Ronan Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Andre Holland and More on Storytelling for Modern Audiences: ‘Some People Connect on an Intellectual Level. But I Want to Be Moved’

variety.com:

Lauren Coates Variety & Audible’s Cocktails and Conversations panel at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival brought together journalist Ronan Farrow, Audible’s chief content officer Rachel Ghiazza and actors Juliette Lewis, André Holland and Mamoudou Athie to discuss storytelling for modern audiences.

The panel discussion was moderated by Variety Executive Editor Brent Lang. Farrow, who signed a deal with Audible last year and is the host of its upcoming investigative crime series “Not a Very Good Murderer,” championed long-form storytelling and urged creators not to be deterred by just how long it can take to get the story right. “It’s an imperiled thing to put resources into stories that can take years and years to tell,” Farrow told his fellow panelists. “But sometimes complicated projects do demand that kind of time and that scale of resources, and it’s not a common thing to find people who believe in and understand both the story itself and the shape of a story.” “If it happens to take a long time, those are the ones that are often worth taking the wide swing and betting big on,” he added. “I have made a career of trying to lean into those stories when I see them coming, even though they can feel like an overwhelming challenge.” Lewis, who is pulling double duty at Sundance by starring in “By Design” and “Opus,” shared her opinion that the most impactful stories are the ones that connect emotionally to the audience, regardless of whether the story is being told through audio or visual mediums. “It’s the emotional connection to any story for me,” she said. “Some people are connected on an intellectual level.