The following interview with Jim Jarmusch was originally published as our Spring, 2004 cover story, and it is appearing here online for the first time. — Editor “Why do people go to the cinema?” Andrei Tarkovsky writes in a book of essays, Sculpting in Time. “I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for,” he goes on, “is time: time lost or spent or not yet had.”  Time lost, spent or not yet had is the stuff of Jim Jarmusch’s new feature, his ninth, Coffee and Cigarettes. Consisting of 11 short vignettes, all featuring two or three people […]

The following interview of Jim Jarmusch about Dead Man was published originally in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1996 issue. It is appearing online for the first time. Dead Man was reissued last year by and is now available from Criterion. In Jim Jarmusch’s new Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant who travels by train across the frontier West to work in a bookkeeping firm run by a crazed, gun-toting Robert Mitchum. When, as in a Kafka novel, the job vanishes before it’s even begun, Blake finds himself a hunted man, pursued for a murder he didn’t commit while […]

The Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) announced today the 38 features, 51 short films, and 17 virtual reality and immersive experiences that comprise its 15th edition, taking place September 12-15, 2019 throughout Camden, Rockport and Rockland, Maine. “Story and Power” is the theme of sorts for this year’s festival, which aims to prompt industry-wide conversations that examine “the ways in which power structures deeply embedded in society have continued to shape the documentary field, including which stories are told, by whom and for whom.” “Our 2019 slate celebrates documentary as a reimagining of the ways we engage with stories from […]

With Rick Alverson’s Filmmaker-recommended The Mountain opening today in theaters, we’re debuting this edition of Not Getting Stoned with Caveh featuring the Virginia-based auteur and his blissed-out interlocutor, Caveh Zahedi. Re the “not,” Alverson disdains pot smoke, allowing Zahedi to puff in his presence but not exhale. Topics discussed: why filmmakers talk about financing all the time, whether cinema produces a physiological response in our bodies that can’t be adequately described in words, and how Alverson thinks about his own filmography.

Two Tribeca titles — 17 Blocks, Davy Rothbart’s decades-spanning documentary about an African-American family living in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, and Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan’s award-winning short doc St. Louis Superman — were announced today as the debut acquisitions of  MTV Documentary Films, a division of Viacom’s MTV Studios headed by producer and executive Sheila Nevins. Nevins previously headed HBO Documentary Films and was hired to launch this new MTV division in May. In a press release, Nevins said,  “At the heart of American Democracy, there is an injustice that gnaws at the soul of the have-nots and […]

Kevin Corrigan will always have a special spot in the Back To One pantheon, not just because he was the very first guest, but because he set the stage for the discussions on the craft of acting that were to come—personal, steeped in the work, confessional at times, often inspirational, always educational. In this hour, he shares some more inspiring personal experiences from a life in acting, and also talks about the work of those who’ve inspired him, from his friend Natasha Lyonne and his current co-star Pete Davidson, to Marlon Brando, Glenda Jackson, Taylor Negron, the actor Bob Dylan, […]

The following interview of Errol Morris originally appeared in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 1998 issue. In 1988, Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer from Massachusetts who made a living designing more “humane” electric chairs, was hired by Ernst Zundel, the publisher of several pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying tracts, to conduct a forensic investigation into the use of poison gas in Nazi concentration camps. On his honeymoon, Leuchter travelled to Auschwitz and, with his wife sitting in the car reading Agatha Christie novels, illegally chipped away at the brick, collecting mortar samples which he transported back to the States. Testing these samples for traces of cyanide […]

I first was introduced to the incredible talents of Emmy Harrington on the set of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About The Show, where she plays “Slut Machine,” and witnessed, first hand, her ability to adapt to all types of run-and-gun shooting environments and unorthodox directing styles and deliver a great performance take after take. You can also see her work in shows like High Maintenance and Jessica Jones, and an award-winning film she wrote, directed, and stars in — Two Little Bitches — is currently making the festival circuit. I sat down with her a couple of days after directing […]

Bad Lieutenant was the cover story for the Winter, 1993 edition of Filmmaker — this magazine’s second issue. This feature by Scott Macaulay, with quotes from director Abel Ferrara and screenwriter Zoë Lund, appears online for the first time. ***“No one can kill me. I’m blessed. I’m a fucking Catholic.” — Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant. “The title is so ironic, Bad Lieutenant. Because of course it doesn’t mean he’s bad. You have the semantic irony of the “baaad” lieutenant and the central irony of ‘Is he bad or is he not bad and perhaps one needs to be bad […]

Appearing online for the first time, here is Scott Macaulay’s report on Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, from our Winter, 1995 edition. It appears here in newly revised form. ***“Addiction will be our question: a certain type of ‘Being-on-drugs’ that has everything to do with the bad conscious of our era.” — Avital Ronell, Crack Wars “Look at this,” Abel Ferrara says, tracing his finger across the video monitor in his Manhattan office/editing room. On the screen: black-and-white images of blood-streaked, bullet-ridden Bosnian casualties. “This is the real thing.” These images, and others of Nazi concentration camp victims from Ferrara’s new […]