Global Courant
Hello and welcome to the Scene 2 Seen podcast I am your host Valerie Complex and we are back for another splendid episode!
Today’s episode is all about my chat with director Stephen Williams and screenwriter Stefani Robinson about Chevalier which had its premiere in Toronto last year and was released in theaters April 21st.
**I want to highlight that this conversation took place in February 2023, several months before the writer’s strike. **
Stephen Williams’ breakthrough came when his first film, Soul Survivor, which he wrote and directed, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim. He went on to direct several TV episodes and movies such as Hard Time: The David Milgaard Story, and in 2004, Williams directed an episode of Lost, the show that won the Emmy for Best Drama that year. Over the next five years, Williams directed over 25 episodes of the show becoming a resident director and co-executive producer.
Since then, Williams has worked on hit shows such as Person of Interest, The Americans, The Walking Dead, Ray Donovan, and Westworld. In 2019, Williams signed on to be an executive producer/director for HBO’s Watchmen. His episode, This Extraordinary Being has been called the best hour of television of the year, and even, by some, of this decade. It earned Williams both an DGA Outstanding Directorial Achievement nomination and an Outstanding Directing For A Limited Series Emmy nomination.
Stefani Robinson is an Emmy-nominated writer and executive producer with an exclusive overall production deal with FX. She was an executive producer and writer on the critically acclaimed comedy series Atlanta. She’s won two Writers Guild of America Awards for her work on the series, and in 2018, she made Emmy history as the first Black woman to be recognized for nominations in both Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series categories in the same year . She is also the first and youngest Black woman ever nominated for a solo-written entry in the latter writing category.
Robinson is also celebrated for her work as an executive producer and writer on the hit vampire comedy, What We Do in the Shadows. Her work on the third and fourth seasons garnered her additional Emmy nominations in the same two comedy categories in 2020 and again in 2022. She is now the most nominated Black woman in the comedy writing category’s history, after becoming the first to be double nominated a few years ago.
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