CURATED INDUSTRY MUST READS
It’s 8 a.m. in Santa Clarita and Ava DuVernay is thinking about fate. We’re on the set of Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, the film adaptation of the much-loved fantasy story that she’s directing. Here in DuVernay’s trailer, a framed photo of James Baldwin below the television stares out to the couch where we are sitting. She wonders aloud if it’s possible to be “meant for something.” Then, muted commercials for Queen Sugar appear on the flat-screen TV, coincidentally promoting the recent television series the director created for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel.
Never underestimate the power of a mistake. Andrew Kevin Walker’s entire career may have hinged on one.
It all started with the then-fledgling writer’s Caravaggio-dark screenplay for Se7en, which he wrote as an employee of the Times Square Tower Records in the early ’90s. Without any real connections in the business, Walker cold-called David Koepp, the Jurassic Park and Spider-Man screenwriter best known at the time for the Rob Lowe thriller, Bad Influence, and convinced him to read Se7en…
Mr. Tarantino, judging from your movies I have to ask: are you obsessed with women’s feet?
I’m not shying away from that. If you think about the directors that have been accused of being foot-crazy, it would have been Alfred Hitchcock, it would have been Buñuel, Samuel Fuller – it’s pretty good company…
When I first started writing, I was very interested in true stories; I think that came from doing documentary research. So I started off writing a lot of long-form drama for television, dealing with special justice issues. It was kind of a way to take things that I was fascinated by and wanted to investigate and go deeper in the storytelling of them to a wider audience.
I’m at RAWvolution, a hip raw foods restaurant in Santa Monica, drinking kombucha and eagerly awaiting the arrival of Craig Borten, the mind behind the Oscar nominated Dallas Buyers Club. He strolls in exactly at the appointed time, and I look up from my laptop to see a tall man (at 6’4), with curly dark hair, sparkling eyes, and an easy warmth about him.