Interviews
Interviews
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“It Was Crucial to Bring a Native Lens into Each Area of the Creative Roles”: Jonathan Olshefski and Elizabeth Day on Without Arrows
Delwin Fiddler Jr., star of Jonathan Olshefski (a “25 New Face” of 2017) and Elizabeth Day’s Without Arrows, grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota, where he found his calling as a grass dancer (which led to championships on the pow-wow circuit and eventually even international fame. His work can be seen not only in the film but also in a continual loop at the Museum of the American Indian in D.C.). And then he spent over a decade in Philadelphia, making more money if not a better living. Having had enough of big city […]
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DP Drew Daniels on “Anora”
In Anora, a stripper (Mikey Madison) at a Manhattan club marries the irresponsible 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch after a whirlwind romance, only for his family to quickly attempt to get the union annulled. In an ode to the “Russian-ness” of the story, cinematographer Drew Daniels paired 35mm film with the flavorful Soviet-era Lomo anamorphic lenses. For further inspiration, Daniels and writer/director Sean Baker turned to the New York City movies of the 1970s. “Some of my favorite films are New York films. The city gives you such a unique canvas,” said Daniels. “I feel like every cinematographer has […]
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“Film No Longer Has the Texture I Was Looking For…”: DP Phedon Papamichael on Shooting A Complete Unknown
The five years between Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York and his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival marked a huge shift in popular culture. It wasn’t just the songs Dylan wrote and performed. The politics he espoused, relationships he formed, causes he endorsed, even the clothes he wore were critiqued and copied by a growing number of acolytes and fans. Dylan helped shape the culture in ways few other artists could match. Based in part on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown follows Dylan as he finds and develops a voice and […]
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Christmas with Art the Clown: DP George Steuber on Terrifier 3
Movies are a uniquely collaborative art form. A painting, a novel or a song can be created in solitude, but you can’t make a commercial narrative film by yourself. That said, the original Terrifier came about as close as you can get: Writer-director Damien Leone is also credited for producing, editing, special make-up effects, visual effects, sound design and props. In addition to putting up money, producer Phil Falcone served as UPM, AD and stunt driver and also assisted with the effects. As for cinematographer George Steuber, he was the entirety of the camera department. He operated, pulled his own […]
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Creating Composed Chaos: DP Jasper Wolf on Babygirl
Just as its characters shift roles in their erotic game of cat and mouse, Halina Reijn’s third feature Babygirl fluently shifts between erotic thriller, existential melodrama and corporate satire. At the center is Nicole Kidman role as Romy, a successful CEO of a high-powered New York-based e-commerce company who relinquishes her sense of control when a chance encounter with a new company intern (Harris Dickinson) plunges Romy into the erotic chaos of a BDSM-charged relationship. Babygirl carefully traces how the seismic shifts of this newfound dom-sub dynamic open up an emotional rift in Romy, resulting in an explosive and messy […]
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“Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist
In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the […]
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“The Process of Dehumanization that Happened to the Palestinians”: Kamal Aljafari on A Fidai Film
It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari. One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology […]
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Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
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Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
At the beginning of Blitz, London is on fire. Against a night sky striated by German bombs, flames engulf obliterated city streets and brick buildings. A platoon of firemen scramble through dense smoke and charred remains to control an errant water hose, which whips around and knocks one of them unconscious. Within the foggy confusion, their shouts and commands get lost in the unrelenting, roaring soundscape, punctuated by distant air horns, panicked screams and a whistling aerial assault. It’s a blistering sequence, an aural nightmare that sets the mood for a war movie full of unexpected, terror-filled situations. Normally, sound […]
