“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