Death of a Unicorn’s Alex Scharfman knows he’s fortunate to be able to say that his feature directorial debut is an A24 film that’s led by Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. But the writer-director has more than paid his dues the last 15-plus years, mainly as a producer, all while refining the craft of screenwriting. Along the way, Rudd, through their shared manager, took notice of a Scharfman-penned script called The Cats of Baxley, which Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey had possession of at the time. From there, Rudd indirectly encouraged Scharfman to write something with him in mind, and that something eventually took on the form of Death of a Unicorn.
The creature feature centers around father-daughter, Elliot (Rudd) and Ridley Kintner (Jenna Ortega), as they journey to the mountainside lodge of Elliot’s Sackler-esque employer, the Leopolds. While en route to the intimate company retreat, the Kintners and their rental car accidentally collide with a baby unicorn. The pharma family that is the Leopolds soon recognize the creature’s medicinal benefits and the financial windfall that it presents.
Scharfman happened to initiate the casting of Ortega right before her smash hit Netflix series, Wednesday, launched her into the stratosphere of the industry.
“We sent [Death of a Unicorn] to her the weekend before Wednesday premiered [in November 2022],” Scharfman tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So I don’t know what we would’ve done if we didn’t get Jenna. It’s such a hard role, and she does such an incredible job with it.”
During and after college, Scharfman worked for producer Lars Knudsen at a production company that he co-founded called Parts & Labor Films. Knudsen would go on to start Square Peg with Ari Aster, and their banner helped produce Death of a Unicorn. But Parts & Labor was also where Scharfman got to watch Robert Eggers put the finishing touches on The Witch and develop his earliest drafts of Nosferatu. So the highly detailed unicorn lore in Death of a Unicorn is Scharfman’s way of taking a page from Eggers’ research-intensive playbook.
“It’s not like I was his research associate or anything, but just passively being around his research and reading his scripts and seeing where his brain was going with his next project, it’s a pretty incredible thing how researched-based he is,” Scharfman says. “So it was an illuminating moment for me, and that became the general philosophical outlook during the early stages of developing this story. I knew that I wanted [Death of a Unicorn] to be a modern monster movie adaptation of unicorn lore from antiquity.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Scharfman also discusses Death of a Unicorn’s timely thematics and why John Carpenter didn’t end up composing the film’s score.
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When I was in high school, my basketball team’s bus hit a Clydesdale horse on the way back from a road game, so Death of a Unicorn brought me right back there. Did a similar wildlife encounter of yours inspire this movie?
I can fortunately say no. I’ve never been involved in an actual accident with a wild animal. I’ve been driving where I’ll all of a sudden see a bear in the road and swerve around it. Also, driving through national parks, you get to encounter buffalo and things like that that are just megafauna on their own, the scale of which is always crazy. But no, I’ve been fortunate enough to never have had such an accident.
Death of a Unicorn is your feature directorial debut after 15-plus years of mostly producing, but you’ve written a number of other scripts. How did Unicorn become the leader in the clubhouse?
It evolved organically. I’ve written a number of scripts that I’ve been developing with other directors to direct. But a couple of years ago, I wrote a script that I felt like I should be directing. I was getting at more personal ideas and themes and questions, and that was the first time I’d thought about directing. I’ve been working as a producer and a screenwriter and I’m very close to directors, but I’ve never been like, “I need to direct.” But the script that I thought I should direct ended up being too big. It wasn’t appropriate for a first feature, but it put a bug in my ear.
I then had the idea for this movie, and I started exploring it. I realized it was big enough to invite the theatrical moviegoing experience, and that it could be my version of the movies that made me fall in love with film and filmmaking when I was a younger person. So it was exciting to see if I could dip a toe into those waters and play on that scale.
You included a great deal of actual unicorn lore. That attention to detail came from observing Rob Eggers by way of a production company you worked at for many years?
Yeah, I’m a general believer in doing a lot of research and just building up a wealth of material. I worked for a long time as an executive at a production company called Parts & Labor Films, and that company made The Witch. It then started developing some of Rob’s subsequent films, including Nosferatu. The first drafts were written then. So I worked on The Witch, mostly in post and a little bit on additional photography, but also on the distribution and the sales side of it. Afterwards, we had the Black Philip horns in the office, and we had a lot of Rob’s research books in the office. So it’s not like I was his research associate or anything, but just passively being around his research and reading his scripts and seeing where his brain was going with his next project, it’s a pretty incredible thing how research-based he is. So it was an illuminating moment for me, and that became the general philosophical outlook during the early stages of developing this story. I knew that I wanted it to be a modern monster movie adaptation of unicorn lore from antiquity.
Did you write Death of a Unicorn with A24 in mind?
I didn’t write it with them in mind, but I really like their taste as a company. I just tried to write something that would’ve been my favorite movie when I was in my early twenties. That was my own brief to myself. I was writing for the kid who watched The Making of Aliens weekend after weekend. In terms of the A24 of it all, they’d previously been interested in a few of my other projects and scripts that I had at different stages. So they were curious about what I was cooking up, and I was very fortunate that they immediately wanted to option it after reading it. They were also interested in figuring this out as my directorial debut. So they got it on a Friday, they told us they wanted in on Sunday and they put an option offer in on Monday. It all happened very quickly, relatively speaking, but that was after years of talking about other projects and scripts. So when I originally wrote it on spec, I did not intend to write it for them specifically, but I certainly knew they were interested in my work.
What was Ari Aster’s role in all this?
Ari’s business partner, Lars Knudsen, is someone I’ve known since I was 19 or 20. I started as Lars’ intern when I was in college. After college, I worked for Lars at Parts & Labor before he and Ari started Square Peg, their current venture. So that longstanding relationship was how I made inroads to Lars and Ari’s production company, and there came an opportunity for him and Ari to jump on, along with Tyler Campellone, who works at Square Peg with them. So Ari and I had known each other socially, and he was generous enough to speak with me a little bit about directing, just as I was preparing to step into the director’s chair for the first time.
Paul read a different script of yours first, The Cats of Baxley, and his appreciation for it led you to write Unicorn with him in mind. From there, how challenging was it to add Jenna Ortega at a time when the world is her oyster?
Well, sending the email was easy. You just write a letter and send the script in the hope that she gets what you’re trying to do and is interested in it. I think we sent it to her the weekend before Wednesday premiered [in November 2022]. It was very daunting because there’s a lot that rides on the character of Ridley. She’s a vehicle for exposition, but she’s also the emotional center of the movie. She’s the audience’s eyes and ears. She’s the one person who sees that everyone else is a little bit crazy. Paul’s character, Elliot, actually sees it too, but he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t because he wants things from these crazy people.
So I don’t know what we would’ve done if we didn’t get Jenna. It’s such a hard role, and she does such an incredible job with it. Aligning things with her schedule was not necessarily a challenge because it ended up working out relatively easily, but there’s always that dance of, “How can this happen?” But there was a really great vibe as of our first meeting, and she really got the character. She also got what I was trying to do on a genre and story level, and she was just incredible as a collaborator and performer.
Between Unicorn and the little I know about The Cats of Baxley, you seem to have a keen interest in how destructive greed is. Do you think the Ridleys of the world can still right the ship?
In terms of human nature, greed is certainly something that we all confront and have to navigate in our daily lives. There’s a part of me that wants to be an optimist and say yes, but then there’s the other part of me that says, “No, just look around.” The last ten years have been the hottest ten years in history, so I hope we can do something about it. I live on this planet, and I’d like it to keep living on this planet. I have a kid. I’d like for him to have a planet to grow up on and to be a part of a society that’s not totally ravaged and depraved in terms of its moral center. So I hope the Ridleys of the world can rise up and organize and lead us towards something better. If we are able to do anything like that, it has to be a generational shift. There’s just been so many generations of self-advancement over collectivism, and that’s sort of how we got to where we are.
When a real-life family like the Leopolds watches any film that tackles similar themes to those of Unicorn, do you think they ever have a “Are we the baddies?” moment of self-reflection?
It’s like that Euphoria meme, “Wait, is this play about us?” Maybe this is how they would justify it themselves, but the film engages with the lies that we tell ourselves to justify why we do the things that we do. “I’m doing something immoral for my loved ones. The end justifies the means.” So I’m sure the Leopold families of the world convince themselves of that: “Well, someone’s going to do this. If it’s not me, it’s someone else. At least I’m advancing my own personal agenda and bettering my own family.”
So I sometimes wonder how there can be anything other than a cynical worldview when people are making the world how they want it to be to get ahead. And it’s an interesting question of how people look at themselves in the mirror. I do think most people need to tell themselves a narrative in which they’re the protagonist and that they’re ultimately doing something positive in the world. But sometimes you look at people’s nihilism and cynicism, and you think, “Nothing matters, and you might as well do whatever you want.” And that, in and of itself, is its own perversely alluring worldview. But God, what a bleak way to be.
I presume it was difficult to create a unicorn, let alone several unicorns, on an indie budget. Was DP Larry Fong a big help since he’s accounted for CG elements on many occasions?
Yeah, Larry was a trusted collaborator throughout the whole process. I really needed to shotlist and storyboard the entire movie. The way these things work is you need to have a budget to get green lit as a movie, and you can’t have a budget until you have a bid for the VFX. But you can’t have a bid for the VFX until you know how many shots there are. And you can’t say how many shots there are or what the scope of those shots is until you’ve shotlisted and storyboarded.
So the only way to make a movie like this was to plan as much as possible and know which shot is a puppet, which shot is VFX and which shot is hybrid. You come up with a plan, you make it as good as you can, and then you change the plan as your collaborators come in with their areas of expertise. And Larry was certainly instrumental in that, especially in terms of understanding lighting schemes. I’ve done a lot of jobs on set, but I haven’t done cinematography since I was in college. So Larry was instrumental in the actual execution, and he knew to say things like, “We’re going to go harder single-source moonlight on this shot. That’s going to help keep the creature silhouetted more.”
Clueless came out first in 1995, but the first movie that Paul shot was Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. That movie’s theme was obviously composed by John Carpenter. Was there almost a reunion of sorts on this?
Yeah, it was announced at one point that John was going to do the score for the movie. John and his films are a major influence on me as a filmmaker and more specifically on this movie. He’s just a major hero of mine. That’s why I sent him the script and wrote him a letter to ask if he would jump on, and he very graciously wanted to do it. Then, as we advanced through the movie, it revealed itself that the movie wanted a different sonic palette than a lot of what John does with synth, guitar and drums. It’s great, and I love it, but the movie was asking for a more organic sound and a more varied kind of soundscape. So it became a question of, “Well, how do we get to the place that the movie is asking for the score to go?” You can still totally feel his fingerprints as a storyteller on this movie, and even the score that’s in the movie still has moments with that Carpenter feeling that I love so much.
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Death of a Unicorn is now playing in movie theaters.
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