Director Interviews
-
Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Le Meraviglie Director Alice Rohrwacher
Following up on her 2011 debut Corpo Celeste, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section, Alice Rohrwacher returns to Cannes with Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), this time as part of the main slate competition. It’s an intimate fairytale full of surreal characters and scenery, marvelously shot in Italy’s central-northern landscapes. Eldest daughter Gelsomina is the head of the family. While taking care of her three sisters, she struggles to keep the bee farm running with her stubborn German father, who opposes anything modern. The family has run out of money when the government imposes new regulations that could shut the […]
-
IFFBoston: Five Questions for Fight Church Director and Editor Bryan Storkel
The documentary Fight Church looks at the intersection of Christianity and mixed martial arts, and how pastors training fighters can reconcile their faith with a violent sport. The film premiered at IFFBoston. Co-director and editor Bryan Storkel previously directed and edited Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians, which examined a devout blackjack team. Filmmaker: How did you get into filmmaking? Storkel: I went to school for media, but I never made my own stuff until after I really became a fan of documentaries. I started watching documentaries and going to film festivals. I think I went to […]
-
Upstate Blues: Drake Doremus on Breathe In
Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy – a gauzily photographed love triangle drama that won Sundance – didn’t burn up the box office, but it opened up a number of doors for the third-time director and his atmospheric followup. By turns strident and sentimental, Breathe In feels like a step forward on a number of fronts. As the 30-year-old director told Filmmaker recently, the film was more or less not scripted, but it has the tension of a tightly wound product of a veteran screenwriter. Guy Pearce is Keith, a married music teacher full of longing for his zesty younger days who risks […]
-
Contemporary as Repertory: Aaron Schimberg and Jon Dieringer on Go Down Death at Spectacle
Perhaps it’s the fabulist way its characters relay their inverted sense of normality or their ragged way of dress, but something about Aaron Schimberg’s debut feature Go Down Death is unshakably anachronistic — and it’s not just the black-and-white 16 mm. Fitting then, that the film accounts for the first-ever theatrical run at the Williamsburg repertory theater, Spectacle. Screenings begin this Friday, with select showings in Smell-o-Vision, the aromatic brain child of producer-editor Vanessa McDonnell, who considers Go Down Death to be the ultimate vehicle for “the weird perfumes and other odd tinctures I’ve made out of plants, foods, etc.,” aside from […]
-
Jersey Boys: Daniel Patrick Carbone on Hide Your Smiling Faces
Promising newcomerDaniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces, well received at festivals such as Berlin, Tribeca and Abu Dhabi, is a sumptuously shot meditation on the difficulties faced by a couple of rural New Jersey teenage brothers following the untimely death of a friend. The film’s delicately designed frames, as well as its super spare screenplay, studiously withhold information — artfully, but perhaps somewhat tediously, denying the audience pleasure. (That pleasure is subsequently generated, however, by the beauty of Hide Your Smiling Face‘s overall visual aesthetic.) The picture’s rather chilly style is somewhat reminiscent of Alastair Banks Griffin’s Two Gates of Sleep, with […]
-
The Truth, The Horror: Eliza Hittman on It Felt Like Love
“If you happen to know a brave fifteen-year-old, that’s not too embarrassed to act in an emotional teenage role, that deals with things teenagers deal with — please have her contact me. Most of the kids I’ve been seeing can only handle a part that’s an idealized version of how they want to be perceived. It’s kind of incredible that parents would let their children perform in some totally exploitative slasher movie, but tense up at the opportunity to be a part of a fictional yet emotionally truthful coming-of-age film.” * * * Eliza Hittman posted the aforementioned on the […]
-
The Kids Are All Right: Matt Wolf on Teenage
Based on Jon Savage’s 2007 book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Matt Wolf’s elliptical and handsome documentary Teenage delves into the history of teen-hood, revealing how those formative years between 12 and 20 produced generations that were cultural forces to be reckoned with in the West during the 20th century’s earliest decades. Using a collage style that includes archival footage, newsreels, dramatic reenactments (anchored by recognizable young actors such as Jenna Malone and total newcomers found by street-casting impresario Eleonore Hendricks), the movie takes us to pre-war Germany, through the pages of diaries of midwestern 15-year-olds, and to dance […]
-
Five Questions With Open Windows Director Nacho Vigalondo
Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo is criminally underappreciated in the States, dating back to his brilliantly circuitous 2007 debut Timecrimes. Hopefully that wrong rights itself with Open Windows, a film that manages to take place entirely within the screen of a consumer laptop. Elijah Wood stars as Nick, a sweet-cheeked fanboy who, through an online contest, wins a date with current It Girl Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey.) But she cancels. Instead, Nick gets a phone call from a fed-up admin for her website, who remotely connects Nick’s laptop to Jill’s cellphone, offering a bit of peep-show revenge as a consolation prize. This means […]
-
Love Lost: Director Roger Michell on Le Week-End
For aging, married academics Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan), romance doesn’t come so easy anymore in Roger Michell’s wise and often very funny anti-rom-com Le Week-end. They jet off to Paris to recapture some of the spirit of their initial honeymoon 30 years before. But the trip is miserable from the start. She refuses to stay in the hotel from the honeymoon, sickened by its beige paint job. They check into a place far too expensive for their budget and enjoy the view of the Eiffel Tower, but little magic is rekindled with Meg, who is especially uninterested […]
-
Five Questions With Last Hijack Directors Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta
Femke Wolting & Tommy Pallotta’s experimental doc Last Hijack sees the venn-diagramming of a rigorous interview style and breakout swatches of rotoscoped animation, ala Waking Life (which Pallotta produced.) In lieu of philosophical digressions or convoluted dream sequences, the filmmakers use animation to depict the unfilmable: nailbiting raids by Somali pirates, led by one Mohamed Nura, who casually recounts his adventures to the filmmakers between mouthfuls of khat. Never feeling doctrinaire, the film takes an earnest stab at correcting the way the West considers seaside piracy, delineating a cycle of corruption and violence starting with Mohamed’s father. Wolting and Pallotta […]
