‘The Christophers’ Writer Ed Solomon On Working With McKellen & Coel

Writer-producer Ed Solomon squeezed in a quick trip to the west coast over the weekend before returning to work on his upcoming drama series The Spot, a Hulu project filming in Westchester, NY.

He came to the Sonoma International Film Festival in California’s wine country for a screening of The Christophers, a dramedy starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel, with supporting performances by Jessica Gunning and James Corden. And Solomon didn’t go unrewarded – the film won the Stolman Audience Award for Best Film at the 29^th edition of SIFF. The writer known for Men in Black, Now You See Me and its sequel, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequel, and No Sudden Move among many other movies watched the screening at the historic Sebastiani Theatre in Sonoma (with his mom in attendance). At a Q&A afterwards, he said he typically skips such screening opportunities.

“I tend to not watch anything after it’s done,” he told the festival’s artistic director Carl Spence, who moderated the conversation. “And I realized that that’s a good idea because [if] one person [leaves their seat], I go, ‘Oh, I fu*king suck.’ Someone gets up to go to the bathroom, [I’m] waiting until they come back to make sure they were just peeing and not walking out. So, it sucks really to watch it with a crowd. No, I say facetiously — the fact that the people who are still here are still here, that is amazing. That means everything. That is incredible.”

Solomon continued, “It’s really hard when the movies come out or a TV show comes out. It’s the worst part for me because it’s like the death of the dream. It’s no longer what it may have been. It’s simply what it is. And so you’re no longer in the world of possibility, which is where I love to be, which is why when I finish something… I just want to keep going toward what’s next.”

The screenwriter, 65, commented (perhaps facetiously as well), “I know I don’t have a tremendous amount of time left, so I’m trying to just get better with each thing. I find that each project teaches massively different lessons and everything you think you learned from the last one doesn’t apply to the next one. It’s crazy. Once I start, I’m not going just like, ‘Oh, how does this one want to be written?’ It’s like, how do you write? How does anyone write anything?’”

The Christophers marks the latest collaboration between Solomon and director Steven Soderbergh, who teamed for the 2023 HBO Max series Full Circle and the 2021 crime feature No Sudden Move. There’s a quasi-heist theme to The Christophers, which revolves around an acclaimed artist (McKellen), who has long since stopped making new work, and his avaricious children (Gunning and Corden) who try to enlist Coel to complete some of their dad’s unfinished paintings. At the Q&A, Solomon shared the project’s origin story.

“I moved to London about two and a half years ago and coincidentally Steven had moved to London for different reasons. And we met up in a pub and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He was going to do a big thing like a year later. I said, ‘What are you going to do in the meantime?’” Solomon recalled. “He said, ‘I want to do a little, like The Dresser, a little drawing room kind of thing, but maybe with a Patricia Highsmith kind of heist thing… I’m just thinking maybe like an older and a younger artist.’ And that was all he had… And we were like, ‘Well, what would it be then? What would the kind of heist-y quality be?’”

Solomon explained, “We came up at this pub with this idea that what if [the artist] just despises his children and they have no inheritance? And what if [the kids] hire a forger to come in and reproduce some of his old canvases so they’d have something when he died? …In that conversation, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I think I know who these characters are because I’ve been wanting to do this story…’ We just wrote it on spec.”

Solomon said he wrote the screenplay quickly, polished it, and production began after an extensive rehearsal period with McKellen and Coel.

“It was a very short shoot,” he reported. “It was a 19-day shoot. And it was beautiful. They [McKellen and Coel] really walked each other through it… I couldn’t believe I was sitting there with these two actors and watching them do this. Truly, if the movie had never come out, if we didn’t have this experience tonight, I would’ve still felt like it was utterly worth it.”

He added, “We didn’t have the time to do a lot of rewriting. And to memorize that [lengthy dialogue] at [McKellen’s] age, honestly, is a remarkable feat. So, pulling words out or changing too much — it takes a long time to memorize that. So, we didn’t end up improvising much, actually.”

Solomon came to Sonoma on short rest after flying from the set of The Spot, which stars Claire Danes and Ewan McGregor. He wrote it and serves as showrunner.

“It’s an 8-episode show. A24 is the studio and the network of Hulu. We’re filming it right now,” he shared. “[Danes] plays a pediatric neurosurgeon who begins to suspect that she was the one responsible for a hit-and-run that happened in her neighborhood on her commute. And she wants to do the right thing and the more she starts to investigate herself, the more of a suspect she becomes. And the question is, what happens and is her husband covering it up? It becomes a sort of psychological character [study], very different genre to this.”

 “I think I probably can say all that. Maybe keep it between us,” Solomon joked. “If I’m here tomorrow night, that means I was fired from my own show.”