Some of the key players who help shape the film industry today are hardly ever seen – we only read what they write. They are the film journalists, like Marietta Steinhart, the Viennese writer. Of course, we do see her periodically when she interviews movie stars and filmmakers for the television cameras. But most of the time, Marietta puts her thoughts, insights and reviews, along with interview questions and answers, on paper, which are then read by millions of people who are interested in the movie business and in entertainment news. “I love doing both television and print interviews,” says Steinhart. “But it’s really only in print where you get to explore a subject in depth, be it a personality or, better still an emerging trend, a subtext or intellectual context, which you as the writer only truly come to understand as you research and write the piece itself.”
Marietta has been a professional film journalist for over five years now and is a member of the Austrian Film Critics Guild, The International Federation of Film Critics, and is accredited by the Motion Picture Association of America. She has covered the Academy Awards Show, and such prestigious festivals including Sundance, The New York Film Festival, and The Toronto International Film Festival. “In the festival circuit you get to see great films you wouldn’t have the chance to see otherwise”, she notes.
She’s also been a guest (on more than one occasion), at Pixar Animation Studios – “to my mind Pixar and Japan’s Studio Ghibli are the two leading mavericks of contemporary animation” – in Emeryville, California, where she has interviewed Academy Award winning directors Pete Docter (Inside Out) and Andrew Stanton (Finding Dory). She has also visited the sets of TV shows filming throughout the US and Canada, like Dark Matter (Syfy), the Golden Globe award-winning series, Goliath (Amazon), Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix) and Preacher (AMC).
Marietta may have lost count of all the personalities she’s met and interviewed since she came to Los Angeles several years ago. But some of them might sound familiar to you: award winning actresses Nicole Kidman (Lion) and Reese Witherspoon (Wild), Anthony Hopkins (Westworld), Kevin Bacon (I Love Dick), Zac Efron (Bad Neighbors 2), Michael Keaton (The Founder), Ruth Negga (Loving), Ang Lee (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), Scott Cooper (Black Mass), Duncan Jones (Warcraft), Paul Feig (Ghostbusters), Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator, Vince Gilligan, Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak), Billy Bob Thornton (Goliath), Melissa McCarthy (The Boss), Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls), Mahershala Ali (Luke Cage), Judd Apatow (Trainwreck) and Dakota Johnson (50 Shades Darker), to name just a few.
“I’ve met a lot of remarkable artists”, she says. “But Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was one of my favorite interviews. Kaufman’s films, both as a writer and now as a director (most recently, Anomalisa; 2015) are unlike anyone else’s work today. They’re so out there, yet so moving, human, insightful and downright funny at the same time. I’m a huge admirer of the man and his work.”
Marietta Steinhart’s work regularly appears in stories syndicated by the Austria Press Agency www.apa.at; ray Filmmagazin www.ray-magazin.at; Zeit Online www.zeit.de, and other German language outlets.
