Interviews

2017 Sundance Trading Card Series: #3. Alex Lipschultz (Menashe)

Published on August 5, 2017

Eric Lavallee: Name me three of your favorite “2016 discoveries”…
Alex Lipschultz: THE WITCH, TONI ERDMANN and THE LOBSTER were all quite brilliant.

Lavallee: With Menashe, you perform double duty. What was your contribution in shaping the original screenplay?
Lipschultz: I’ve typically been a fairly hands-on, creative producer. At a certain point the logical next step seemed to be just putting pen to paper to shape a story and write a screenplay. I certainly never expected that the first movie I’d write would be in Yiddish, but there you have it.

Lavallee: A remarkable feat, this is your fifth straight film & year attending the fest as a producer. In your opinion, what is the secret sauce to having your film selected for Sundance?
Lipschultz: Decent taste, hard work and dumb luck. I’m a pretty harsh critic of anything I’ve worked on and I genuinely never expect that these movies will be selected by the festival. It’s been an extraordinarily pleasant surprise getting each new invitation to screen the films in Park City.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).