DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

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Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical

We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS

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Actor · Comedian · Filmmaker · Magician · Singer · Writer

And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small-town New Mexico in this big city of Los Angeles…I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African-American man in Pittsburgh and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at 13, 14 years old…And it was so moving. And I did think even back then, I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.

MAX RICHTER

MAX RICHTER

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Award-winning Composer & Pianist
His album Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time
Film & TV scores for Ad Astra · Black Mirror · Shutter Island · The Leftovers · Arrival · Taboo

For me, the creative process is a sort of a continuous thing in the sense that I'm writing kind of all the time, at some level. And that doesn't mean I'm sitting at my desk all the time, but it does mean that I've got a continuous thought process, a continuous engagement with the material I'm trying to shape. And it's many different kinds of processes. First of all, obviously an intention. You need to have an intention. What is it I'm trying to do? But then you get a process of making things, and then you get into a process of dialogue with the things you've made where they start to take on properties and it feels like the material has intentions of its own. So then you are trying to - it's like herding cats, you know? - sort of corralling this material into some kind of structure, some kind of formed object. Then it becomes like a sculptural process on the large scale.

ALAN JACOBSEN

ALAN JACOBSEN

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Director of Photography
Emmy & Sundance Special Jury Award-Winning & Oscar Nominated Documentaries

I hope that film and the story can help people get their heads around these huge ideas that are pretty terrifying and almost hopeless to think about. What can we do? Are we on this track? What have we done to the earth? I think scientists are very much starting to agree that it’s getting to the point where it’s almost too late. So can humans see that far ahead? Can we understand the track we’re on in time? I don’t know, but I’m willing to use whatever tools possible to try to help that conversation happen.

ALICE BROOKS

ALICE BROOKS

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Award-winning Cinematographer
In The Heights, Tick, Tick…Boom!

There’s this children’s book called Miss Rumphius, and I’ve carried it around with me my entire life. It’s about a woman whose grandfather tells her three things, and the last one is the most difficult thing of all and that’s to fill the world with beauty. And I give this book to every one of my friends who are having babies, I have a copy with me almost at all times, and I’m reminded of that feeling that Jonathan Larson had in Tick, Tick…Boom! Of how much time do we have to do something great.

JANE ALEXANDER

JANE ALEXANDER

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Tony & Emmy Award-Winning Actress · Conservationist
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts 1993-97

I did not seek out these roles like All the President's Men. I know that I was very interested in social and political issues from childhood. I don't know whether there was something in me that translated that I was politically and socially conscious when I was a young actress because these roles came to me. I didn't go out begging for them. And I was so grateful to have them because I thought they had a depth to them.

MARCELO ZARVOS

MARCELO ZARVOS

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Pianist and TV/Film Composer

I think the music, the way that it's shot, and the way that it's written, of course, all work in conjunction. There’s something about a passage of time in your mind. Then it's not about the clocks. It's more about the suspended, almost like the absence of clocks, and the idea of suspended time, which memory is more like that since in our memory all time happens at once.

JOE MANTEGNA

JOE MANTEGNA

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Actor and Director

When I read Mamet, to me, it was almost like–Yeah! I get it. This is a language I understand. It felt very comfortable to me. And I know he has told me that he has written characters with my voice in his mind as he wrote them, and so, again how lucky for me that that's the case. I feel very lucky that it's worked out that way that he's the writer that I ended up hooking up with.

MORGAN NEVILLE

MORGAN NEVILLE

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Academy Award-winning Documentary Filmmaker

I think it's interesting because I feel like in scripted films people are trying to infuse a spontaneity and a reality and a being in the moment into something that's very artificial. And I feel a lot of what we do as documentarians is try and impose a structure or a form on something that is utterly real and alive and in the moment and uncategorizable in many ways. So, we're kind of the opposite, coming from opposite ends of the same goal, which is to kind of create something that is or feels authentic to a certain truth, an emotional truth, or a literal truth.

DOUG WRIGHT

DOUG WRIGHT

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Playwright & President of the Dramatists Guild of America

I think we have to look to find the voices of women and marginalized people because sometimes it's the most disenfranchised people in the culture that are the most articulate about it and most aware of the innate injustice in certain social systems. So I think we really have examine our canon and broaden and deepen it to include more voices.

STUART DRYBURGH

STUART DRYBURGH

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Cinematographer

If I had to choose one movie I always say Terrence Mallick's Badlands. If I have to ever choose one it's that one. It's just such an amazing film. Great music and great acting. Just sort of stood back, relaxed cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. That era of John Cassavetes movies. Oh, my god, Gloria, Woman Under the Influence. Just outstanding and daring and free. In the film world, I’m probably more influenced by that than I even realize. I always appreciated the magic of cinema, even before I was involved.

JOHN POWELL

JOHN POWELL

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Composer

I can't draw a line between language, really, and music. It's too disparate, but there are so many levels of human communication in it that I hear. Feelings, obviously, imagery, a sort of indescribable warmth, chills. All of these kinds of words we try to use to explain the feelings, but the communication is very clear when music is good. It's very clear. You hear a story that is a four-dimensional story.