Authors — Tomris Laffly
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“I Felt an Enormous Amount of Pressure to Deliver Something That Wasn’t Just a Music Doc”: Matthew Heineman on His Telluride-Premiering Jon Batiste Doc, American Symphony
“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.” Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a […]
by Tomris Laffly on Sep 1, 2023 -
“I Think We Sampled 100 Pinks”: Production Designer Sarah Greenwood and Set Decorator Katie Spencer on Barbie
Neither Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood nor set decorator Katie Spencer had Barbie dolls growing up. “Or a DreamHouse, or anything,” recalls Greenwood, who joined Filmmaker on Zoom alongside Spencer following the record-breaking opening of Greta Gerwig’s feminist smash hit. “I was probably a little judgmental about Barbie until this film — I fell into that camp. But I kind of readdressed my thoughts after meeting this Barbie, and [its creator] Ruth Handler.” Spencer adds, “And [after] meeting Greta. We were a part of the backlash generation. Even if we wanted a Barbie, I don’t know that our parents would have […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jul 26, 2023 -
“Directing Is Being a Professionally Passionate Person”: Celine Song on Past Lives
A lived-in, swooning memory piece on the intersection of roads taken and missed, Celine Song’s Past Lives is as confident as filmmaking debuts come. “I needed to invent the way that this movie should be made. I wanted it to be the first movie of its kind to be made,” Song tells me recently during an interview at the Madison Square Park—one of the locations of her film—over a picnic of petits fours and sparkling lemonade. “I think that every filmmaker pursues this when they approach a new project,” she continues. “I needed this to be something that stands on […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jun 2, 2023 -
“I Observe Human Behavior With Such Pleasure”: Nicole Holofcener on You Hurt My Feelings
It’s no surprise that Nicole Holofcener prides herself in thinking that she can always tell when people are lying to her about her work. After all, she’s as observant as writer-directors come, able to portray even the slightest nuances in idiosyncratic human behavior across the likes of Please Give, Friends with Money, and Enough Said. “There are certainly some tells,” she says, during a recent Zoom interview with Filmmaker on her latest feature You Hurt My Feelings, centered on the white lies we tell loved ones about their work in order to, well…not hurt their feelings. “The bad ones are […]
by Tomris Laffly on May 25, 2023 -
“A Storybook We Were Creating Inspired by the Truth of Washington Heights”: Director Jon M. Chu on the Spirited New York Musical In The Heights
“We were trying to break the rules of a musical genre that’s been around since the beginning of Hollywood,” director Jon M. Chu says about the making of In The Heights, his sensational adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-award-winning stage musical featuring a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, who also wrote the screenplay. And the rules, he does break confidently, with a boisterous movie dedicated to the mostly Hispanic and Latin-centric communities of New York City’s Washington Heights. When he first came on board to direct In The Heights, a massively-scaled screen musical that renews the Busby Berkeley spirit and brings […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jun 9, 2021 -
Last Call: Writer/Director Emerald Fennell on Promising Young Woman
“This movie is a tribute to the many genres I love—thrillers, rom-coms, horror,” says writer/director Emerald Fennell about her searing and fiercely confident debut feature, Promising Young Woman. “It’s a dark satire of those genres.” It’s also, says Fennell, a Western of sorts—a continually surprising movie about a woman on a journey of justice. Self-styled vigilante Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a medical school dropout determined to teach entitled male predators a life lesson, a calling that honors the life of her best friend Nina, victim to a horrific case of sexual assault years earlier. An actor whose credits include The […]
by Tomris Laffly on Feb 10, 2021 -
“Building the Character a Closet”: Costume Designer Trish Summerville on the 1930s Hollywood Style of David Fincher’s Mank
A repeat David Fincher collaborator after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014), multi-award winning costume designer Trish Summerville has been signing her name onto numerous challenging film and TV projects throughout her storied, genre-spanning career, including the likes of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Red Sparrow. But Mank—Fincher’s meticulous creation of the Golden Age of Hollywood through the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane—and working in black-and-white presented a new challenge for the artisan, who had only done small projects in monochrome previously. “We were lucky; we were able to do […]
by Tomris Laffly on Dec 4, 2020 -
Her Decision: Eliza Hittman on Her Observational, Intimate and Necessarily Political Never Rarely Sometimes Always
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
by Tomris Laffly on Mar 17, 2020 -
Capturing Social Change through Clothing: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Costume Designer Arianne Phillips on Dressing Quentin Tarantino’s Latest
Hawaiian shirts. Leather jackets. Go-go boots. These are just a few of the costume staples that leave a defining visual mark on Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film in which real history is viewed through a fictionalized lens. We are in 1969, a year of change — both in Hollywood and the U.S. Think the start of the Nixon presidency, the eroding of the studio system before the artistically adventurous New Hollywood came to the rescue and yes, the Manson Family murders that claimed five lives, including that of a very pregnant Sharon Tate, actress […]
by Tomris Laffly on Aug 1, 2019 -
“The Harder Life Was for Us, the Stronger the Images Were:” Director Hassan Fazili on the Perils of His Flight-from-the Taliban Doc, Midnight Traveler
As headlines blare possible peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, and with its intersection of politics and filmmaking, Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in World Documentary Competition, is bound to be one of the festival circuit’s most discussed pictures this year. (It travels next month to the Berlin Film Festival.) Midnight Traveler charts the Fazili family’s escape from the Taliban after Fazili became the group’s target due to his controversial documentary Peace. Fazili, with the help of his filmmaker wife Fatima and daughters Nargis and Zahra, filmed the story of […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 29, 2019
