Authors — Evan Louison
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The Devil, Most Definitely: Christopher Jason Bell on His Ten-Part Archival George W. Bush Docu-Series Miss Me Yet
“When George W Bush becomes president, for the first time, I knew someone dumber than me was president, and the whole fucking thing fell apart. It’s all been a house of cards, it’s all been a shell game, and a mirror illusion, and George W. Bush made it so you could finally see through the mirror, at all the wrong angles.” — Quentin Tarantino. Over the last four presidential administrations, Christopher Jason Bell has produced an estimable body of work, directing more than13 shorts and three features, devoted to creating off-beat, experimental, and challenging microbudget cinema, spanning narrative, documentary and […]
by Evan Louison on Sep 6, 2024 -
“Sometimes the Cinema is Here To Make You Watch Something You Don’t Want to Watch”: Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire on Asphalt City
With his features Johnny Mad Dog and A Prayer Before Dawn — the former a breakneck, road-to-ruin chronicle of child soldiers in war-torn Liberia and the latter a visceral portrait of a British expat, imprisoned in Thailand on a drug charge and conscripted into a violent kickboxing competition — French-born director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has consistently dropped viewers into extreme, ultra-violent scenarios, employing a mis-en-scene steeped in hyper-graphic realism to compel a one-to-one relationship between his audience and protagonists. His most recent feature, Asphalt City, is no different. Sauvaire’s first film to shoot in the US, where he has lived for over a […]
by Evan Louison on Mar 29, 2024 -
“That Kid Running from the Fire”: Director Reinaldo Marcus Green on Destiny, Devotion and Bob Marley: One Love
On your way up. Take me up. On your way down. I won’t let you down. — Robert Nesta Marley As a form, the biopic and even more specifically the musical biopic, is an often fraught endeavor, one whose pursuit brings its makers along well-worn paths of pitfalls and dead ends. With his fourth feature, Bob Marley: One Love, Reinaldo Marcus Green meets this challenge head on, capturing a vision of Marley in a time of great upheaval. In the 1970s, Jamaica was embroiled in turmoil — a result of staggering levels of poverty and political rivalries. In ‘76, through gang […]
by Evan Louison on Feb 15, 2024 -
“I Don’t Want to Corner You”: Michel Franco on Isolation, the Commonality of Trauma and Memory
In nearly all of his eight narrative features, Mexican director Michel Franco has worn his appetite for the most distressed and tormented of human dramas on his sleeve. His characters have vascillated between acts of abject cruelty and silent, practically stoic indifference to their own behaviors, as well as the rueful consequences of their often misguided choices. With each new entry in Franco’s body of work, his approach displays a deft hand for framing and a keen eye for the subtleties of the human condition. In the case of his new Memory, premiering in U.S. theaters today after bowing at […]
by Evan Louison on Dec 22, 2023 -
Anxiety of the Outspoken: Director Kathryn Ferguson and the Example of Sinéad O’Connor
It would be nearly impossible to name another musical performer deserving of a deep dive into her formative years than Sinéad O’Connor. Every step of her life — shuffled between an array of parochial schools, a childhood subject to her mother’s chaotic transference of her own abusive childhood onto her daughter — would in retrospect seem to have been an accretive stage in O’Connor’s becoming. A popular culture firebrand, demonized, her message mischaracterized to the point of parody, met with a withering disdain in the highest corners of western media, O’Connor’s own words have always spoken for themselves. Her message […]
by Evan Louison on Oct 4, 2022 -
“I Believe Her Experience of Love Was a Brutal One”: Director Eva Vitija on Her Patricia Highsmith Doc, Loving Highsmith
With their pronounced and callous violence, their serpentine studies of obsession, delusion, and identity, Patricia Highsmith’s hypergraphic body of work has by now become as much a part of the culture of literary fiction and cinema as that of her lionized male counterparts. But where the personas of Hammett and Chandler have been crafted into legend, the Fort Worth-born Highsmith has stayed a cipher. While in recent years a pair of biographies and the release of her excerpted private diaries have let some light into the picture, Highsmith’s peripatetic nature remains elusive and secretive. Expatriated from the States and then […]
by Evan Louison on Sep 2, 2022 -
“A Movie Should Only be Understood by Watching It”: Michel Franco on His Tim Roth-Starring Psychological Drama, Sundown
Obsessively examining crisis in terms of its navigation and interiority, the films of Mexican director Michel Franco confront common human behavior amidst extraordinary events. In the face of his characters’ often truly confounding decisions, Franco’s interest in the indistinct, in the prevarications of men and women in conflict, and in the disparate realities posed by wealth and class divisions, affords him a distinct place in the contemporary cinema. Since his 2009 debut Daniel & Ana, the preoccupations of Franco’s output appear consistent, even as they may at times suggest a cloying violence, which in all its sundry forms, emerges as […]
by Evan Louison on Jan 29, 2022 -
“He’d Kill You If He Got the Chance…”: Editor Walter Murch on Coppola’s The Conversation, the Nodal Concept of Montage and Our Modern Surveillance State
“If I really thought of the consequences all the time, I certainly wouldn’t have been in the business…” — Frank Terpil, Confessions of a Dangerous Man “Everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” — Pete Hamill There’s perhaps no greater contribution to the latter-day postmodern suspense genre than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. An exhaustive study of a lone artisan drawn into a web of deceit and treachery, it has long been held as both a prescient cinematic landmark and a seminal Ur-text. And yet fifty years after its premiere, the film is still an […]
by Evan Louison on Jan 12, 2022 -
A Process of Subtraction: Sean Durkin on His Disquieting Family Drama, The Nest
A man in a quiet suburban home makes a phone call. He stands by the window and holds the phone to his ear. The light on his face, the reflections from the window…. It’s morning. No one else is up. This seemingly innocuous moment could lead to any number of things, but, in Sean Durkin’s The Nest, an early-dawn overseas call prompts a life-changing shift for Rory, played to the hilt by a frightfully self-possessed and seemingly effortless Jude Law, his wife Allison (a remarkably calculated Carrie Coon), and their two children, the adolescent Sam and prepubescent Benjamin, (Oona Roche […]
by Evan Louison on Jan 18, 2021 -
Forbidden Truths, the Symmetry of Myth, and a Friendship Uninterrupted by Death: Werner Herzog on Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.” — Jim Harrison For anyone — show of hands now — locked in an all too familiar, selfsame cycle of recurrent dread, it’s no great mystery that cinema can (and maybe even should) offer familiar, welcome respite. Allowing a sense of escape while borders are closed, cinema’s palliative possibilities also remind us of our unsteady balance, as we strive to outlast whatever this current period is. In this mode, patience is currency. Yet, confined to our spaces and neighborhoods, we are all prone to a sense of restlessness. In the course of […]
by Evan Louison on Aug 28, 2020
