An Interview with Matthew Wilder
ABOUT THE WRITERS
Alden Nagel is the founder and editor of Nut Hole Publishing. You can find him on Instagram. He has an upcoming novella entitled Salination Mountains, and a paired novel entitled The Desalinated Exosphere.
Matthew Wilder directed Your Name Here (2007) with Bill Pullman and Taryn Manning, and Regarding The Case Of Joan Of Arc (2018) with Nicole LaLiberte. This year he will direct One More Sleepless Night with Rainey Qualley and Wallis Day. A movie he co-wrote, Control, starring James McAvoy and Julianne Moore, is coming out this year. Wilder received a B.A. cum laude in literature from Yale and an MFA in directing from UC-San Diego.
Alden Nagel: As a model for interviews to be inspired by, how do you view the Proust Questionnaire?
Matthew Wilder: Revere it. I read Swann’s Way in jail. I thought it would have an all-subsuming “Calgon, take me away” effect. It did.
Alden Nagel: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Matthew Wilder: I achieved it in 2016. Lying on the sofa in a beautiful hotel overlooking Los Angeles’ blue skies with an unimaginably beautiful young woman in matching bathrobes, drinking martinis and watching Marguerite Duras’ Destroy She Said. As I write these words I almost can’t believe it happened, but, as Orson Welles once said, it’s all true!
Alden Nagel: What is your greatest fear?
Matthew Wilder: Homelessness. Alzheimer’s. Sleeping in a ditch with Alzheimer’s.
Alden Nagel: Which living person do you most admire?
Matthew Wilder: Martin Scorsese.
Alden Nagel: What is your greatest extravagance?
Matthew Wilder: Ubers. Now Waymos. Goddamn Waymo has boycotted Santa Monica during the fires! Come on, guys, you’re robots.
Another is flying in a pod. That means the seat in business or first that goes down like a bed. Just had a conversation with a friend about this yesterday: nowadays business and first are “acceptable,” coach is subhuman. This is not my snobbery, this is the economics of the airline industry and their ever more kennel-like “economy” space.
Alden Nagel: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Matthew Wilder: “I’m just being honest.”
Also having the bienpensant “just be a decent person” hot take on everything. Even now, people little acknowledge that theirs about Kamala Harris, say, are as irrelevant to the universe as their feelings about Charli XCX.
Alden Nagel: On what occasion do you lie?
Matthew Wilder: Not too much, unfortunately. I am known for my fastidious honesty, which gets you some respect but also repels a lot of people. Like, a lot.
Alden Nagel: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Matthew Wilder: I think I have great achievements yet to come. But even in my direst hour, I remember that I started out in a trailer park and…well, if I died today I’d have a pretty cool highlights reel. So, at a minimum, I pulled that off.
Alden Nagel: What do you most value in your friends?
Matthew Wilder: There’s really one thing that’s necessary, and that’s loyalty. It’s amazing to me how often people will let their friends get off the hook when they’re disloyal!
Alden Nagel: How would you like to die?
Matthew Wilder: I can’t be too precise because it involves Lily-Rose Depp.