Director Alex Scharfman on Unicorn Mythology and Corporate Greed

Whatever preconceived notions about unicorns you may have, nothing will prepare you for director Alex Scharfman’s addition to their long-standing lore with A24’s Death of a Unicorn. More so resembling chimeras or griffins, Scharfman’s unicorns, novel but familiar, prowl like panthers, with eyes like snakes and talons like eagles. His unicorns are the latest entry in the cinematic canon of creatures who act as agents of divine judgment against humanity’s worst impulses; the only thing that’s been updated here are the vices being admonished.

The film follows Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), on a journey to visit Elliot’s boss, Leopold (Richard E. Grant), wife (Téa Leoni) and son (Will Poulter). Along the way, they accidentally hit and kill a baby unicorn, setting the film’s kinetic plot in motion. Unsure of what to do, they bring its carcass to Leopold’s estate, where they begin to experiment on the creature, eventually discovering that it can heal diseases and physical ailments. 

The Leopolds, who run a pharmaceutical giant, have already started thinking about how to exploit the foal’s healing capabilities for profit before its heartbeat has even stopped. Grant, Leoni, and Poulter relish delivering the barbs in Scharfman’s sharp script, each of them shading their performances with complimentary hues of snark and sincerity. Yet hell hath no fury like vengeful unicorn parents, and everyone in the Leopold house realizes that hot tubs, fancy cars, and lavish meals can’t ultimately protect them from the wrath of a scorned beast. Last week, I got on a Zoom with Scharfman, still riding the high of the rapturous applause the film received at its world premiere at SXSW a few days prior. We spoke about harnessing Will Poulter’s comedic genius, satirizing the corruption of the pharmaceuticals industry, and adding a cosmic dimension to unicorn lore.

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ZACHARY LEE: How did it feel to have the film premiere here at SXSW?

ALEX SCHARFMAN: It was a real waking dream. I had the idea for this movie 10 years ago or something. I’ve been actively working on it for almost five years. You get to those moments that you think about for a long time and then they start happening. It’s the same way when I travel sometimes. I’ll build an itinerary and I’ll be like, “I’ll go here and then I’ll go here.” Then when you’re doing it, you’re like, “I’m just going through the steps of something that I’ve considered.” I was saying it was a lot like my wedding day too, where you’re like, “I’ve got to do all these things.” Then before you know it, you don’t remember any of it. It just happened. But the screening itself was absolutely incredible. Superlative. I don’t know what to say other than the crowd had a lot of fun with the movie and met it on its own terms, which is the most you can ask for.

LEE: Totally. I was like, “Here’s a director who knows how to use Will Poulter.” All of his lines were hitting. It was almost to the point where I was getting ready to laugh even before he spoke, because you guys built up such goodwill. I would like to hear a bit more about that.

SCHARFMAN: Will’s just exceptional. I wish I could say I did something special to tap into some next level that he had access to. But the truth is, the guy’s just incredible. I do love how that’s an absurd character who he somehow found grounding in. There’s a level of pathos that I really appreciate. We talked about how that’s a character who knows he’s a disappointment to his parents and doesn’t want to be, and knows that he’s inadequate and is desperate to prove otherwise.

LEE: Totally.

SCHARFMAN: He’s smart enough to know that he’s not smart. I think Will found a really human basis in the humor there. His comic timing is just impeccable. I don’t know how you teach that or how I could direct it better—he just executes. Will’s absolutely incredible. I’m very fortunate he decided to sign on to the movie. I also love what he did with the evolution of the character. Over the course of the movie, he becomes less of a laughable doofus and more of a genuine threat.

LEE: I keep telling people that I need to add “that form was rather girthsome” into my vocabulary somehow. So thanks for bringing girthsome back into the zeitgeist of words.

SCHARFMAN: It’s been a bee in my bonnet. That’s a juicy word that’s been taken over by the romance novel paperback industry. It’s for the rest of us too. We can all enjoy it. In fact, when the trailer dropped, Téa [Leoni] told me that a lot of people were saying girthsome to her on the subway. 

LEE: You’ve set things in motion.

SCHARFMAN: Yeah, exactly.

LEE: Let me get nerdy for a bit. I’d love to hear about your research process.

SCHARFMAN: As a writer, generally speaking, it’s so helpful to do research and not feel like you’re just making shit up, you know?

LEE: Mm-hmm.

SCHARFMAN: I much prefer to feel like there’s something that I’m pulling from, or some source that I’m trying to approximate or do justice to.  To me, it’s always about honoring the story and where the story wants to go, the natural expression of itself. Research helps that a ton. I was an exec on The Witch, but mostly in post and in distribution. In the office, we had Rob [Eggers’s] research books around.

LEE: Oh, that’s great.

SCHARFMAN: When you are just in the orbit of the shit Rob does, it’s hard not to absorb and to see, “Oh, there’s something here.” But I don’t think I’m doing what Rob does.

LEE: Yeah.

SCHARFMAN: Rob was not consulting with me as a research assistant or something. But you watch that and you can’t help but say, “Okay, there’s something here.” I feel like in all artistic expressions as a writer, you’re trying to find your version of doing something else. When I realized that the movie could be a contemporary adaptation of medieval unicorn mythology, it immediately made me realize, “Oh, time to hit the books.:

LEE: Yeah.

SCHARFMAN: He goes deep. I did my best. But I don’t think I got as deep as he did.

LEE: But you visited the museums, right?

SCHARFMAN: Oh, yeah. The history of unicorn mythology is really fascinating. I had no connection to it whatsoever at the outset of this project. It was just an idea I had. Also, a good way to procrastinate writing is to keep doing research. Some are more interesting or more dry. But a lot has been said about unicorns. In his Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges has this great quote in his chapter on unicorns, which is that the first unicorn story is almost identical to the latest. Unicorns have been around since 400 BC. That was the first written account about a unicorn. It was very similar to the versions that we were getting up until 50, 75 years ago when they started becoming much more frolicking.

LEE: My Little Pony type thing.

SCHARFMAN: Exactly. But they were always this untamable manifestation of nature incarnate.

LEE: There’s that great bit where the characters are like, “We think we know what this is, but we don’t.” I love that idea that we’ve been so inundated with these corporatized versions of these characters that if we were to encounter the ancient deity version of it, we’d actually have no framework for this. We don’t even know.

SCHARFMAN: Exactly.

LEE: I thought that was interesting.

SCHARFMAN: There’s a real old world god. It’s if the characters from Succession encountered the deer god in Princess Mononoke. “What the fuck is this and is there a chance it could make us some money?”

LEE: It’s always thinking about target markets, right?

SCHARFMAN: Yeah. In that regard, I’m being truthful about how it felt like these sort of people would react to this sort of situation. It presented itself in that way.

LEE: On that note, Sunita and Steve’s characters are people of color. They very quickly become sacrificial lambs, so to speak. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I wondered if there’s a racial, ethnic undertone to the power dynamics at play.

SCHARFMAN: That’s not why I cast those actors, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about it. There’s definitely a context of colonialism and imperialism. It’s hard not to talk about capitalism without talking about those things. Even the name, Leopold the Second is one of the worst war criminals of history in colonizing the Congo. You can’t not engage with that stuff. Once I realized the movie was an update of medieval mythology, about a lord and his hunters going after this pure being that’s too good for our world, it immediately became a satire. It has to be a satire. If you’re updating that, there’s nothing you could do. That’s what it is. It was a class commentary then, it is a class commentary now.

LEE: I know you had seen Jenna before Wednesday. Even then, you couldn’t have anticipated these things, it’s funny to think about how your film criticizes pharmaceutical companies in light of our current moment.

SCHARFMAN: The first draft I wrote in the first few months of the lockdown. I was outlining it in late 2019 into 2020. And then the lockdown was definitely something in my mind. Again, I was letting the story lead me, and it naturally led me to pharmaceuticals. When you realize unicorns are panaceas and were always prized for their medicinal value, you can’t not talk about pharmaceuticals in a contemporary context. In the pandemic, we had this incredible moment where these companies are developing vaccines and treatments at a rate we’ve never seen before—true modern miracles of science helping us get out of an untenable situation. Yet, at the same time, the second they could and were given the opportunity to, they jacked the prices up as high as they could, like any other capitalist venture. It’s so weird when you engage with healthcare because, like any other capitalist venture, they’re just profit-motivated at the end of the day. I don’t say that begrudgingly. That’s just the fact. It is a confusing moral quandary that they’re not helping people to help people. They’re helping people to make money. The morality of it was another part of the research, reading about the Sacklers and the pharmaceutical industry. That was the contemporary context. But not just the Sacklers. Abbott Labs does a lot of that. That family was another pharmaceutical family for a long time. They sold their stake. Anyhow, there’s a lot in the pharmaceutical business that is inherently fraught and morally complex and corrupted at its root, at least in the contemporary context in which we live. I didn’t see Luigi Mangione coming, I’ll say.

LEE: How would the Leopold’s have reacted to Luigi?

SCHARFMAN: They probably would have hired a couple extra guards. I wrote this years ago, but at the same time, if you read enough social theory about this sort of thing, that was going to happen eventually. The water’s getting warmer, not colder.

LEE: Totally. Another throughline was the spiritual element and Ridley’s cosmic encounter. I like that she’s the one who touches the horn and has this widening moment. Then she goes to see this lavish, wealthy house and it doesn’t phase her. She’s not won over by it because she’s just encountered something so divine and unique. She’s like, “It’s cool you guys have money and archery, I guess. I don’t really care.” The wealth of the world is nothing when you’ve encountered something so beyond yourself. 

SCHARFMAN: I knew I always wanted the movie to have an emotional center to it. That was really important to me. I didn’t want to make something that was a cynical satire that only had an interest in taking people down. I couldn’t make something for years that only did that. What I was always trying to do was align the emotional spine of the movie with the satire of the movie. That got me on a thematic level. That got me thinking about Elliot and Ridley’s journey together. But Elliot especially, because he has more changing to do over the course of the movie.

LEE: Totally.

SCHARFMAN: I bring that up because he and her have the same experience at the beginning and end of the movie, bookmarking it. But I needed to lock him into a certain worldview and value structure. Then the idea of this cosmic experience is something ineffable that reveals deeper meaning. It’s a character who got kicked in the teeth by the universe. They both had this tragedy befall them and did not expect it. He promised his wife that he would provide for Ridley no matter what. And he has a very literal mission: “How I’m a good dad is that I will provide monetarily for her.” The cosmic experience is letting him see and letting her see that that’s not all that you need to do. There’s more than that. We don’t need all of that. This financial anxiety that’s creating this tension in their relationship is solving a problem that is creating a bigger problem.

LEE: Yeah.

SCHARFMAN: And that maybe if you let go of that a little bit, it could actually heal this relationship. I thought a lot about the Star Gate sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Contact when she goes into the wormhole and sees her father on the beach there. There are a lot of movies that were trying to get at this transcendent feeling at the ending. It’s certainly something I’ve thought about as a metaphor of, “If you could do mushrooms with your dad, would that fix everything?”

LEE: Would you meet unicorn Jesus?

SCHARFMAN: Exactly. The challenge of the movie has been to subvert expectations of what a unicorn is, but then ultimately satisfy them in an unexpected way. Whenever I told people I was working on a unicorn movie, occasionally people would be like, “Oh, you’re into unicorns too?” People have really strong emotional connections to them. There is this magic to them. Especially in Asian cultures, there’s more celestial associations with unicorns. So there was something about the magic and cosmic associated with unicorns. It’s weird to say, but I was trying to stay grounded, in some ways, in making a unicorn movie. I didn’t want them to literally go and shake hands with god, but maybe they’d go to the center of the universe. There was this cosmological theory of end point theory that was disproven, but I remember reading about it in college and it stuck with me. After the universe expands, it will collapse back into one point and all matter that ever existed will be in that one point of time. It’s almost like an afterlife, in a way. There’s something about that that always struck me as a scientific basis for a version of an afterlife. In a way, Solaris gets that too. There’s something to that cosmic transcendence that was always important to me.