We Need to Talk About Oscar

Áron Czapek

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TV & Film

We Need to Talk About Oscar brings you inside the creative process with the artists behind modern film and television. Anchored by the awards conversation but passionate about indie cinema, each episode bridges technical filmmaking with rich, personal storytelling.

5d ago

Thomas Leisten Schneider on what family hands down in 'Love - Love'

Writer-director Thomas Leisten Schneider makes his feature debut with 'Love - Love,' moving from the quick turnaround of commercials and shorts like 'Point and Shoot' into a much longer, more demanding shoot. He reflects on the unexpected challenges of holding onto a singular vision over that extended timeline, and on growing up between France and the US, a background that shaped his outsider's fascination with the road trip as a distinctly American form, and with the bleak, otherworldly quiet of the Salton Sea as a setting. Much of the conversation centers on directing Haley Joel Osment as Andy, a character living with schizophrenia, and how Thomas balanced guiding that performance with trusting what Osment discovered on his own, including a moment on set that reshaped his sense of the character entirely. He also discusses casting Beck Bennett as Jeff, a brother pulled suddenly into caregiving while still searching for his own footing, and how he used the absurdity of the entertainment industry to offset the story's heavier emotional terrain. Thomas connects his theater background to the rehearsal process he built for both actors, aiming for something true beneath the film's shifts between humor and pain. He also unpacks the title's tennis roots and how they tie into Bruce's past as a disgraced professional, before reflecting on how far he's come since his first day on set and what that journey revealed about his voice as a filmmaker.
Sep 22

Paula González-Nasser pauses the city one home at a time in 'The Scout'

Writer-director Paula González-Nasser spent years location scouting before making 'The Scout,' her feature debut following Sofia, played by Mimi Davila, through a single frantic workday. Paula reflects on whether scouting for a film about scouting changed her process at all, and whether her professional instincts made her hyper aware of every space she chose for Sofia to enter, or whether she had to consciously set those instincts aside. The city around Sofia moves fast, but time slows the moment she steps inside a stranger's home, and Paula walks through the pacing and blocking choices behind that shift, protecting a sense of quiet within scenes that otherwise sit inside a hectic day. She also unpacks the irony of making such a measured film under the same high pressure conditions indie sets usually produce, and what it took to keep her crew from falling into the very chaos the film observes. Paula gets into the toll of constantly watching and drawing from strangers without fully showing up as herself, and whether that same transactional dynamic extends into independent filmmaking more broadly, including any observational habits she's had to unlearn to stay present as a director. Turning to how younger creatives have responded to a film this honest about the industry's exhaustion, she weighs whether that honesty makes the path ahead feel more daunting or more navigable for them.
Sep 18

Liz Sargent on family, care, and imagining better in 'Take Me Home'

Writer-director Liz Sargent built 'Take Me Home' out of the life she and her sister Anna have lived, expanding her Sundance short into a feature. Liz opens up about what it means for her work to sit so squarely inside her own family, and whether any line can realistically exist between directing a project and living it, between being someone's director and being their sister once the camera rolls. The short still stands on its own, and Liz looks back on it now with the feature finished, considering how her feelings toward that earlier piece have changed and whether the longer process gave her new appreciation for choices she made the first time around. She also gets into how a feature schedule, so much longer and heavier than a short, reshaped her working rhythm with Anna, and what pulled her toward telling this as fiction rather than documentary. Anna acts opposite a seasoned ensemble here, and Liz describes how she built a set where her sister felt secure and genuinely creatively empowered among them, along with the accessibility practices her crew adopted to make that possible for everyone. She closes on the film's ending and the hopeful world it imagines, and whether offering audiences that vision makes the current state of care systems land even harder for her.
Sep 8

Greg Vrotsos turns the camera on himself in 'Situations'

Writer-director-star Greg Vrotsos shot 'Situations' entirely within Silver Lake, and considers how uncommon it's become for a film to present Los Angeles as itself rather than a stand-in for somewhere else. He also unpacks the space between what he anticipated directing would feel like and what actually filled his days on set, plus whether the experience reshaped opinions he'd carried for years as an actor working under other directors. Several scenes place Greg's character, Nick, in conversation with himself, and he identifies who or what served as his counterpart in those beats. He addresses his instinct to withhold emotional explanation and let the audience fill in what a character feels, and describes how his eye as a photographer informed the visual distance he and cinematographer Trevor Wineman maintained between the lens and the people on screen. Greg also reflects on what playing a man trying to climb out of a creative and romantic slump revealed about his own habits as a performer, including instincts he found he could finally drop. We wrap by considering whether completing a film rooted in frustration over the scarcity of stories about adults in their thirties and forties actually eased that frustration, or simply underlined how rare those human scale stories remain. (Photo: Courtesy of Liam Brown)
Sep 4

Joe Swanberg on scaling up and looking back in 'The Sun Never Sets'

Joe Swanberg sets his first feature in nearly a decade against the vast landscapes of Anchorage, Alaska, a marked departure from the cramped apartments and coffee shops that have long defined relationship dramas. Joe reflects on what it meant to trade those intimate confines for bush planes and sprawling terrain, and how directing on that scale changed his day to day approach behind the camera. Known for building loose, outline-driven scripts that let dialogue emerge in the room, Joe considers whether a larger crew and the added complexity of shooting in Anchorage forced him to tighten his structure, or whether his cast still found room to reshape scenes on the fly. He also touches on returning to 35mm for this production, and what that format brought to a story centered on people navigating their messy thirties from a more reflective, slightly older vantage point than his earlier work, without slipping into easy nostalgia. This marks Joe's fourth collaboration with Jake Johnson, and he weighs in on how their long partnership keeps evolving, particularly given how closely this story draws from his own life. Joe also opens up about directing Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith, who had no prior films of his to measure this experience against, and what that dynamic looked like without any shared history to lean on. (Photo credit: Mitchell Hansen)
Sep 1

Orlando von Einsiedel on destiny and documentary form in 'The Cycle of Love'

Orlando von Einsiedel, the Academy Award winning director behind 'The White Helmets' and 'Virunga,' turns to romance with 'The Cycle of Love,' recreating PK Mahanandia's 6,000 mile bicycle journey from Delhi to Sweden. A dedicated London cyclist himself, Orlando reveals whether he pedaled alongside actor Chirag Lobo during production, and considers which strict verité habits he had to let go of once staging unscripted, actor driven scenes became central to the process. Real strangers encountered along the route add another layer of unpredictability, and Orlando explains how he steered those spontaneous exchanges whenever they risked pulling too far from the emotional heart of PK's original trip. With little archival footage surviving from the actual 1977 journey, he leaned instead on a collection of handwritten letters and keepsakes, pointing to the single object that resisted translation to screen more than any other. He also weighs whether spending years immersed in a story anchored by a childhood prophecy altered his own outlook on fate versus coincidence. Having built a career largely around documenting conflict, Orlando discusses the different creative muscles needed to render pure joy on screen without tipping into sentimentality. We close on the film's handling of caste based discrimination, describing his work with Dalit advocacy groups and one piece of guidance from that partnership that changed either a moment on set or a choice made later in the edit.
Aug 25

Jess Zeidman and Leo Gallagher find rhythm in fragments in 'Human Theories'

Director Jess Zeidman previously wrote 'Tahara' for Olivia Peace to direct, and this time stepped behind the camera herself, working alongside cinematographer Leo Gallagher, who moved up from gaffer on that earlier project to DP here. Jess unpacks what shifted in her instincts now that every creative choice landed on her desk, while Leo identifies which lessons from his prior work translated most directly to this larger undertaking. Built from more than 40 interconnected vignettes and a cast of over 20 named characters, the film demanded a different kind of groundwork than anything shorter form requires. Jess and Leo describe negotiating how self-contained each segment should feel against the urge to thread them together, and how they mapped out a shoot this sprawling in setting and tone without boxing themselves in too rigidly. Filmed over roughly a year across real New York locations with a lean crew and actors dressed in their own wardrobes, the visual approach, including mounting the camera on a Lazy Susan, had to carry a lot of narrative weight, whether each vignette earns its own distinct look or the throughline comes from one unified way of observing all these different lives. Jess and Leo close by reflecting on how laughter, both from crew during production and later from audiences, became a kind of compass throughout the process, guiding what ultimately made the cut and confirming when a scene had found its truth.
Aug 21

Shatara Michelle Ford and Ludovica Isidori craft a gentler collision for 'Dreams in Nightmares'

Writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford and cinematographer Ludovica Isidori reunite for their second feature together following 'Test Pattern,' this time following three queer Black femmes searching for a missing friend across the American Midwest. They reflect on how the shorthand built during their first collaboration carried over or had to be rebuilt entirely once the scale and ambition of this story demanded something new from their partnership. Our conversation turns to the film's opening moments, where a charged, layered score and archival footage give way abruptly to still, quiet images of nature. Shatara and Ludovica walk through the reasoning behind that jarring juxtaposition and what it establishes for the tone that follows. Shatara breaks down why providing broader context is essential for an audience to truly grasp their work, while Ludovica shares how much of that foundational world-building she needs to absorb before picking up the camera. The episode concludes with an intimate look at their reshaping of the road movie, a genre long associated with solitary men and open highways, into something rooted in closeness and romantic warmth instead.

We Need to Talk About Oscar brings you inside the creative process with the artists behind modern film and television. Anchored by the awards conversation but passionate about indie cinema, each episode bridges technical filmmaking with rich, personal storytelling.

Creator

Áron Czapek
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

182
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2024 We Need to Talk About Oscar
Show Website

We Need to Talk About Oscar