Director Interviews

MICHELE AND KIERAN MULRONEY, PAPER MAN

In Michele and Kieran Mulroney’s debut feature Paper Man, Richard (Jeff Daniels) is a sweet natured, struggling author who’s unlikely friendship with an alienated teenager named Abby (Emma Stone) grows increasingly tender and strange during an extended stay in Sag Harbor to work on his latest book. Although his marriage to Claire (Lisa Kundrow) is fading, his imaginary interlocutor, a caped superhero named Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds) keeps him plenty busy when he’s not trying to avoid working on his book or inventing new ways to keep Abby dropping by. The married writing and directing duo, having long toiled as […]

By Brandon Harris on Apr 21, 2010 Director Interviews
JENNIFER KROOT, “IT CAME FROM KUCHAR”

George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]

By Brandon Harris on Apr 7, 2010 Director Interviews
Marco Bellocchio, Vincere

An operatic look at the largely forgotten life and times of Benito Mussolini’s first wife Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), veteran Italian helmer Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is a tragedy on scales both intimate and national. Il Duce’s transformation from a anti-war journalist to socialist rebel rouser to brutal fascist dictator is glimpsed through the lens of his misbegotten first marriage to Dalser, a beautiful and politically conscious Milano hair dresser who, enraptured by his charms and ideals, sells off her business and belongings to fund his early publishing efforts. However, in the wake of their marriage and the birth of their […]

By Brandon Harris on Mar 17, 2010 Director Interviews
BONG JOON-HO, “MOTHER”

Mother, the latest film by South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, is an inky affair. The humor is dark and the sky is a soggy shade of gray. The bumbling characters have limited prospects, and when love exists, it’s intense and deranged enough to kill for. The central relationship in the film is between Yoon Do-Joon, a slow-witted young man, and his unnamed mother. The son is played by Wan Bin, a wide-eyed Korean heartthrob cast effectively against type; his good looks leave us continually disappointed by his character’s slow intellect. His protector, oppressor and champion—also known as his mom—is played […]

By Livia Bloom Ingram on Mar 10, 2010 Director Interviews
Bill Jennings, Harlem Aria

The desire to be an opera singer is a career path that the broad majority of Americans would probably treat with some skepticism. If you come from Harlem, that skepticism is probably more palpable than most places. Yet the protagonist of Bill Jennings’ winning first feature Harlem Aria finds himself in just such a predicament. Anton (Gabriel Casseus), a dim-witted, twentysomething Harlemite who launders clothes for a living and resides with his overbearing grandmother, is determined to do just that. Despite the bullying of local teens and the entreaties from a local drug dealer (Malik Yoba) to work for him, […]

By Brandon Harris on Mar 3, 2010 Director Interviews
Jacques Audiard And Tahar Rahim, A Prophet

A often stunning and certainly never less than riveting meditation on the coming of age of an Arab/Corsican criminal in the unforgiving French penal system, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is that rare bird that feels utterly at home as an art house blockbuster (its pedigree includes the Grand Prix in Cannes, multiple European Film Awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and as a potential crossover hit. It follows a young prisoner named Malik (a terrific Tahar Rahim), who enters jail as little more than a homeless petty thief, but after being taken under the wing of […]

By Brandon Harris on Feb 22, 2010 Director Interviews
Martina Egi, Barefoot to Timbuktu

Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi’s keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn’t shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi’s portrait of the subjects very […]

By Brandon Harris on Feb 3, 2010 Director Interviews
Jon Amiel, Creation

The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel’s Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany’s real life spouse Jennifer Connelly), decides to finally tackle writing a book on his nascent theory of Evolution. Haunted by visions of his recently deceased daughter and the notion that he may permanently alter man’s conception of the […]

By Brandon Harris on Jan 20, 2010 Director Interviews
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbash, Sweet Grass

An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who travel mostly on foot with three thousand sheep over a two hundred mile Montana expanse that cuts across the seemingly unending Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. Without the use of voiceover narration or title cards, the film allows you to soak in […]

By Brandon Harris on Jan 6, 2010 Director Interviews
Corneliu Porumboiu, Police Adjective

Cornelieu Porumboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective, a hit at last fall’s New York Film Festival, has pushed the Romanian director into the forefront of a young group of Romanian filmmakers who have in the past four years taken the world of International Art Cinema by storm. Along with Cristian Mungiu (2008 Palme D’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), Cristian Nemescu (California Dreamin’) and Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. L?z?rescu), Porumboiu has found success at the highest levels of the international festival circuit while still trying to carve out audiences at home. In his latest film, the follow […]

By Brandon Harris on Dec 23, 2009 Director Interviews

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