Authors — Larry Gross
-
“It’s a Pretty Unambiguous Condemnation of a New Age Answer to Life’s Problems”: Writer/Director Todd Haynes on Safe
With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 2, 2020 -
Milk Money: Director Kelly Reichardt on the New World and Nascent Capitalism of First Cow
First Cow marks the fifth film in 14 years on which director Kelly Reichardt has collaborated with screenwriter–novelist Jon Raymond. I can’t think of a director–writer team in America that has produced so much superior work during this time period—Reichardt is one of the talents on whom hope for the creative possibilities of American filmmaking now rests. Like Reichardt and Raymond’s first partnership, the critically lauded, microbudgeted Old Joy (2005), First Cow is a lyrical tragicomic story of male friendship, emerging against the background of the almost intoxicating beauty of the Oregon woods. But this time, Reichardt’s telling a more […]
by Larry Gross on Mar 17, 2020 -
Love is Colder Than Death: Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria
I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 17, 2018 -
Inexplicable Traces: On the Beautiful Epiphanies of Mark Pellington’s Nostalgia
Mark Pellington, along with David Fincher and Mark Romanek, began his filmmaking career in what might be called MTV’s heroic age. After a series of music videos, which include Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” U2’s “One” and R.E.M.’s “Drive,” he made two skillful, flashy, mid-sized star-driven studio thrillers — Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies. Over the last ten years, a succession of his indie films have all dealt in sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic terms with people trying to manage death. Alex Ross Perry, perhaps at one point associated with the mumblecore movement, whatever that exactly was, has for the last eight years, […]
by Larry Gross on Feb 13, 2018 -
A Wonderstruck Tweetstorm
Larry Gross first appeared in Filmmaker with the Todd Haynes/Safe cover story of our Summer 1995 issue. A screenwriter (48 Hours, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Porto), producer and director, he has contribued many interviews and essays since, but, in our Winter 2015 “Super 8” column, we took note of another element of the Gross oeuvre: his seductive and compelling use of Twitter, in which carefully honed critical arguments on myriad topics cascade onto screens in the form of tweetstorms. For this 25th anniversary issue, we asked Gross to commit one of these tweet storms to dead-tree media before he […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 14, 2017 -
Kafka, Renoir and the 99 Percent: Ten Thoughts about Twin Peaks: The Return
“…there would remain the terrified feeling of the return.” — Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond. 1. Whatever else you say about Twin Peaks: The Return, it seems that to talk about it, if you are in good faith, you must begin by talking about the difficulty of talking about it. 2. Twin Peaks: The Return issues some fairly unique challenges to summary or description. It is difficult to describe what is happening in the story, if there truly is a story, if one of its many threads has some kind of priority over the rest. The original series had, […]
by Larry Gross on Aug 7, 2017 -
The World Below
The Lost City of Z, James Gray’s latest writing-directing effort, adapted from David Gann’s 2009 award-winning nonfiction work of the same name, tells the story of an Edwardian-era British military officer, Percy Fawcett, sent on a map-making expedition to the jungles of Brazil. There, he becomes obsessed with finding proof of a “lost” civilization whose existence would challenge all Euro-centric models of history. Lost City has many rich elements woven together: It’s a traditional heroic adventure where men affirm their solidarity against the arbitrary violence of nature at its most unpredictable and murderous. It’s a meticulous allegory of British imperialism […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 13, 2017 -
The New Americans
I have found myself disconcerted in writing about James Gray’s The Immigrant. I was immediately moved by the film and couldn’t fail to appreciate its elegantly controlled cinematic style, but I also felt there was something elusive and hard-to-pin-down about the many levels on which it attempts to address the audience. The film is consistently surprising in how traditional it is in some ways, how unabashed it is in its tenderness toward its characters, the milieu and historical period. Yet the film never succumbs to the twin dangers of stereotypical downbeatness or sugar-coated wish-fulfillment; it has an unusually complex level […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 28, 2014 -
The Watergate Theory of Screenwriting
At the 2013 Screenwriting Research Network International Conference, Larry Gross discusses narrative, knowledge and Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I want to begin by expressing my sense of unworthiness at being offered the chance to give this keynote address, given the stature of some of those who proceeded me in performing the task, and I want to express briefly my personal admiration for three of these predecessors. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, I don’t have to explain the importance of David Bordwell as one of the world’s greatest film scholars. I only want to mention that I first became aware of his work in […]
by Larry Gross on Oct 21, 2013
