The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) held its annual writers panel on Feb. 8, featuring the writers of some of the biggest films this year. The panel included the writers of the historical film based on the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys; the prison drama Sing Sing; Jesse Eisenberg’s dramedy A Real Pain; the epic period piece The Brutalist dominating recent headlines; historical thriller September 5; and the political mystery based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, Conclave. 

The writers at the panel have received some of the biggest awards and nominations in the art world for their films. Joslyn Barnes’s Nickel Boys, Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist, and Peter Straughan’s Conclave have all been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Nickel Boys and Conclave, as well as Clint Bentley’s Sing, Sing were also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 

The panel was moderated by Anne Thompson, asking the writers questions about their inspirations and the details of their writing process. As a producer and co-writer of Nickel Boys, Joslyn Barnes took an active role in the filming process. The film was based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, which followed the investigation into an abusive reformatory school in Florida. The camera work was vital to bringing to life the relationships created in the writing.“It’s treated as an extension of consciousness, the way the camera moves,” Barnes explained. 

Sing, Sing follows the story of a man who is wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and stages a theater group with other incarcerated men through Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. The film has received high praise, and writer Clint Bentley attributed this and the success of the other films on the panel to the increased interest in cinema today. “There’s a real desire there for people for movies,” he concluded. 

One of the biggest names on the panel was Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film A Real Pain. The film details the life of two cousins who visit Poland to honor their family history, a plot based heavily on Eisenberg’s own family and its attachment to surviving the Holocaust in Poland. “I don’t feel like it’s a movie until it feels like my personal exorcism first,” he joked. Eisenberg has been writing and acting for nearly twenty years, and was inspired to write A Real Pain because, “My first (movie) wasn’t received very well so I decided to write another one.” While Eisenberg was tempted to make the film a documentary rather than fiction, he was compelled to create the film as it is because, “My loyalty was always towards how I could convey authenticity through a story.”

Mona Fastvold co-wrote The Brutalist with director and husband Brady Corbet, a dual effort that has become one of the most talked about films of the year. Starring Adrien Brody, the film is an epic period piece surrounding a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrates to the U.S. to find success as an architect. The film has received Golden Globe, Academy Award, and Critics’ Choice nominations for Best Picture. While some have viewed the length of the film (three hours and 35 minutes) as a barrier to the film’s accessibility, Fastvold is confident in her choice, saying, “I can’t imagine the film in any other way…It’s what the story wanted to be.”

September 5 is a thriller written by Tim Fehlbaum that details the sports broadcasters who covered the hostage crisis of the 1972 Munich Olympics. While Fehlbaum knew he wanted to write a movie about the Munich Massacre, the story went through multiple rewrites as the idea for crafting it through the lens of the journalists did not arrive until late in the process after an interview with one of the broadcasters present. This also made it easier for the writers to adhere to the budget they were working with for the film, saying, “Limitation in budget can lead to a more interesting approach.”

Peter Straughan’s Conclave follows a story of corruption and betrayal within the Roman Catholic Church as the protagonist (played by Ralph Fiennes, who received the Outstanding Performer Award at SBIFF for his performance) participates in the selection of a new pope. Straughan adapted the story after falling in love with the book of the same name by Robert Harris. As an Oscar nominee for Conclave and his 2012 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Straughan has had much time to finetune his writing process. His biggest advice for writers is to always end in a place that will make it easy to start back up again. “The hardest thing is to finish and come back the next morning to a blank page.”

The writers panel at the 40th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival offered a time for discourse with some of the most intelligent and talented writers in the world, and an opportunity to bring movie lovers together. As Joslyn Barnes put it, “To come together to experience…these things become super important in how our societies come together or how they’re fragmented.”

[Panelists Jesse Eisenberg and Mona Fastvold discuss their films Image Credit: Mary Moses]