With three of the screenplays written by women, this is the most female-dominated lineup this category has seen since 1991. Jane Campion, who won Best Original Screenplay in 1993 for The Piano, earns her second writing nomination for The Power of the Dog, while Maggie Gyllenhaal enters the history books with her screenwriting (and directorial) debut by becoming the third woman, after Emma Thompson and Ruth Gordon, to be nominated for writing and acting; she and her mom, 1989’s Running on Empty scribe Naomi Foner, are the second mother-daughter duo to both be recognized for screenplays. Other milestones: The dialogue in Siân Heder’s CODA is 50% in American Sign Language, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe’s Drive My Car is the first Japanese film to earn a writing nod.
CODA, Siân Heder
Heder knew that to adapt the 2014 French movie that inspired CODA, about a hearing girl in a deaf family, she’d need to showcase American Sign Language. “I was writing half the script in a language that couldn’t be written (and was) purely visual,” she said. To assist Heder, Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti came on as directors of creative sign language. “I’m so grateful to Alexandria and Anne and the deaf collaborators that I had on this project,” Heder said. “It was a beautiful process to see my own writing come to life in this language that is so unique and beautiful and rarely gets to be seen on screen.”
DUNE, Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, Eric Roth
Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel had stymied at least three filmmakers before Villeneuve, Spaihts and Roth successfully found a way in, dividing the monster doorstop of a book into two films. As with any literary adaptation, Villeneuve and his co-writers did some pruning of plot and characters to focus on the essential storyline of a family in crisis. “I had such powerful source material. All the detail made by Frank Herbert is so rich and precise,” Villeneuve said. “The dream was that the people who loved the book will feel we put a camera in their mind and brought back images (of) … what they imagined when they read the book.”
DRIVE MY CAR, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe
One of the biggest changes Hamaguchi and Oe made when adapting Haruki Murakami’s short story was putting greater emphasis on Uncle Vanya, the Chekov play that theater director Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is staging. That allowed Hamaguchi to explore the parallels between Harakumi’s characters and Chekov’s, creating a more complex portrait of how humans contemplate loss, love and the role of art in life. “Those corresponding relationships are very important as you move through the story,” Hamaguchi said. “Murakami made a very deliberate choice to put (Uncle Vanya) in his story.”
THE LOST DAUGHTER, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Gyllenhaal had an intense reaction to Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, in which a middle-aged literature professor becomes haunted by her own decisions made 20 years before. The book lays bare certain aspects of womanhood that are rarely discussed, including maternal ambivalence, and Gyllenhaal said she wanted to bring that to the screen, “not just in terms of motherhood but in terms of all sorts of feminine experiences.” The writer-director added: “Only a fraction of our experience has been reflected back at us. So I think something new and different happens when women are writing and directing.”
THE POWER OF THE DOG, Jane Campion
The idea to write a Western came to Oscar winner Campion unexpectedly, when she read Thomas Savage’s novel about Montana ranching brothers in 1925 and was struck by its hyper-masculinity, territory she had not focused on in her previous work. Distilling Savage’s book to its core elements, Campion weaves tension as much through silence as through taut dialogue. Her lines are powerful, and so is what lies between them.
Steve’s Perspective
While four of the five nominated films are also in the running for Best Picture, Jane Campion seems to be the favorite to win this award and become the first person since James L. Brooks in 1984 to win Best Director and a solo screenwriting award. If there’s a threat to her, it’s probably CODA, which is riding a strong wave of affection and a big win at BAFTA—unless all those overseas voters unite behind Drive My Car to give us the second non-English screenplay winner in three years.
