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FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: SPRING, 1995
Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb was our cover story in Spring, 1995. Consensus was that our cover, which was an illustration by the film’s subject, R. Crumb, didn’t really work. Newsstand distributors mistook the issue for a comics magazine, leading to retail confusion. Also in the book: Swimming with Sharks, Basketball Diaries, My Family, and Berenice Reynaud interviewing filmmaker Lourdes Portillo about her The Devil Never Sleeps. Liza Bear interviewed Atom Egoyan about his Exotica, who spoke of the film and his impending fatherhood:
Filmmaker: You were becoming a father while Exotica was in production. What effect did being an expectant parent have on the orientation of the whole project?
Egoyan: Everyone talks about the joy of the anticipation of having a child, and that’s very much part of it, but there’s also a sense of dread as well, of not being able to fulfill the expectations of what being a parent means. There’s just a lot of fear, I think. And I guess Exotica is a film that really capitalizes on that. The incredible responsibility of leading someone through a life.
And, Peter Bowen wrote about Hal Hartley’s Amateur:
But with this film, Hartley, perhaps, is the most sophisticated “amateur” as he systematically unlearns his knowledge of genre and film editing, refusing, for example, to make a formula thriller or adhere to standard practices of establishing shots and camera placement. Hartley explains, “I thought I could take genre elements – a guy running into a place with a gun or things like that – and have fun with them and still avoid it being a genre piece.” And while Hartley watched box-office blockbusters like The Fugitive and Jurassic Park, as well as generic TV police dramas, as models, he tried to view them through the eyes of a neophyte so that his film could become, as he quipped to Graham Fuller, “a TV cop show made by someone who doesn’t know how to make TV cop shows.” Indeed, even the film’s violence explodes as both too much and too little, so that when a character is endlessly gunned down on a grassy pasture or repeatedly electrocuted by a solitary desk lamp one can never tell if the scene is being played for comedy or terror.
