Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.
19.01.2022 - 22:46 / etcanada.com
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter after her self-imposed exile, Lena Dunham reveals she’s entering a new creative era that will focus on art rather than public perception.
“I just realized that the experience of ‘Girls’ and my 20s was such an all-encompassing hurricane of both validation and derision that in order for me to keep that place of myself that loved to make art, that was what needed to happen,” Dunham said of her sudden disappearance from the public eye.
The auteur rose to fame in 2011 with the release of her HBO series “Girls” which followed the messy lives of a group of young millennial women. Dunham was only 24 when she landed her first major TV series.
“I look back, and just, like, the sheer gall of me, stepping on to set that first day; 24-year-old me standing in Silver Cup Studios, the old ‘Sex and the City’ studios, going, ‘Let’s do this.’ I’m proud of myself,” recalled Dunham.
READ MORE: Scott Speedman Talks Playing A Porn Star In Lena Dunham’s New Film ‘Sharp Stick’, Reveals How He Prepared For The Role
With the sudden rise in profile also came criticism and scrutiny from the public eye. Past mistakes were blown up to major gaffes.
“There are things I said in my 20s and 30s that I apologized for because I knew they came from a place of ignorance and lack of awareness… I was young, and I had huge blind spots,” the star admitted of past racially insensitive remarks. “I came right at the cusp of the internet becoming a thing. The speed with which the hammer comes down is so much more intense right now.”
Commenting on the current era’s focus on diversity and scrutiny of past cultural attitudes, the artist confessed she was actually supportive of the movement.
“I am not one of those
Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.
Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorLena Dunham’s Sundance entry “Sharp Stick” has been acquired by small indie distributor Utopia for U.S. rights.
Utopia has acquired the U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s Sundance comedy “Sharp Stick,” which follows a young woman’s unexpected quest of sexual exploration and self-discovery, Utopia announced on Monday.Utopia will release the film theatrically in the U.S.
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Sarah Jayne Dunn has revealed she will audition for “other acting roles” on Loose Women, after she left Hollyoaks for Only Fans. The 40 year old had her contract terminated on the hit Channel 4 soap after two decades on the show, as she wanted to keep her Only Fans account. While the exit was a “huge shock” to Sarah, she admits that her “intention” is to keep acting and she will be looking for other roles.
Lena Dunham got a little help from her friends! For her new movie,, the star tells that she asked Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn for their help, which is why they are given a Thank You credit at the end of the film.«They are just really great friends of mine who watched a really early cut of the film and gave me notes,» Dunham says of Swift, who was a bridesmaid in her wedding, and her actor boyfriend. «They’re both just really interesting, perceptive people. Taylor’s been one of my close friends for a really long time and Joe is an actor who I actually ended up working with on a project that I shot just a few months after this.», directed and written by Dunham and starring Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal and Luka Sabbat, follows Sarah Jo, a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister.
Elizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentAfter Lena Dunham’s new movie “Sharp Stick” was criticized on Twitter by an autism activist who claimed she was approached to be a consultant on the project, the filmmaking team behind the Sundance film says that the central character, Sarah Jo, was never written to be on the spectrum. Producers say the drama about a young woman’s sexual awakening was inspired entirely by creator Lena Dunham’s personal journey, dealing with severe endometriosis which resulted in a hysterectomy.“Sarah Jo was never written nor imagined as a neurodivergent woman,” a spokesperson for the film says, in part, in a statement to Variety.
Lena Dunham is sharing her thanks for Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn.
in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many high-minded inspirations. She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family and design your own family and how that’s just as meaningful.” Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy? Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do.
Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.
Lena Dunham hasn’t made a feature film since Tiny Furniture 12 years ago, but she has some plausible excuses—running Girls for six seasons, conceiving another series, writing two books, acting here and there. It took the pandemic to get her behind the camera again and, low and behold, the resulting film is about people living in very close quarters, not going out much and, at least for some, having a lot of sex. Sharp Stick brims over with the energy of young people who wanted to make something, quickly and down and dirty. The result is an invigorating film about a beautiful woman who, in her mid-20s, sheds her lifelong avoidance of sex to dive into the deep end. The FilmNation production is making its world premiere in the Premieres section of this year’s festival.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor a decade, Lena Dunham has kept more than busy, executive producing TV series like “Camping” and “Generation” and putting out her memoir. Yet she’s been notably selective about her main slate of projects, and “Sharp Stick,” which premiered tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, is her third major act.
iveté of Alana Haim’s Alana Kane in “Licorice Pizza.” Sarah Jo is placed as a caregiver in the family of Zach (Liam Michel Saux), his hip, white-dude-who-raps, stay-at-home dad, Josh (Jon Bernthal), and nagging, very pregnant realtor mom, Heather (Dunham). When Treina, through a little social-media sleuthing, catches her man hanging out with his ex’s cousin at Universal Studios, Marilyn offers this advice: “You wanna know if he is really yours? You look him in the eye and you say, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’ It’s foolproof . . .
score record-breaking pacts despite the fact that all-night bidding wars were conducted over Zoom.This year’s festival has a number of high-profile features that should attract buyers’ attention, either because they feature A-list stars like Lena Dunham, Dakota Johnson and Regina Hall or because they deal with hot topics like abortion rights and religion. There are also a number of documentaries exploring everything from the rise of TikTok to the fight to prevent a climate change catastrophe that could score major sales.
Lena Dunham has discussed her past addiction to Klonopin, describing getting off the anxiety drug as “the hardest” thing she’s been through.After being prescribed the drug aged 12, the actor and writer became increasingly dependent on it following filming on the last series of Girls – a period she described as being like a “50-car pileup”.Back in 2017, at the time, Dunham faced criticism for defending Girls executive producer Murray Miller, who had been accused of rape by actor Aurora Perrineau. Miller denied the claims.Dunham later retracted her statement and apologised, admitting she had lied about having ‘insider information’ regarding the accusations and that she defended Miller in an attempt to discredit Perrineau.Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Dunham said: “Those images of me at the last Girls premiere, skinny and hollow-eyed, that was 100 per cent my appetite and my body just shutting down in response to that.”In 2018, Dunham entered rehab for an addiction to benzodiazepines, specifically Klonopin.