My Filmviews interviews… Director Kurt Kuenne

shuffle, dear zachary
Kurt Kuenne has written and directed several movies and documentaries, including Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. His latest movie Shuffle was recently released on DVD.

The idea behind Shuffle is a very unique one about a man waking up being a different age each time. It almost feels like something you’d see on The Twilight Zone.
What was your inspiration for it?
The concept came out of a conversation I was having with a development executive in Hollywood who had read a script of mine called “Mason Mule” that had just won the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences at the time; he really liked my writing and was thinking about hiring me to write something for his studio. He had noticed from my previous work that I liked playing with structure, so we started chatting about ideas in which I could do that. “What about a guy who lives his life out of order?” was one of the ideas floated during that brainstorming session. I didn’t even know what the sentence meant, but I liked it, so I went home and came up with the outline for what eventually became “Shuffle”. It turns out that the exec I was talking to was looking for something more comedic in nature, so we parted ways on that particular idea, and I decided to go write it on my own. Continue reading

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)

Andrew Bagby is a 28-year-old medical student who starts a relationship with 41-year-old Shirley Jane Turner. Although his parents and friends get a weird feeling about it, it seems that she makes him happy, at least for a while. He decides to end the relationship, but it’s something Turner can’t handle and his lifeless body is found in a park. It’s a big shock to his family and friends, which gets bigger once they find out that she is pregnant with his child.

When director Kurt Kuenne, one of his childhood friends with whom he made a lot of home movies, hears the story he decides to make a documentary about Andrew. The goal is that this can be shown to his son Zachary when he’s older. This way he can learn who his father was. This movie is more than just a story about Andrew. It is one of the most emotionally gripping documentaries I’ve ever seen. Continue reading