You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and these are my interviews with the director and writer of the film Death of a Unicorn, Alex Shorffman, and the film star, Will Poulter.

This entire nature preserve was donated by the Leopold.

It's truly untouched by man.

Spotter and AB. It's truly untouched by man. Spot it in a big game on the way.

The fuck was that?

Must be moose mating season or something. Aren't you the most magnificent thing?

Hello everyone, welcome to the Next Best Picture podcast, where I am being joined right now

by the director and writer of Death of a Unicorn, Alex Schwarfman.

Alex, thank you so much for taking the time, man. I really appreciate it.

Oh, yeah. Hello. Good to see you. Thanks for having me on. And thanks for want to talk about this movie.

Absolutely, man. Well, thank you so much. I saw this movie at the South by Southwest Film Festival where the crowd just seemed to

eat it up. We all had such a blast watching it. I'm curious to know because it's such a high

concept, unusual premise for a film. Where did the idea come from? Like, because it's not every

day that you just pull this necessarily out of your head

no it was an idea that i had a long time ago and the idea was just the opening scene um

basically of a father and daughter driving through the woods uh but i didn't know where they were

going or what they were doing but i knew they were talking about something relatively banal and grounded.

And then out of nowhere, boom, they just hit a unicorn. And that was an idea I had. And at first I was like, I guess that's a short film, but like, I don't know what to do with that because it's an expensive short film. And I wasn't really interested in making a short film. So I didn't do anything with it. And then, I don't know, it kept kind of, you know, it kept kind of gnawing at me in the back of my mind.

I like to, with a lot of ideas, I like to try and, like, put them away for as long as I can and let them kind of build up and accumulate their own feeling. And I had no interest in uniforms. Like, I was not like a unicorn kid growing up. I had no, like, emotional attachment to them. And so when I had that idea, I was like at first, I was like, does it have to be a unicorn? What if it's Bigfoot or what if it's, you know, just anything else? And I was like, it kept coming back to it had to be a unicorn. Then that led me to a lot of unicorn research, trying to think about like, well, what is a unicorn? What does it symbolizeize what do we all bring to what a unicorn is and then it kind of you know i don't know my favorite ideas are the

ones where i just start pulling a thread and i don't know where it's going um but that then led me to

you know unicorn research led to a lot of medieval lore which led to you know unicorns being prized

throughout history as a panacea which then led to the tapestries eventually. And then at some point, I kind of realized it was a way to make a fun kind of creature feature in the vein of so many movies that made me fall in love with film and filmmaking when I was a young person. And so that's when I was like, it all kind of coalesced.

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