Actors
Interviews - Actors
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“You Learn to Let Yourself Go Completely”: June Squibb, Back To One, Episode 367
June Squibb has only been acting for about seven decades, so forgive her if she hasn’t figured this whole acting thing out yet. Luckily she isn’t stopping or even slowing down. In fact, at 96 years old, she is more busy than ever before. Since her Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Squibb has been in high demand. Her first leading role in a film, Thelma, led to another, Eleanor The Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson. And now she’s about to take the stage in the exciting new Broadway production of Marjorie Prime. On this episode, […]
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“It’s Great to Feel Like You Made a Cult Favorite”: Alex Winter and Bill Corso on “Freaked”
Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s 1993 cult classic Freaked is less an example of “high” and “low” art commingling than of pop- and-sub-cultures colliding. At the precipice of marquee fame after headlining the first two Bill & Ted movies alongside Keanu Reeves, Winter—along with his former NYU classmate Stern and TV writer Tim Burns—pitched 20th Century Fox on an anarchic comedy called Hideous Mutant Freekz, in which Ricky Coogan (played by Winter), a shallow TV idol, becomes spokesman for a patently evil chemical corporation. Ricky, his best friend and a handful of others board a plane to the fictitious South […]
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Girls Rock: Nobuhiro Yamashita, Doona Bae, and James Iha on “Linda Linda Linda” at 20
Indie director Nobuhiro Yamashita was not under the impression that he had much insight into the lives of high-school girls. For his first three features (Hazy Life (1999), No One’s Ark (2003), and Ramblers (also 2003)) he’d focused on what he knew best—“lazy men.” But Yamashita’s fifth feature, Linda Linda Linda (2005), would prove pivotal, expanding the horizons of his career, his cast and Japanese independent cinema itself. A gentle slice-of-life drama, Linda Linda Linda tells a story in snapshots of four high-school girls as they prepare for their debut performance as a band at their school’s culture festival. “I […]
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“We Had to Test the Audience’s Own Morality”: Harris Dickinson on Urchin
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), stars Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) as a homeless addict trying to rehabilitate after his latest stint in jail. I spoke to Dickinson […]
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Endgames: Alejo Moguillansky on Pin de Fartie
Pin de Fartie (2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play’s themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky’s ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy. The title refers to the end of a chess game; here, it signals the twilight of relationships––both filial and romantic––against the current approach of the end of civilization. Each sequence of Pin de […]
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“You Pick Up Your Tools and Go Wherever the Wind Blows You”: Charli xcx and Pete Ohs on the Toronto-Premiering “Erupcja”
When Charli xcx walked into downtown New York bar Clandestino in May, 2024, she couldn’t have predicted that by the next day she would have committed to star in an independent film — especially one with no screenplay and scheduled to shoot just three months later, right before the start of her Brat tour. But that’s what happened when a chance encounter and free-flowing conversation led the pop star, actress and now writer and producer to say yes to the Toronto-premiering Erupcja, the latest “table of bubbles” film from Pete Ohs, a filmmaker who pursues both constant motion and a […]
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“It’s Really Sharp on the Neurotic Relationships that Americans Have with Money”: Robin Schavoir and Paul Felten Discuss The Jag
The titular sports car of Robin Schavoir’s The Jag is parked in an imaginary space off-stage at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where the play is currently running in a production directed by Paul Felten. The existence of this symbolic object structures the matrix of resentment, envy and desire searchingly embodied by The Jag‘s on-stage trio: struggling screenwriter Tyler (Gilles Geary), rich guy art collector Brian (Mickey Solis), and nursing student Cori (Giovanna Drummond). (A fourth character, the renter of the Catskills home the three converge at, and voiced by a “downtown icon,” is only heard via recited emails […]
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Moments of Flight: Lili Taylor and Amalia Ulman Go Birding
I was listening to the radio when Lili Taylor came on the air to talk about her first book, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. I immediately got excited: I have loved Lili’s work (Dogfight, Arizona Dream, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, The Addiction, I Shot Andy Warhol, Things I Never Told You, Pecker) for the longest time, so learning that she was a birder only added to her immensely cool aura. Until now, my relationship to birding had been via New York’s most famous bird, Flaco the owl. He took a fancy to one of the water tanks […]
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Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
With Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides sneak previewing in New York via Sideshow/Janus Films, we are unlocking our Spring, 2025 cover story, an interview with the director as well as lead Zhao Tao covering their collaboration on this film as well as across their filmographies. On May 4, 5 and 6, Jia will be doing Q&As at New York’s IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center. Caught by the Tides opens May 9. — Editor Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, […]
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“A Redemption Story That Gets Derailed By a Revenge Story”: Ariella Mastroianni and Ryan J. Sloan on Gazer
There are a set of rules that have long-guided ultra-low and microbudget production. Lots of daylight exteriors, one or two central locations (to minimize company moves and location rental cost), a small cast, no stunts, no child actors and a compressed shooting schedule. If today it’s not uncommon to see a 24-day schedule on films of $12 million, and most independents with sub $3-million budgets are boarded between 18 and 24 days, a filmmaker considering their first ultra-low-budget picture should think about going even lower, to 11 or 12 days, even. And, of course, shooting digital is probably the economically […]
