Interview: Riley Stearns – The Art of Self-Defense | 2019 American Film Festival in Wroclaw

A meek, introverted loner turns to karate as a way of coping with trauma after being violently attacked in Riley Stearns follow-up to 2014’s Faults. Somewhat surprisingly, Stearns’ exploration of toxic masculinity, gender and gaslighting keeps a sinister tone while letting in a fair amount of comedy, with star Jesse Eisenberg the ideal performer to connect the two. His relationship with a karate instructor played by Alessandro Nivola is the highlight of a movie suspended in time and space and drowned in shades in brown to the point of becoming blandly universal. A practitioner of martial arts himself, the writer and director manages to convey an authentic passion for the discipline while selling a generic, stereotyped version of it to its characters. The Art of Self-Defense premiered at SXSW and now brought Stearns to Poland for the American Film Festival, where I sat down with him to talk about the peculiar writing balance he had to strike, how he leveraged Eisenberg’s persona to enrich the role, and what Nivola’s intensity brought to the character of Sensei.