Alex Scharfman knows that a movie about killer unicorns is ambitious. “A healthy swing” is how he describes Death of a Unicorn, his new A24 horror comedy starring Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd. You only get one feature directorial debut, so Scharfman channeled the escapist populism made famous by Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and John Carpenter for his version of a satirical creature-feature. In other words, Scharfman wanted to make “someone’s favorite movie,” one you rewatch many times in the hope of discovering new things.
In Death of a Unicorn, Elliot Kitner (Rudd) and his daughter, Ridley (Ortega), are driving to a retreat when they accidentally crash into a unicorn. In shock, the duo decides the best course of action is to store the dead unicorn in the trunk and continue on toward the lavish house of Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), Elliot’s boss, and his family — wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and son Shepard (Will Poulter). There, the group discovers the unicorn’s healing powers and attempts to extract them from its blood. The move proves costly as the unicorn might not be as friendly as it appears.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Scharfman discusses the film’s origins and the emotional core at the story’s center.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Digital Trends: How did you pitch this movie? Did you just come out and say, “I have this unicorn movie,” or did you dress it up in a different way?
Alex Scharfman: I don’t like pitching things, to be honest. I’d tell friends about it, but I don’t think I ever pitched it to anybody like, “Hey, you interested in this?” I found this with a couple of things that I’d written. When I tried to explain it to my manager before I wrote it, he was like, ‘Wait, what?” And then I was like, I’ll just write it.
I’ve had this happen before while trying to explain it … I’m just gonna write it and you’ll see. If you like it, great. It’s not necessarily good business for me because I then end up writing things on spec, but at least it gives me an opportunity to lay out what I want the movie to be. Then, people can be like, “I’m into this or I’m not into this.”
There’s so much interpolation of negative space when you pitch an idea. Something like this is idiosyncratic and very execution dependent — a word people say a lot about movies that are trying to blend genre and tone and things like that. It’s hard trying to reintroduce old mythology in a new context. I don’t know. I’m just going to f—— write it. Read it, and if you like it, great. We can talk. I had all different types of pitches. The three-word pitch — it’s killer unicorns. I had all these different versions of it in my mind.
Read the script, and you’ll find out.
Yeah. Again, maybe that’s my own performance anxiety. I have friends who pitch who are just like, “I’m gonna memorize the script, and I’m gonna talk you through the whole movie, and it’s gonna take an hour and a half.” I’m like, what the f— are you talking about? I would go nuts if I had to do that s—. I’m a writer, not an actor. I can’t do that.
In the notes, you wanted to make “someone’s favorite movie.” It’s escapist populism. Do you feel that the film industry has gotten away from that, and this is a way to add it back? Or did you take those ideas [from escapist populist movies] and make it for now?
It was more the latter. I don’t know. It’s hard to think about anything as carrying a flag for anything other than what it is. If this movie’s carrying a flag, it’s for the Death of a Unicorn flag. That’s it to me. One of the North Stars was to make a movie that felt like the movies that got me into making movies when I was a young person. I was in my early to late teens or early twenties, watching the making of Alien three times in a row. That’s what I meant by making someone’s favorite movie.
Something that feels escapist, feels big, feels like it’s about the magic of movies, but also has a certain rewatchability. I hope that there are layers to stuff. You can keep exploring it. You might not hear jokes the first time around. Sometimes I just like amusing jokes that aren’t like big laugh lines. That’s a weird turn of phrase that’s in there. Cool. If you like it, great. If not, we’re still moving ahead. That’s sort of what I was getting at with that feeling.
I worked as a producer for a while, and I read a lot of scripts. A lot of scripts exist because someone wants to make a movie, not because the movie wants to exist. You know what I mean? Someone’s trying to impose something on the world, and not like, “Here’s a story that wants to be told or a story that is asking to be told out there.” I was trying to do something that was asking to be told. I was trying to find a story that felt deserving of being someone’s favorite movie. I have a certain someone in mind. It was really myself in my early 20s. But yeah, I feel like too often people aren’t thinking like that, which is ambitious. Someone’s favorite movie is a really high f—— bar, but that’s the hope.
It is killer unicorns, so it is ambitious.
For sure. This movie is a healthy swing. It is not shy about maximalism, and that’s part of that ambition.
When did you know Will Poulter was gonna steal the show?
I don’t know. I like everyone in the show.
I will say that everyone is funny, but the loudest I laughed was at Will’s jokes.
I mean, that’s a character who popped off the page. His [Will’s] comic timing is just incredible. He grounds it. It’s obviously a heightened character, but he finds an emotional grounding in making that character rooted in his sense of inadequacy. The game of his comedy is all built on this frailty, vulnerability, and weakness in a way that feels very human. I think it translates to an effective portrayal of a character who’s more than just like an antagonist whom you hate. I feel bad for that character at least. His parents did a f—— number on his head, and he’s left to deal with the consequences of that.
We did a table read, and it was like very clear. I was like, Will’s cooking here. But I already knew he was going to. You watch him in Midsommar, We’re the Millers, or anywhere where he’s given a little bit of a comedic leash, and he knows how to use it. So it was very clear to me that we got very fortunate that he wanted to be in the movie.
It was such a weird thing, going from Death of a Unicorn and laughing at Will to seeing an early screening of Warfare. It [Warfare] was rocking me to my core. It’s the duality of what he could do.
He [Will] and I were talking about that last night. It speaks to his versatility as a performer. He can do whatever he wants. Will is just like the real deal of real deals. An incredible actor who really can do any and everything.
This film has satirical themes. There are things to say about capitalism, class, and race. But there’s also this emotional core at the center. It’s the father-daughter relationship between Paul Rudd’s character and Jenna Ortega’s character. I wouldn’t say a lot of satires have a lot of heart. This one does. When did you decide that you needed this emotional core in the movie?
I try not to decide anything. I try to let the story decide things. [Laughs]
Fair!
It’s funny. I’ve said to actors that I’m not making any decisions here. The story is driving the ship. I’m the vehicle by which the story speaks.
You’re the captain.
[Laughs] No, the story is the captain, and I’m the boat. I don’t know how this metaphor works. I think one of the things I realized early on was that the unicorns elicit emotional reactions from us as humans because they’ve been with us for so long, and we all carry a lot of associations with them. It felt weird to me to try and make a straight cynical movie. I think that would have been kind of a disservice to what a unicorn is and the potential that it has.
There’s a certain, like, E.T. kind of quality to the movie, with this emotional association to this creature. Obviously, ours is a horror movie, and E.T. is not scary. That [the emotional core] always felt important to have in the movie. It felt like it was organic to what we were doing. I think the challenge became aligning the satire and the emotional arc on a thematic level.
One thing I was conscious of was that we were making a satire, which can be cynical. And like I said, I think the movie wanted an emotional center. I always think about David Foster Wallace had this whole bit about talking about the problem with cynicism and sarcasm. Ultimately, it’s a negative value proposition that you’re tearing stuff down. You’re saying there’s a problem with this, and there’s a problem with that. At the end of that, you’re like, “OK, but then what are we positing as a way forward? What is an actual positive value structure?”
That was something I had long thought about, and, as someone interested in satire, I think about it a lot. It’s not enough to tear something down. You need to propose something new. The challenge became, how do you align the satirical angle with the emotional center of the movie? I was thinking about Elliot, Ridley, and the repairing of their relationship. In this context, it’s this familiar relationship where they’ve suffered a loss, and as a reaction to that loss, Elliot made it his mission to ensure that they have a degree of financial security so that if anything like that happens again, they will be OK.
It’s an emotional reaction to a social problem in the world: it takes money to get by in it. Through a degree of moral relativism as a coping mechanism, he [Elliot] has told himself, “Whatever I have to do to achieve that end is OK. If I have to work for bad people and do bad things, that’s OK if, at the end of it, it is to the benefit of my daughter and my loved ones. I can protect her and provide for her in a way.” Obviously, over the course of the movie, she’s [Ridley] becoming more vocal in her assertion that it’s actually not okay. She doesn’t want those things. What she wants is a relationship with her father built on a shared value and a shared sense of morality of what’s right and wrong in the world.
That actually, the ends don’t justify the means. The means count for a lot, and how we live every day counts for a lot. And I think in so doing, she sort of provokes for him the realization that if she doesn’t need this s—, then why is he doing this? Maybe it’s for him. Maybe he has to look in the mirror and recognize that he wants material things and that he doesn’t actually need them because, at the end of the day, they’re not providing him the comfort that he’s told himself they would.
Something that I definitely tried to thread through the middle of this question of aligning the satire and the heart is like making the movie something about the things we do for our loved ones and the things we tell ourselves we do for them. To me, that brings an emotional center to the satirical angle of, like, how do we engage in a late-stage capitalist society? What do we do in that sense of moral relativism, and make sense of our way through the world?
Death of a Unicorn is now in theaters.
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