Authors — Alix Lambert
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“…Much More Truthful and Much More Alienated than Anything I Would Produce Myself”: Jonathan Lethem on Fred Barney Taylor’s Lethem
Last week I was very much looking forward to talking with friend Jonathan Lethem about the new film Lethem, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, which screens at the Metrograph on Sunday, September 17, with the author in attendance. Before that happened though, we both received the news that Michael Friedman had died. A beloved friend and collaborator, Friedman co-founded The Civilians, a theater company where I’m an associate artist. He also wrote the score and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s 2003 novel. Fortress of Solitude tells the story of Lethem’s childhood on Dean Street in […]
by Alix Lambert on Sep 15, 2017 -
Alone Inside: Kristi Jacobson on Her Penetrating Documentary about Solitary Confinement, Solitary
Kristi Jacobson was nominated for the Truer than Fiction Spirit Award for her artful and incisive documentary on solitary confinement, Solitary. The film plays this month on HBO, and filmmaker Alix Lambert interviewed Jacobson for our Winter issue. With Solitary, filmmaker Kristi Jacobson offers her audience an experience both visceral and intimate inside the notorious Red Onion supermax prison in Wise County, Virginia. Jacobson, who spent a year filming at the prison, examines the devastating effects of solitary confinement by introducing us to the men who are incarcerated as well as to the guards and others who work at the […]
by Alix Lambert on Jan 18, 2017 -
“Stupidity is the Only Big Risk”: Chevalier Writer/Director Athina Rachel Tsangari on Power, Greece and Filmmaking without Rules
Athina Tsangari is a director and producer whose films examine the negotiation of power. While they span genres and approaches, her pictures — including her latest, Chevalier — are consistently organized around this theme. Chevalier takes place on a boat in the Aegean Sea. The men on board decide to play a game in which they judge each other on… everything. I spoke with Tsangari about her past and future projects and about returning to Greece, which has just wrapped up another tense debt relief negotiation with the IMF and EU. Chevalier opens at the IFC on Friday. Chevalier opens today […]
by Alix Lambert on May 27, 2016 -
“Why Don’t We Just Make it Seven-and-a-Half Hours?” Director Ezra Edelman on O.J.: Made in America
How could close to 150 million people watch with rapt attention the exact same televised trial and come away with such passionately different responses to the verdict? Ezra Edelman’s epic, important and masterful documentary, O.J.: Made in America, spends close to eight hours exploring why you might have felt very differently from your neighbor. And, despite its length, nothing included is filler. OJ: Made in America, will air on ABC and ESPN beginning June 11th. I sat down with Edelman — a producer and director whose previous works includes sports documentaries for HBO and ESPN’s “30 for 30” series — […]
by Alix Lambert on May 20, 2016 -
Directors Frida and Lasse Barkfors on Their Complex Portrait of a Sex Offender Community, Pervert Park
When first-time filmmakers Frida and Lasse Barkfors read an article in a Danish newspaper about a community of sex offenders living in Florida they immediately wanted to go there. Traveling from Scandinavia to Florida they were surprised by the place they found. Without any outside funding, the couple soon embarked on the four-year process of making their first documentary about the Florida Justice Transitions Park — commonly referred to as “Pervert Park,” telegraphing the opinions held by the rest of society. Pervert Park, which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, […]
by Alix Lambert on May 20, 2016 -
In Every Dream Home a Heartache: High Rise Director Ben Wheatley on Adapting Ballard, Practical Special Effects and ’70s Parenting
I first met and spoke with Ben Wheatley in Brighton, where he lives with his wife and collaborator, Amy Jump. I was there for the inaugural Dark and Stormy Crime Festival, where Wheatley was screening his existential hit man thriller, Kill List. That film, along with Sightseers, Down Terrace and A Field in England, comprise a body of work that has rightly cemented Wheatley’s status as a raucous, disruptive, independent voice within the sometimes staid confines of the British specialty film industry. Wheatley’s new film High-Rise — an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s 1975 dystopian sci-fi novel and his highest-budgeted to […]
by Alix Lambert on Apr 21, 2016 -
“Are We Telling Stories with Images through the Camera or from a Computer?” Ed Lachman on Shooting Carol in Super 16mm
Ed Lachman has been the director of photography on a long list of visually stunning movies. He has worked repeatedly with director Todd Haynes. This year he is nominated for an Oscar for his work on Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel that stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. For Carol, Lachman creates a beautiful pastiche of color and texture to invite the audience into the world of New York in the 1950s as well as the emotional state of two women suddenly and deeply in love. Lachman and I sat down in L.A. to talk about Carol and […]
by Alix Lambert on Feb 11, 2016 -
Opening Doors: Jessica Jones Creator Melissa Rosenberg
The more money involved in any industry, the more timid and conservative the financiers become about what they are willing to back. When deciding what to greenlight, they cling to outdated ideas of what audiences will want to watch, often lagging behind what the rest of us have always known: both men and women alike will watch, love and cheer a badass female protagonist. Props, then, to Netflix for recognizing that a series based on the Marvel character of Jessica Jones and created by Melissa Rosenberg could be fed to a hungry audience waiting like chicks with tiny beaks open […]
by Alix Lambert on Jan 13, 2016 -
“We’re Not Very Good at Sharing in This Country”: David Simon on Show Me a Hero, Public Housing Today and Moving from Journalism to Television
David Simon (Homicide, The Wire, Treme) has a new miniseries on HBO, Show Me a Hero, and it’s about the fight for public housing and desegregation in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1987. And if you think that doesn’t sound dramatic or exciting, you’d be dead wrong. I watched all six hours straight through and found the series riveting from the first scene to the last. After watching the series I read the book (of the same title, by Lisa Belkin and equally riveting). The book has been out of print, but is being re-released with an introduction by Simon, in which […]
by Alix Lambert on Aug 30, 2015 -
“When You Have a Message or Issue-Driven Film, It’s Already an Act of Patriarchy”: Hubert Sauper on We Come as Friends
Hubert Sauper’s new film We Come As Friends is more non-fiction poetry than traditional documentary. Following his Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come As Friends is set in South Sudan as it becomes its own country. A new (or, rather, the same old) colonialism is represented by rapacious outside interests pressing in on Sudan from all sides, desiring the country’s oil and natural resources. Amidst it all, Sauper and his collaborators build their own tiny aircraft, complete with a wind-up music box on the dashboard, and fly it into a nexus of cultural communication gaps, deception, corruption, violence and a rhapsodic […]
by Alix Lambert on Aug 14, 2015
