Director Interviews
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Creating a Promotional Video for the Kindle Best-Selling Sci-Fi Series Post-Human
David Simpson is the author of the bestselling sci-fi novel series Post-Human. There are currently five books in the series, with two more planned. Born in Ireland, he has lived in Vancouver since 2000 and believed he would end up a teacher of English until he discovered self-publishing on the Kindle. Having had success self-publishing, he hoped to create a promotional video for the series that might lead to the production of an actual movie. The resulting video represents what Simpson thinks the opening sequence of a Post-Human film might look like. The truly fascinating part of the story is […]
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TASER Tries to Discredit Killing Them Safely Documentary
It’s not unusual for filmmakers digging into difficult truths to face backlash or even retaliation. The Church of Scientology, for instance, launched a smear campaign against director Alex Gibney after his film Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief addressed some of the religion’s questionable practices. Now TASER International has tried to discredit the new documentary Killing Them Safely, which raises serious questions about the safety of TASER guns, by posting negative reviews on various web sites, including Amazon.com, iTunes and IMDB. Because TASER employees used their real names when posting these reviews, it’s been easy to spot these fake reviews (after Berardini shared […]
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“The Odds Were in Our Favor to Fail”: Krisha at the BFI London Film Festival
Krisha Fairchild is a 64-year-old actress who lives in Mexico and has four dogs. She’s named after a young Polish girl who saved her father’s life during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. With an older sister named Vikki and a younger one called Robyn, Fairchild grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, the three sisters take turns visiting their 91-year-old mother — who suffers from cognitive brain damage as a result of her late onset closet alcoholism — in an assisted living facility in Texas. Fairchild’s mother is remorseful about the addiction, and like her own alcoholic father, is charming […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Wes Anderson
The Rome Film Festival had a striking fresh look this year under the direction of its new artistic director Antonio Monda. The redesigned fest had a slew of hot films and top-tier tributes. But at the core of the new “festa,” or celebration of cinema, was a series of high-profile conversations with leaders in the arts. One of the main highlights of the fest was a conversation with Wes Anderson and novelist Donna Tartt in which they discussed their love of Italian films. While Tartt went in depth on her love of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Max Ophuls’ Everybody’s Woman, and Paolo Sorrentino’s […]
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“One of the Basic Questions of Directing is When Are You with Someone and When Are You Not?”: Eskil Vogt on Blind
Blind, the feature directorial debut of Joachim Trier’s co-writer Eskil Vogt, is an aesthetically spick-and-span Nordic nightmare, a meditation on loneliness, illness and responsibility. If its effects are a bit sneakier than the wrecking ball to the chest approach of Oslo, August 31, it’s due to the meticulousness of its script, and the complex interplay among its many principal characters. Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has recently lost her sight, and spends her days cooped up with her computer while her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) is at work. Unable to relate to the outside world, Ingrid retreats into her imagination, crafting an interwoven tale of […]
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Five Questions with Men Go To Battle Director/Co-Writer Zachary Treitz and Co-Writer Kate Lyn Sheil
Hats off to director Zachary Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil for sidestepping the more introspective, resource heavy trends of much contemporary independent filmmaking, and swinging for the fences with their Civil War period piece, Men Go To Battle. Set in 1861 Kentucky, the brothers Francis and Henry Mellon (Tim Morton and David Maloney) are desperate to scare up some funds for their overgrown farm before winter arrives, but the pair’s constant quarreling is a hindrance to much progress. Eventually fed up with Francis’ heavy drinking and general flippancy, Henry takes off to join a far more populated battle amidst the Confederate army. […]
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Five Questions with Bloomin Mud Shuffle Director Frank V. Ross
For my money, Frank V. Ross is one of the most inventive, witty and honest low-budget filmmakers that major festival land has neglected to embrace. With the exception of the SXSW-premiering Audrey the Trainwreck, Ross’s films have toured the regional circuit like best kept secrets, with their structurally complex, yet casually rendered studies of modern relationships serving as any program’s unmitigated highpoint. His latest, Bloomin Mud Shuffle, which premieres tonight at the Wisconsin Film Festival, concerns Lonnie (James Ransone), a vaguely alcoholic house painter, and the object of his unsteady affection, Monica (Alexia Rasmussen). Such a distilled synopsis scarcely does justice to Ross’s execution, with its […]
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Five Questions with God Bless the Child Directors Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the Atlanta Film Festival over the weekend, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s God Bless the Child is a naturalistic, quotidian portrait of five children roaming the streets and marshes of Davis, California after their mother skips town. Machoian and Ojeda-Beck capture their characters with both formal remove and striking intimacy, as their interplay suggests the nature of young bodies left to their own devices. Though the Grahams — Harper, Elias, Arri, Ezra, and Jonah — exist in the film without any parental supervision, all five happen to belong to co-director Machoian, a relation which the pair were […]
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“An Auteur Film with Pseudo-Anonymous Dialogue”: Benjamin Crotty on Fort Buchanan
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
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“Like Reading a Diary You Wrote as a Teenager”: Britni West on Tired Moonlight
Since taking home the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, most reviews have charged Britni West’s naturalistic narrative Tired Moonlight with the “documentary-like” or “hybrid” stamp of approval, but more than anything else, the film seems to suggest that such classifications were meant to be broken. An interwoven portrait of the inhabitants and topography of Kalispell, Montana, West collapses the conventions of an ensemble driven film by allowing her characters to roam free, presenting a beautiful, like-minded series of vignettes that form a cohesive whole. Recently back from Austin where she presented the film at RxSM (along with 7 Chinese Brothers at SXSW, on which she […]
