38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival Writers Panel featuring Sarah Polley, Ruben Östlund, Rian Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro and more [VIDEO]

Always one of the most popular events of the annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival, today’s writer’s panel featured nine of the ten Oscar nominees for screenplay, both adapted and original. Of the ten nominees, only Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans) and the writers for Top Gun: Maverick were absent, and the conversation that ensued, moderated by IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, was absorbing and entertaining, as the writers got into some juicy subjects, such as the specifics of their process, how they came to the ideas for their films, and what scene was the hardest to write.

The panelists were Daniel Scheinert, co-writer and co-director of Everything Everywhere All At Once (his partner, Daniel Kwan, seemingly had caught the bug that inspired the second act of Triangle of Sadness, so Scheinert carried the EEAAO torch alone), Todd Field, writer/director of TÁR, Kazuo Ishiguro, writer of Living, Rian Johnson, writer/director of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Tony Kushner, co-writer of The Fabelmans, Martin McDonagh, writer/director of The Banshees of Inisherin, Ruben Östland, writer/director of The Triangle of Sadness, Lesley Paterson, co-writer of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Sarah Polley, writer/director of Women Talking.

Here are some of the highlights:

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ishiguro admitted that he spends most of his time thinking about novels, and “they’re basically all about the same thing,” so, when he wanted to write a film, he looked to Akira Kurosawa for the idea, which is how he came to adapting Kurosawa’s 1952 Japanese film Ikiru. “I don’t have much imagination.”

When Ishiguro was thinking about doing the adaptation, he had an “aha moment” while sitting in a British cab with Bill Nighy.  Right then and there, he decided to move the plot to London and have it star Nighy, who is nominated for Best Actor for the film.

Ishiguro says that he wanted to make a film about what really matters in life. “You can make a small life heroic and magnificent.”

Johnson said he started writing movies just as an excuse to get friends together to make them.

Paterson was a professional triathlete before becoming a screenwriter, which explained why she’s a writer: “I love suffering.” Paterson, who’s Scottish, said she developed an imagination while spending all that time alone, running through the Scottish moors.

Polley, who started as an actor, said the film The Thin Red Line pulled her out of a depression, and inspired her to write.

Scheinert admitted that, after he and Kwan started in the business making music videos, they suffered from imposter syndrome once they started writing screenplays.

Field said he got the best advice from his screenwriter father-in-law, Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), who told him the key to writing is to unplug the phone, get up at the same time every day and write, no matter what.  It may be terrible, but you’ll have something to work from.

McDonagh said that, even though he had success as a playwright, he always had dreamed of making a movie, but wasn’t sure if he could. When Thompson noted that his first short film, Six Shooter, won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short film in 2006, McDonagh credits, “beginner’s luck.” When he made his first feature, In Bruges, he said he learned on the job.

As for Östland, he pitches his ideas to everyone he knows before he writes down anything. He takes ideas from anywhere and anyone and admits he steals from anyone who suggests things he likes. He needs to know exactly where the script is going before he starts to write.

McDonagh’s process is the opposite from Östland, he likes to be surprised to see where the dialogue takes the story, which explains why his films have so many twists and turns. He admits that, in The Banshees of Inisherin, the whole finger subplot didn’t emerge until he was 10-12 pages in, after evolving from the dialogue he was writing for Brendan Gleeson’s character.

Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Kushner first wrote for film when Steven Spielberg hired him to write Munich in 2005. It became a long and fruitful relationship, as Kushner noted, “That was nineteen years ago and I only write for him. I don’t feel like I’m a screenwriter, I feel like I’m HIS screenwriter.”

In commenting on his relationship with Spielberg, Kushner noted, “I feel like Garfunkel to his Simon.”

Johnson has always loved the whodunit genre, but he noticed they were always period pieces set in England, so he wanted to see what it was like to unapologetically set a whodunit in the present day.

Johnson says the whodunit genre is “a good machine to create a microcosm of society.” He added, “it’s a very serious idea for a deeply unserious movie.”

Johnson made a point of telling the audience to see the film The Last of Sheila (1973), the best whodunit he’s ever seen, and one that substantially influenced the Knives Out films.

When asked if he was targeting anyone specific in his portrayal of the tech-douche villain played by Edward Norton in Glass Onion, he deferred, saying he prefers to focus on the concepts, the primary one being “mistaking wealth for competence is a very common misnomer.”

Paterson had been holding onto the option to remake All Quiet on the Western Front for sixteen years before she and her partner Ian Stokell were able to bring it to director Edward Berger. She says it’s all about timing, because she truly thinks the film would never have worked if it had come out sixteen years ago.

Endurance and adversity, tools she gained as a professional athlete, have served Paterson well as a screenwriter. She related the story of how she was wholly dependent on the earnings from winning a triathalon to be able to hold onto the option for the film, but she broke her shoulder the night before the race. But she literally would lose the option if she didn’t win, so she competed anyway…and won. “Swimming with a broken shoulder is hard.”

Paterson says she believes what makes All Quiet on the Western Front different is the perspective. “We’re so used to seeing the Germans with no humanity, it’s important to see it from the other side, the taking of the German youth.”

When Thompson asked Polley why she chose to keep the villain offscreen, she said the story is not about the details of the violence, but “how the characters move through the trauma.”

Kushner admits his and Spielberg’s relationship is often quite volatile. “I scream and yell a lot and he puts up with it.” But Kushner acknowledged he needed to tone down the screaming a bit for The Fabelmans, since it was Spielberg’s own story.

When asked if the rumors were true that The Daniels turned down a Marvel movie, Scheinert admitted that they did turn down Loki, the television series, but that’s only because they were deep into prep for EEAAO, and Michelle Yeoh had already committed, so nothing was going to distract them from that. “This is our Marvel movie,” Scheinert gushed.

Field admits that after he created the character of Lydia Tár, she wouldn’t stop bothering him, so he had to make the movie.

Östland related the fact that it took six months to edit the vomiting sequence in The Triangle of Sadness and in the first cut the sequence ran over twenty minutes. When they first showed it to audiences, so many people ran out of the theater, he knew two things: he had to cut it down and what he had done worked.

Polley, who has three children under the age of ten, admits her writing process is all about being flexible. You have to “let go of that preciousness and grab what time you can.”

Polley acted out each character as she was writing the script for Women Talking, saying the words out loud as each character, to make sure it worked when she heard it.

As for Kushner’s process, he said, “My writing process is to avoid writing at all costs. I’m in constant terror.” He admitted his writing method is “Not a method, it’s a grab-bag of neurotic manifestations.”

Östlund says the most important thing is to not be scared to tell people what you’re working on and to not be afraid of their reaction. He loves to “play ping pong with different brains.” He confessed he’s currently working on his next project, tentatively called The Entertainment System is Down, which takes place on an international flight and the entertainment system is down. All his friends are offering up stories of when that happened to them, and he is going to find a way to use every idea he likes.

The panel ended with Thompson having the writers share the most difficult scenes to write in their recent work. 

• For Ishiguro, it was the ending, struggling with the burden of creating something that really allows the film to linger in the audience’s mind.
• For Johnson, it was a key expository character introduction scene partway through his film.
• For Paterson, it was figuring out how to differentiate the action sequences.
• For Polley, it was making a key apology really cover all that a character needed to hear.
• For Kushner, it was understanding what the audience needed from a scene where two characters have strange, but telling reactions to a film.
• For Scheinert, it was managing to lay the dramatic groundwork of the film while still getting the audience into the fun of the project.
• For McDonough, it was creating an ending with both subtlety and sincerity.
• For Östlund, it was dealing with the structural decision of having the movie almost start anew in the third act.

(Photo by Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for SBIFF)