AARON SCHIMBERG

“A Different Man”

Now on his third film, “A Different Man,” writer-director Schimberg says he always wanted to be a filmmaker. “I never had any ambition outside of that,” Schimberg admits. Though he’s now grateful for his education at USC Film School, it was a path to directing he hadn’t envisioned for himself. “I didn’t take to it because I was naive about how the industry works,” he says. “I just wanted to deny the existence of this giant machine controlling the arc that I loved.”

That outsider’s perspective also shaped his upcoming psychological drama about a disfigured man (Sebastian Stan) reckoning with the aftermath of facial reconstructive surgery. Schimberg explains, “I was thinking about the broad psychological cliche that the way we judge others is a reflection or a manifestation of the way we feel about ourselves, so I just literalized that.”

What emerges from the premise is an increasingly complex meditation on identity, revolving around characters that Schimberg tries not to know too much about. “I deliberately shield myself from knowing these things so that their actions and their words and their deeds can just unfold,” he says.

Despite that deliberate detachment, Schimberg says that each project is all-consuming as he makes it. “I am walking around with one idea, and then that idea overtakes my life,” he says. That said, he’s unsure yet how cathartic the process can be of translating that idea to the screen. “I do think of films as therapy. On the other hand, the process of making a film can be so traumatic that I don’t know if it’s actually useful,” he jokes.

“So it’s sort of an endless cycle in that sense, but maybe after 10 films I’ll feel that I’ve finally healed myself.”

— Todd Gilchrist

Reps: Agency: CAA; Legal: Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher Influences: Luis Buñuel, the Marx brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, Samuel Fuller