Show Notes
Ponies is a delightful series about two women who become CIA spies during the Cold War. In our very generous conversation, creator Susanna Fogel explores the development of her characters and the show's unique take on designing Moscow, as well as some of the honest trade-offs required to get a streaming series over the line these days.
Subscribe to Top Of The Line - IndieWire's new newsletter about the craft of film and TV - https://cloud.email.indiewire.com/signup/
Listen to the Screen Talk Podcast. Every Friday IndieWire editors Anne Thompson & Ryan Lattanzio break down insider news from Hollywood and debate the latest films and series.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/indiewire-screen-talk/id893977298 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit
During the making of her boundary breaking period drama "Marie Antoinette," Sofia Coppola's mother Eleanor shot hundreds of hours of behind the scenes footage. Sofia and her long time editor Aaron Mathews assembled it into a feature length documentary, with the aid of Diane Lane reading the late Eleanor's journals from the set. She opened up with IndieWire's Chris O'Falt about the intimate access a filmmaker grants their own mother, working under the shadow of her father's reputation for grandeur, and her pride in her mother's art.
Lance Oppenheim is a favorite guest on the Filmmaker Toolkit; a director who loves dissecting his process. Lance has two films in theaters that demand this kind of breakdown more than any this year. First, we dig into the Elizabeth Holmes documentary he co-directed with Nathan Fielder, 'You Can See Everything.' Lance explains the web of confusion and falsehoods they were drawn into by Holmes, often disagreeing about the nature of what they had just captured on camera.
Director Cristian Mungiu ("4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days") uses his films to challenge audience's morals and sense of justice. In his newest film, the Palme d'Or winning "Fjord," Mungiu follows an immigrant Romanian family targeted by Norwegian child protective services for their conservative beliefs. Our challenging conversation digs into the messy morality of a progressive nation enforcing its beliefs with authoritarian practices, and how Mungiu writes his films to place the viewer in the role of jurist.
The legendary screenwriter returns to the subject that won him an Oscar for "The Social Network," this time in the director's chair. Hear Sorkin explain how he tried to get David Fincher to direct, replacing Jesse Eisenberg with Jeremy Strong's intense transformation into the Facebook founder, and why America's growing political extremism made him change his mind about "not wanting to jump up and down" on Zuckerberg. We also explore the making of the 2010 original film, and even touch a bit on 'The West Wing.'
In his fourth film as writer and director, Chris Rock is coming out as a cinephile. In this conversation with IndieWire's Chris O'Falt, Rock shares his love for independent filmmakers like Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach, and how he is trying to be taken seriously as a director of personal, dramatic films. We also discuss casting and collaborating with the film's star Rosalind Eleazar, and stumble into some fun anecdotes from Rock's comedy past.