession with cinema,” says director Max Minghella, whose film Shell is a love letter to those bedtime stories.

“With Black Phone 2, we were able to keep building on characters rooted in our own childhoods and what it was like growing up in the ’70s and ‘80s,” says writer-producer C. Robert Cargill. “We have been through a lot together and are as close personally as we are professionally. What keeps it creatively fulfilling is the material, of course. It is always about telling a good story. That drives everything,” says writer-producer-director Scott Derrickson.

“I wanted to design something new, but familiar,” says Norwegian-born director Joachim Rønning about TRON Ares. “What drew me to the project was the mix of the digital and real worlds. Having a Program exist in the real world was interesting for me – I hadn’t seen that before. And the idea of Ares finding out what it means to be human, what it takes to be human, was fascinating.”

There was something really complicated about Mark Kerr that I wanted to explore,” says writer-director / editor Benny Safdie of The Smashing Game. “And there was something about Dwayne, too. He has this image of himself out in the public, but as he spoke to me about Mark, and as he talked about this movie, oh my God! I realised there was a whole other side to him that we could explore together.”

“I believe that the strongest case of the theatrical experience can be made with horror films. We all seek the therapeutic experience of facing our worst, darkest, most secret terrors in the safe environment of a movie theatre,” says director Renny Harlin of The Strangers – Chapter 2. “We can scream, cry, hide our eyes, or even laugh at the uncontrollable and life-threatening scenes that unfold in front of us. In a movie theatre, it is all a communal experience.”

“Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can’t help it. We’re made by the events of our past, so there’s no escaping it,” says writer-director Andrew Haig of All Of Us Strangers. “I am fascinated by that person who is trying to live authentically, but they are on the outside of society—so how do they manage in the world around them?”

“I started working on One Battle After Another 20 years ago to write an action car-chase movie, and I returned to it every two or three years. At the same time, this was in the early 2000s, I had the notion to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a book about the 1960s, which he wrote in the `80s. So, I was trying to decide what the story meant another 20 years later. So really for 20 years I had been pulling on all these different threads. Vineland was going to be hard to adapt. Instead, I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together.  With his blessing,” says writer-director-producer Paul Thomas Anderson.

“As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, the buddy cop genre and road movies were more popular than ever before, and they had a major influence on me when it came to the kind of films I wanted to make. Like a lot of people, I was charmed by the idea of taking two individuals from different walks of life and forcing them together. As soon as my agents sent me the script of London Calling, I was all in. It took the best elements of the buddy genre, stuffed it into a road movie, and encompassed themes of family, aging, and identity,” says director Allan Ungar

“Over the course of my career, I’ve tried to bounce around different genres and stories, but they always seem to retain one common denominator – characters that are simply trying their best to do the right thing. I find there to be such a beautiful dignity to it. I felt like I had an idea of what I was going to be getting from a movie called The Threesome and then was given something much more sophisticated, tender and nuanced,” says director Chad Hartigan.

“I’m one of those guys who usually loves the book and hates the movie—so with The Long Walk we had to find a way to be really, really loyal to the DNA of the story,” says screenwriter JT Mollner. “What makes it special is this hint of nihilism, but then a tiny bit of hope—this weird amalgamation of things that Stephen King was obviously feeling as a young man. This disillusionment with America, and him creating this sort of hyperbolic version of it.”

“The real challenge is in structure,” says writer Julian Fellowes about writing Downton Abbey. “When you have a series, you don’t have to give every character a story every week. You can have different emphases. Whereas in a film, everyone has to have their crack at the whip. Everyone has to have an active part in the story.” 

“In my movies, if there’s a real case, I’m going to do a deep dive into it, and meet and talk to as many people involved as I can,” says Director / Executive Producer Michael Chaves of The Conjuring: Last Rites. “There’s also obviously research into the period—in The Nun II, I went through all kinds of great 1950s photography that we leaned into as we were making the film. So, we looked at the period, but I also did a lot of Zoom interviews with the four Smurl sisters. Talking to them about their experience was really powerful.”

“Together is a film about the potential horror of sharing a life with someone; the lingering anxieties of commitment writ large. It’s about co-dependency, monogamy, romances and resentments — and that at a certain point, can we truly tell where one life ends and our other half’s begins? What draws me into a project is finding a one-off, hooky premise, and squeezing that premise for all its juice. Despite the personally resonant and (hopefully) realistically observed characters at the centre of this story, I am so proud how we escalate the horror into things I’ve never seen before on screen, ” says writer-director Michael Shanks.

For Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing isn’t just a darkly humorous heist story— it’s a project that’s near and dear to their heart. “I wrote this book way back in 1998, the year the story is set in,” they say. “There’s a ton of my own lived experience in the story’s main character. When Darren Aronofsky reached out to me 18 years ago to say that he was interested in the book, it was super exciting. I loved the idea of Darren taking his visual sensibility and the dynamism of his storytelling and applying it to this story.” 

Tony McNamara believes one of the best things about being a screenwriter is seeing your words brought to life by the people playing the characters you have spent so long imagining in your head. When it came to The Roses, that first day on set was perhaps one of the best. “We wanted to make a very smart adult comedy that goes dark. And I feel like there haven’t been that many of those for a while,” says McNamara. “And we wanted to make a really good comedy about marriage that also had a good heart about how hard that is. We wanted to make something that people could relate to. I know we all did.”

“I’ve always liked Superman. I think as a kid I was really attracted to the Superman family comics, with Superman and Supergirl and Krypto and the whole gang. It was at a time when I was starting to become more aware of how important films were to me in my life, and that was different from how important films were to other people in their lives,” says writer/director/producer James Gunn.

“When I’m writing, I have a rule for myself—I don’t want to know what’s going to happen at all. I always just start. So, I sat down to write what would become this movie, and the first thing I type is this little girl telling a story and these kids who go running out of the house. And I’m thinking as I’m writing, “This is cool. I hope I figure this out.” And I didn’t really figure it out until it was time in the script to answer that question. Basically, I’m writing on a tightrope, hoping that it is revealed to me. Luckily, in this case, it was. But I was just writing to get this feeling out, and it ended up turning into Weapons. I think when I wrote Barbarian, it was kind of a similar thing. I sat down and started writing for the fun of it, without any idea of what it was going to be,” says writer-director Zach Cregger