Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Best Thing for Coppola Would Be to Have Zero Budget”: Mike Figgis on Megalopolis Behind-the-Scenes Documentary Megadoc
Megalopolis’s reputation preceded the film itself long before its première iat last year’s Cannes Film Festival. As Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating opus about the folly of men and the collapse of the fictional city of New Rome edged closer to completion, it became embroiled in a flurry of speculation and controversy, kickstarted by a striking exposé in The Hollywood Reporter about rising tensions on set between director, cast and crew. Self-funded by Coppola, who funneled over $100 million of his vineyard profits into the film, the Adam Driver-starring film ultimately represents two things at once: a historic landmark of independent […]
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“Film isn’t Meant to Solve Problems, It’s Meant to Create More”: David Osit on Predators
In Predators, three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker David Osit’s new documentary, the titular descriptor applies to multiple people: the pedophiles who found themselves the target of popular NBC sting series To Catch A Predator (2004-07), but also the makers of a show which packaged disturbing subject matter into mass entertainment while feigning moral superiority, the slapdash copycat series that have sprung up in its wake and the undiscerning audience for all of these. Osit divides Predators into three chapters. The first uses To Catch A Predator clips, chat logs and phone calls to build an introduction to the show, in which men […]
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“Grief in a Beautiful Place”: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias on Her TIFF World Premiere Forastera
The carefree, meandering pace of summertime suddenly takes the form of a depressive stupor in Forastera, the feature debut from Los Angeles-based, Spanish-born writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. During an annual vacation to visit their maternal grandparents in Mallorca, Cata (Zoe Stein) and Eva (Martina García) engage in typical teenage shenanigans: they aimlessly ride bikes along the coast, go to beach bonfire parties and flirt with the boys they encounter there. Basically, all is as it should be—at least until the day that Cata discovers her grandmother’s unresponsive body. The girls’ mother Pepe (Núria Prims) arrives in order to help with […]
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The Burnt Century: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar on Train Dreams
Originally published in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams chronicles the life of a logger who slips in and out of the world without a trace. An orphan with no knowledge of his birthplace or family lineage, Robert Grainier doesn’t have a history as much as he merely lives through it. He helps build the railroads that crisscross the country; when physically unable to maintain his arduous, itinerant lifestyle, he performs a series of odd jobs in his adopted home of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He marries a woman, has a child and just as quickly loses them both in a […]
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The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs
With Ira Sachs’s highly recommended Peter Hujar’s Day opening today at New York’s Film Forum from Janus Films, we’re unlocking our paywall on Azazel Jacobs’s interview with Sachs from our Fall, 2025 print issue. (See also my interview with Sachs out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) Both Sachs and Rebecca Hall will be doing Q&As this opening weekend. — Scott Macaulay The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, […]
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Childhood After Dark: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl
Taipei first appears in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl glimpsed indistinctly through a little girl’s kaleidoscope. A vivid, swirling combination of colors and shapes, it’s a fittingly vibrant entrance for Taiwan’s capital, a cultural center that Tsou—making her solo directorial debut more than 20 years after co-writing/-directing 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker—captures as a layered panorama of neon-lit alleyways and crowded streets. Following a single mother and two daughters who return after several years in the countryside to carve out a new life for themselves in the big city, the film has been described by Tsou as a “neo-melodramatic tapestry,” […]
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Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You
Few films arrive with the urgency and necessity of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, a work that positions itself as both historical epic and intimate confession. Emerging from the long shadow of displacement and erasure, it stands as one of the most vital contributions to Palestinian cinema in recent memory. Told through the voice of Hanan (played with piercing restraint by Dabis herself), the story begins with her son Noor, a teenager shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank, before spiraling outward to a multigenerational saga of exile, endurance and return. While Dabis’s Amreeka (2009) examined […]
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The Art of Arrival: Yashaddai Owens on Jimmy
Once in a while, never often, a film comes along that defies the protocols of the moment and delivers an unexpectedly wondrous impact. Thus it was that Jimmy sent this writer skittering down the internet hole in search of young Yashaddai Owens, writer-director-cinematographer-editor of this portrait of the young James Baldwin, about whom everything had seemingly already been filmed, revived, archived or written. Owens brings considerable powers of lyrical invention to the table in his debut feature, imagining and projecting himself into the past, 16mm Bolex in hand to capture the unfailingly imaginative contours of the young Baldwin (Benny O. […]
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Motherload: Mary Bronstein on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
With If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opening today from A24, we’re unlocking from behind our paywall Natalia Keogan’s interview with Bronstein, which is the cover story of our Fall, 2025 edition. — Editor “Something very bad is happening,” young mother Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) whimpers amid oncoming tears during a routine therapy appointment. In the throes of a severe bout of postpartum depression exacerbated by a lack of support from her husband, Caroline’s hour-long sessions at Montauk’s “Center for Psychological Arts” are a brief respite from a world that, in her mind, is more violent and evil than anyone […]
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“I Wanted It to Feel Like… Some Children Just Took a Camera and Documented a Few Hours of Their Life”: Director Stillz on His Edglrd-Produced “Barrio Triste”
Barrio Triste premiered at the Venice Film Festival weighted with at least a couple of expectations. It’s the debut feature for Stillz, known till now for directing music videos for Bad Bunny (who years ago took him on quite early in his career) and other artists. It’s also the latest feature produced by Edglrd, Harmony Korine’s creative conglomerate, following the frontal audiovisual assaults of Aggro Drift and Baby Invasion, both directed by Korine and themselves highly anticipated for how they would re-scramble cinema. In actuality, Barrio Triste (as might be expected from watching Stillz’s moodily evocative videos) evolves its own […]
