Screenwriters Nicole Holofcener (also known as director) and Jeff Whitty won Best Screenplay for Can You Ever Forgive Me? at the 2019 Indie Spirit Awards.
“I feel Marielle was cheated and I feel badly about that,” Holofcener said backstage after her win, highlighting the lack of Academy recognition for director Marielle Heller.
Holofcener was attached to direct the project eight years earlier but decided that she could not do so when the film was being greenlit due to her commitment to direct “The Land of Steady Habits.”
She knew that Heller would be the right choice, thanks to her work on the indie, The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
Holofcener and Whitty won the Writers Guild Award for best adapted screenplay, and are also up for an Academy Award.
She also gave credit to the late Lee Israel, who died in 2014, for her candid memoir of the same name about being caught for fabricating letters from famous literary figures, after experiencing a decline as a functional biographer.