Varietys 10 Screenwriters to Watch for 2020

Variety highlights cinema scribes making headway in an unconventional year. They will be feted on Oct. 13 at the Mill Valley Film Festival and participate in an online discussion. Deers directorial debut, Beans, a coming-of-age tale centered on a smart Mohawk girl whose family becomes embroiled in the 1990 Oka Crisis in Quebec, made its

Variety highlights cinema scribes making headway in an unconventional year. They will be feted on Oct. 13 at the Mill Valley Film Festival and participate in an online discussion.

  • Tracey Deer and Meredith Vuchnich

    “Beans”

    Deer’s directorial debut, “Beans,” a coming-of-age tale centered on a smart Mohawk girl whose family becomes embroiled in the 1990 Oka Crisis in Quebec, made its world premiere at the recent Toronto Intl. Film Festival. Deer, who is Mohawk, lived through the confrontation in which the Indigenous people protested the expansion of a golf course into their lands. The dispute also laid bare ugly systemic racism. The screenplay from Deer and Vuchnich delves into painful memories of that time, as well as issues of assimilation and universal truths tethered to teen crushes and defying your mom by wearing too much makeup. Deer notes that addressing these big issues through the eyes of a child would be less threatening. “A lot of the people who really need to listen have a very big wall when it comes to that, and I thought connecting with a child would be a safe way into the topic.” The film was the second runner-up for the prestigious People’s Choice Award at TIFF this year. “Helping Tracey Deer tell this story is one of the great honors of my life and I am incredibly grateful for her trust,” says Vuchnich. “Most people, myself included, don’t know what it’s like to experience the world as an Indigenous person. I learned so much through this process, and still have tons to learn. I believe this film can help people understand more and do better. I believe ‘Beans’ is a story that the world needs to hear right now.”

    Reps: Management: OAZ

    — Carole Horst

  • Clare Dunne

    “Herself”

    When writing her first feature film, “Herself,” Dunne had no plans on claiming the lead role of Sandra, a young mother who leaves her abusive husband to reclaim her life. But as a new screenwriter, it was a no-brainer that she listened to Phyllida Lloyd’s only condition for directing her script.

    “It wouldn’t have happened without Phyllida,” Dunne tells Variety from her hotel room in Ireland. “I had a hard time shaking off Sandra. I’ve been in her, writing her for years, and I knew exactly who she was. But I didn’t want that as an actor — I needed Sandra to discover herself one step at a time.”

    Dunne spent a portion of her summer in production on Ridley Scott’s film “The Last Duel” in Dublin, while writing her first screenplay for episodic television. “At the moment, I have a lovely balance,” she says of juggling acting with screenwriting. “Some days I’m flowing with ideas; some days I’m chilling in bed.”

    Her writing, Dunne believes, reflects her outlook on life of believing in the ideas she wakes up to. When the coronavirus- forced lockdown is over, Dunne is eager to tell more stories that contribute to today’s “visionary activism,” by reckoning with painful histories and voicing new truths.

    Reps: Agency: UTA (U.S.), Lisa
    Richards Agency (Ireland)

    — Janet W. Lee

  • Shaka King and Will Berson

    “Judas and the Black Messiah”

    With “Judas and the Black Messiah,” scripters King and Berson look at the 1969 murder of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton and the immediate cover-up. A lot of misinformation was deliberately spread to exonerate the Chicago police and FBI agents.      “This is an opportunity to counter that, to shed light on an important topic,” says King, who also directed. “It’s a Fred Hampton biopic inside of a crime-drama narrative, which is inside of a genre film. Give people a history lesson and entertain them.” Due to decades of lies, the Black Panthers are still a hot-button topic, and Berson adds, “I think we’ll get a lot of flack from all sides. But if we can honor Fred Hampton’s legacy and purpose, that’s OK.” King wanted to do a project centered on Hampton, and was shown a script that Berson had completed. So they worked together to make a unified whole. The story is more timely than ever, telling of government infiltration into radical groups. The film, from Participant and WB, is expected to open early in 2021.

    Reps: King Agency: UTA;

    Legal: Stuart Rosenthal

    Berson Management: Epicenter;

    Berlant Legal: Myman Greenspan Fox Rosenberg Mobasser Younger & Light

    — Tim Gray

  • Viggo Mortensen

    “Falling”

    After acting for more than 30 years, Mortensen makes his filmmaking debut with “Falling.” Variety critic Peter Debruge enthused, “Lance Henriksen gives the performance of his career, but it’s writer-director-star Viggo Mortensen who makes the film’s universal themes resonate so strongly … His script manages to be tough yet tender.” “Falling” explores the subjective memories of a father and son (respectively played by Henriksen and Mortensen). But the emotional conscience is wife/mother Gwen (Hannah Gross). Mortensen tells Variety, “I’ve always been drawn to stories that are not fully explained to me, that invite me to see and think for myself.” It’s not autobiographical, but Mortensen says this approach stems from his own mother. After watching a movie, the two would talk about “what might have happened, about what was left out. If the movie had engaged us, it was always because we had been inspired to fill in part of the story, to understand its structure and the motivations of its characters. To this day, as a reader and a writer, I am as interested in what is not on the page as I am in what is.” The result is a knockout work that stays with the audience long after the final credits. — Tim Gray

    Reps: Agency: UTA; Manager: Lynn Rawlins; Legal: Stuart Rosenthal (Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher)

  • Kemp Powers

    “One Night in Miami”

    Ever since Powers’ debut play, “One Night in Miami,” premiered in 2013, producers Jess Wu Calder and Keith Calder have been trying to adapt it into a film. And for most of that time, Powers wasn’t interested.

    “When I first wrote the play, I didn’t see myself making a transition into writing for film and TV,” Powers says. “It wasn’t even necessarily an aspiration at the time.” Fortunately the producers eventually changed his mind, and “this thing I didn’t think would happen started to happen organically.”

    The play, which Powers adapted himself into the Regina King-directed film that premiered at Venice last month, is a speculative dramatization of a real-life event in 1964, when newly crowned heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (soon to rename himself Muhammad Ali) spent the night in a hotel with friends Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. In Powers’ hands, their imagined discussions amount to an unusually politically astute hangout film that foreshadows so many of the knotted questions of racial identity and responsibility that continue to this day.

    Reps: Agency: Gersh; Management: Media Talent Group; Legal: Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman

  • Emma Seligman

    “Shiva Baby”

    After her short film “Shiva Baby” premiered at the SXSW Festival in 2018, writer-director Seligman was looking forward to returning with the feature version — until the pandemic brought things to a halt. The festival went digital and the film was a hit, taking the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature before playing at Toronto. Seligman is still overwhelmed. “I told myself that even if the movie sits on a shelf and no one sees it, at least we finished our first movie,” she notes. “So having low expectations has made this kind of response unbelievable.”

    The film is primarily at the titular shiva, as Rachel Sennott’s Danielle juggles interactions with meddling relatives, her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy, who shows up with his wife and child. “I always knew the feature adaptation would also take place in one day in the same location for budgetary reasons. Therefore, the most challenging aspect of writing this was filling the story up with enough events to keep you hooked but not so much that would make the film fall into a total unbelievable slapstick style,” Seligman notes. “It
    was also challenging to display

    Danielle’s bisexuality, which felt extremely important to me since I’m bi and I wanted a bi protagonist, but there’s only so much you canget away with showing in one day with different love interests.”

    Seligman says the film was influenced by “my manic, ridiculous family” but also credits Joey Soloway for paving the way “for modern, nuanced and queer Jewish storytelling.”
    She also credits her professor at NYU, Yemane Demissie, who advised her to write about something she knew. “When I was deciding what my film school thesis would be about, I originally wanted to do something epic and dystopian, as many college seniors want for their theses,” she notes. She also admits to going to school with “a lot of sugar babies” at NYU, which inspired this “beautifully uncomfortable clashing of worlds that would unleash a woman’s deepest anxieties about community pressure, sexual validation, self-worth and uncertainty about her future.”

    — Jenelle Riley

    Reps: Agency: WME; Management: Brillstein Entertainment

  • Andy Siara

    “Palm Springs

    Siara’s “Palm Springs” did not start out as a time-loop movie, but rather one inspired by his own concept of love and a trip to Palm Springs with director Max Barbakow. Contrary to many other time-loop films, Siara’s plot utilizes repeated time as a device for a more broad storyline about love, marriage and commitment.

    And after over four years of changing and adding to the original idea, eventually his script came to life.

    “I would put away ‘Palm Springs’ and go back to it … and whenever I went back to it, me and Max would get into a room and almost, on one hand, act like each other’s therapists, then on another hand, try to make each other laugh as we were digging through our own psyches and our own subconscious,” he says. The balance between humor and emotion is at the core of Siara’s film. In fact, it’s a signature goal found at the core of everything he writes. “My goal is always to try to hit that special laugh-cry dynamic in a scene,” he says. “If you can laugh in a scene, and cry in the same scene — like a true cry that is from a deeply emotional spot — that’s the goal.”

    — Eli Countryman

    Reps: Agency: UTA; Management: LBI Entertainment; Legal: Todd Rubenstein and Morris Yorn

  • Remi Weekes

    “His House”

    Weekes makes his feature directorial debut with “His House,” a tale of married Sudanese refugees who face unspeakable horrors once arriving at their new home in England. The British filmmaker says he was inspired to develop the story by examining his experience growing up as a person of color in London. “[Me and my friends] always felt torn,” he says.

    “There was one side of us that wanted to fit in and wanted to assimilate, and kind of disappear into the culture and be part of, I guess, Britishness. But then there’s also this other side of us that felt very rejected. And because of that we wanted to pull away and to rebel against the culture.”

    Weekes says that, in some ways, those two sides are still at war with each other. Which is why he represented both perspectives in the film through its stars, actors Sope Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku. For Weekes, the story is less about the social and political aspects of immigration, “but more about what it means to be a person in this world and what it means to have to move through it.” Though the film landed a big pickup by Netflix before it premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the budding filmmaker isn’t only interested in telling horror stories.

    “I like emotional cinema —I like melodrama, I like feelings, I love romantic film,” he says. “Whatever my next film will be, I hope I tell stories that are about feelings over things.”

    — Angelique Jackson

    Reps: Agency: CAA, Independent Talent Group (U.K.), Legal: Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christophe

  • Kata Wéber

    “Pieces of a Woman”

    Multilingual playwright Wéber is a woman on a 10-year plan. For 10 years she was an actress and the next decade a writer. Working with helmer Kornél Mundruczó, with whom she previously partnered on 2014’s “White God,” she made “Pieces of a Woman,” the story of a Boston couple who lose a child. “I come from a theater background and I’m working in German houses, in Poland, in Switzerland, so always I am constantly working in other languages,” Wéber says.

    “It is not new for me, it is very familiar. You have a text and you have to find the best possible way of the translation.” For “Pieces of a Woman,” which is winning accolades, she worked with translators who understood the emotional center of her film. “After all these years I am finding that only the most important meanings stay, only what is universal, all the rest you don’t need.”

    She had two “pillars” to the story, the birth scene and the dinner scene with the trial. While “Pieces of a Woman” is a universal story, Wéber is emphatic that she didn’t herself experience a stillbirth. “This is an art piece,” she points out. “I am not a visionary, I am not thinking in pictures at all, I am thinking in dialogues, in feelings, intentions, yes. And also measures, like this has to be big and long.”

    Wéber and Mundruczó go back to the early 2000s when she acted in his first features, and while she has worked with other directors on plays, her films have only been with him. “We have this relationship, he stands for me if I need help with the script or I have questions and I stand for him during shootings. I never interrupt, I think, only if I feel there is a big misunderstanding.”
    As for future projects, she’s working on a historical Hungarian story, but she wants to talk to Mundruczó over whether they should be English-language or in Hungarian.

    — Shalini Dore

    Reps: Agency: United Agents (U.K.), CAA (U.S.)

  • Tracey Scott Wilson

    “Respect”

    Growing up in Newark, N.J., Wilson listened to the songs of Aretha Franklin and dreamed of one day becoming a novelist. But she discovered her true calling was writing for performers on the stage and screen.

    A playwright first, she began collaborating with Liesl Tommy on theater projects, and that connection helped pave the way for Wilson’s first feature screenwriting credit on “Respect,” which Tommy directed. Wilson, a writer and producer on “Fosse/Verdon” and “The Americans,” was surprised by how much she didn’t know about Franklin’s life when she began working on the MGM biopic in May 2019. She admits it was a bit daunting to write a movie about such an iconic figure, but “once I sort of started to look at her as a character in a movie it became easier. So anytime I thought I was just being too precious, I just thought, she’s a character in the movie.”

    Inspired by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for his sheer audacity and imagination, she relishes the challenges of writing for different media. Theater offers immediacy, she says, while TV writing projects allow more expansive character development. As for film: “I love the challenge of having to fit a story into a structure and having to figure out that puzzle,” says Wilson, who lives in Brooklyn with her wife and is working on some projects for FX. “I love studying movie scripts and looking at films and just figuring out how the puzzle works.”

    — Diane Garrett

    Reps: Management: Manage-ment; Legal: Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz

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