How Sam Mendes and Jez Butterworth Brought a New and Improved Version of “The Hills of California” to Broadway

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor The playwright Jez Butterworth recently had perhaps the most eventful recording session in the history of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: “In the course of this call, I have returned one dog to its owner and seen four foxes,” Butterworth said during a conversation with director Sam Mendes about their latest Broadway project, “The Hills of California.” With Mendes recording from New York, where “Hills” opened Sept.

29, Butterworth was beaming in to the virtual studio from the streets of London after 10 p.m., and enjoying all the color that comes with the locale.

But even with the occasional diversion, Butterworth and Mendes carried on a revealing conversation about their creative partnership, which began in the film world when Mendes tapped Butterworth to contribute to the scripts to Bond films “Skyfall” and “Spectre.” Mendes later staged Butterworth’s play “The Ferryman,” which was a West End hit and transferred to Broadway, where it won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2019.

Butterworth described his plays as “made up of indigestible losses that I put together in an order to try and make sense of them.