Bricks by Brick – Interviews with the Storytellers Behind the Screen
From the art and craft of making TV and movies to navigating the business side of the industry, Bricks by Brick highlights the hard-working people who are the cornerstones for bringing these stories to life.
Screenwriter Spotlight: Lori Rosene-Gambino On Writing The Thriller Anniversary
By: Kelly Jo Brick
Thrillers have a power to engage and captivate audiences, keeping them on edge, anxious to see what comes next. Writer Lori Rosene-Gambino takes us inside her approach to writing the gripping thriller feature, Anniversary.
TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT ANNIVERSARY.
It’s a story about a close-knit family whose lives are interfered when a former student of the mother comes home and spreads what we refer to as a social virus throughout the family and the consequences of that.
HOW DID THIS FILM COME ABOUT?
Jan Komasa, the director, he had read a spec I had written that was on The Black List years ago. Around the time right before he was nominated for Best International Film by the Academy for Corpus Christi, he wanted to meet me about the script I had written and became attached to it.
At some point he came to me afterward and said like, I really want my first American, English-language film to be this idea that I have about an intimate family that becomes separated. He had kind of a two-pager, but it was very loose. He had set it up with producers who are these great producers who I love: Nick Wechsler, Kate Churchill and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz.
They had read the script and vetted me and so he offered me the job. Then we were off to the races and thought we would get together in a room and sort of develop it together and then the pandemic hit so that was a no-go. We decided we were going to WhatsApp it through development.
It was a really interesting process in the way it came together because we were so taken by, obviously what was happening in the world with the spreading virus, and honestly, pockets of populism around the globe and the misinformation that came out of all that. So we had tons and tons of conversations about that. We just didn’t put it on the page despite trying.
Those conversations were indelible to me and the writing process and they’re all sort of filtered into the idea of the story. So it was unconventional, but liberating, and at some point I went off and did very huge character bios and a treatment and then I went off and wrote the script.
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR WRITERS TO BRING TENSION AND THAT THRILLER ELEMENT TO THEIR SCRIPTS?
I think it’s just the idea of thinking about suspense in general and how it works in the story. It was a different process for me because I have a very contained story. It operates in some capacity as a thriller, but it’s really a lot like a family drama with a lot going on and it’s a slow boil build to where it goes.
It’s being as creative as you can and you’re kind of directing in your mind a bit and there’s a choreography to it. For me it was in the contained walls of this home and just the outer exterior of the home.
I was looking for a location for the film and I said I’d really love to put it on the Potomac, like a house in Virginia just outside DC, which I wanted to make Diane Lane’s character a Georgetown professor. That gave me a lot of latitude with how to build things in terms of suspense with the woodland areas around there, the water around there. So location is another really big builder, particularly if you have a contained film. Then I thought of the house a little bit like a haunted house where it gets very claustrophobic. And although our film relegates a lot around a dinner table and these sort of conversations, you want to make all that really work and you want to build out your numerous characters.
WHAT FILMS INFLUENCED YOUR WORK ON ANNIVERSARY?
For this film a couple of influences were a film called Burnt by the Sun, Fanny and Alexander, The Leopard. Ice Storm is definitely one of them. These are things that are dealing with sort of families and some kind of occupation, so outside force type thing.
Another big thing for me is plays. I love reading plays. Jan and I discuss certain plays because of the contained environment,
But a big thing was I thought about the René Magritte painting called The Lovers. It’s the one where there’s a couple on a porch and they’re hooded and it’s like an intimacy of the two, but there’s outside forces pressing down on this couple and so that image was very helpful.
ARE THERE ANY FILMS OR TV SHOWS THAT HAVE INSPIRED YOU ALONG THE WAY TO BE THE WRITER YOU ARE NOW?
Yes, and in different genres. I don’t consider myself just one particular genre, although I do love a good suspense film. As a kid, I’m from Burbank, California, and my parents, they were young parents, and they took us kids to the Pickwick Drive-In and my brothers would be asleep, I’m the oldest, and I would watch all the movies. Even if it was like The Boston Strangler. I was watching those films and terrified. So it just became part of our language in the home.
Something that was very indelible to me was Reds, believe it or not, which I saw not when it originally came out, but years later and that was a turning point for me strangely because I saw where a film could do many things, because within that film you have a biographical notion, there’s a war, there’s a love story, there’s these interstitial one-on-one interviews. You can do many things in it. And so that sort of grew the art form for me.
I remember loving Thirtysomething. I love Ice Storm, because I feel like that’s a really great small sort of story about families converging and just a slice of life and it has so much to say and I think it’s beautifully written and acted.
WHAT WAS YOUR APPROACH TO WRITING A CONTAINED, LIMITED-BUDGET PROJECT AND WHAT TIPS DO YOU HAVE FOR WRITERS CREATING STORIES LIKE THIS?
Get as creative as you can possibly, because you want to challenge yourself with writing some things that you might have to eventually cut. My first thing was how to sort of
flatter in the read. I was able to have a communication with the director where I said, “I really want to start the film in DC at Georgetown.”
The husband in the story, who is played by Kyle Chandler, owns a sort of farm-to-table restaurant that caters to politicos and it was important to me to know what’s at stake professionally as well as personally. So I opened the story up and we ended up using it. I was told a contained thing, but it was very helpful to open the film up. Plus the DC proximity to their home is very important to the story.
A thing I learned was my first job is to try to be contained within the rules of the story, but also to make it really read and to use what’s necessary. I built in things that I thought, I don’t know if this is going to work in a $5 million film that we’re going to shoot in Ireland, but a lot of it was used.
You get your actors in a great read. You get the imagination stirred. That was really helpful for me to think about that. And then gosh, your job when you’re writing something that’s a bunch of people around a dinner table is how do you hold it, like a really nice written thing? How does one actor roll the grenade down the table to the other actor? It takes some real thought out pieces of this.
This is absolutely the most challenging thing I’ve written and I feel like I really learned a lot about the craft from writing this script.
AS THIS WEBSITE IS COCKTAILS AND MOVIES, WHAT COCKTAIL DO YOU THINK GOES BEST WITH THE MOVIE, ANNIVERSARY?
I love a paloma and I think paloma means dove or peace, and we need a little bit of that after you see this film. I always tell everyone to go see the film and take a beta blocker before they go in because it’s serious. And I think the overall message is about sort of peace and love works as a country that’s kind of become very divided.
That would be a hopeful drink to partake in while watching the film and it’s very simple to make with grapefruit juice and a little blanco tequila.
There’s those great Italian grapefruit sodas you can get at Trader Joe’s and it’s so easy. You just put a little ice and a little bit of blanco tequila and I like a savory type of drink. This is a savory type of film so that it actually goes pairs pretty well.
***Coming Thursday: More with Lori Rosene-Gambino on the craft and business of navigating film and TV as a writer.
Kelly Jo Brick is a TV crime, mystery and procedural writer. A Sundance Fellow and alum of the Women In Film’s Writer/Showrunner Mentoring Circle, Kelly Jo is also the Vice Chair of the WGA Genre Committee. She wrote the Telly Award-winning film, PAUSE, and the Frank Lloyd Wright documentary, The Jewel in the Woods. Follow her on Bluesky @kellyjobrick.bsky.social
