24: My Dinner with Warren Etheredge: Film, Architecture and Storytelling

“Write what you’re desperate to understand”

In this SPECIAL EDITION we talk with Warren Etheredge, critic, screenwriter, teacher and charismatic co-founder with Tom Skerritt of The Film School. Warren is also the author of TheWarrenReport and host of the podcast, The High Bar. Over a meal in the University of Washington Faculty Club, we discuss his career, screenwriting and the importance of storytelling, emotional vulnerability and honesty in film. We explore the art, craft (and crap) of cinema and design and interrogate issues of practice, celebrity, consumer culture, profit, auteurship and aesthetics in filmmaking and architecture through the work of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and others.

Timestamp Outline

2:00 Discussion of both Warren and Virkam’s fathers
5:35 Architecture vs. film, ownership and longevity 
8:28 Building the freedom tower and making a film
12:01 “Seattle is a city filled with forgettable architecture, it is the summer slate of paramount”-WE
18:18 What the public wants
19:17 “The more specific we are to our emotional experiences in the world as individual artists, storytellers, creators, the more universal it can become”-WE
22:05 Stanley Kubric’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
25:04 Collaboration, or consensus?
29:44 Storytelling and Film School pedagogy  
32:54 “Write what you’re desperate to understand”-WE
40:00 Moonlight, Barry Jenkins 2016
49:36 PTS…D?
55:10   “Architecture is focused on solution making. We do not acknowledge the persistence of a problem, we are solution makers”-VP
68:18 The Last Temptation of Christ (Adapted from 1952 publication by Nikos Kazantzkis) Martin Scorsese 1988
72:00 The Third Act, new reality