Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“You Have to Be There”: Barbara Kopple Looks Back on American Dream
Set in Austin, Minnesota, a company town where nearly every resident has a connection to food-processing giant Hormel Foods, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990) embeds with unionized Hormel meatpackers as they respond to a 23 percent hourly wage cut in a time of unprecedented corporate profits. Kopple and her collaborators embedded with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local P-9 for a year. The film spans the Austin local’s initial PR push, their tactical disagreements with the UFCW leadership, their protracted contract negotiation process, and, ultimately, their year-long strike from 1985 to 1986. Gathering a wide array of voices—workers, […]
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“The Wicked Are Punished”: Damian McCarthy on Hokum
Damian McCarthy knows how to scare an audience. At the Hokum premiere at SXSW, screams and giggles filled the theater as festivalgoers jumped in their seats and covered their eyes watching McCarthy’s tightly wound trap spring out at them—sometimes literally—on the screen. The Irish writer-director describes his films as “classic ghost stories,” campfire tales designed to have you searching for faces in the shadows all the way home. They’re elemental, they’re impeccably crafted, and they’re a lot of fun. Hokum is McCarthy’s third feature, and the first time he has worked with a major actor—Adam Scott, who stars as an […]
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RZA Doles Out One Spoon of Chocolate
RZA, born Robert Diggs, is most well-known as The Abbot, or leader, of the Wu-Tang Clan. Beyond his musical pursuits, however, he has been building an eclectic body of work in cinema for going on three decades. RZA’s cinematic beginnings can be traced to Jim Jarmusch’s elegant, and elegiac, urban samurai riff Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), for which he composed the score and played a minor role. He then appeared as himself in a trio of early aughts comedies: Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), which re-teamed him with Jarmusch; Scary Movie 3 (2003) alongside fellow Wu-Tang members Method Man, U-God, and Raekwon; and Be […]
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“This Rupture of Utopian Horizons”: Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe on Aro berria
Aro berria, the first feature from Spanish Basque filmmaker Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe, is focused on the revolutionary potential of two spaces: a factory floor and a tent. In the former space, Gorostidi restages the working-class unrest of the late 1970s during Spain’s transition to democracy, opening the film with workers in a San Sebastian water meter plant forming a human snake, their comrades silently putting their tools down and joining in a collective mass. When the more radical workers—many of them young people—fail to sway the plant towards continued action, a number of them leave San Sebastian for the Arco […]
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“The Comedy of Man Begins Like This”: On and with Terry Zwigoff
The aspiring artist seeking an inspiring avatar in the corpus of Terry Zwigoff has set themselves up, to put it mildly, for a fair bit of consternation. It’s not that, to invoke his Daniel Clowes adaptation Art School Confidential (2006), the “narcotic moment of creative bliss” is totally impossible—Crumb (1994), his documentary about the eponymous underground cartoonist, is littered with such moments rendered with the commonplace flick of a pen, even if bliss is comparatively rare—only Zwigoff’s cadre of enfants terribles, male pathetics, and fringe art-makers wryly observe how a collapsing capitalism and an ever-accelerating corporatism have come to define […]
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“I Find the Truth of the Scene in the Moment”: Fatih Akın on Amrum
Fatih Akın had reservations going into Amrum, a soulfully classical coming-of-age tale set on the eponymous German island in the waning days of WWII. The story was by and about Akın’s friend and frequent collaborator Hark Bohm, a veteran of the German New Wave alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Initially, Akın was only set to produce, but when Bohm fell ill and asked Akın to take over directing duties, the Turkish German filmmaker behind deeply personal films like Head-On and In the Fade had to find a way into Bohm’s personal recollections of life during wartime. (Bohm ultimately passed away in […]
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Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. In Mile End Kicks (Sumerian Pictures), 23-year-old Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is an avatar for Levack, a music critic at a Toronto alt-weekly who leaves her bro-dominated publication for a creative summer in Montreal. She’s supposed to write a short book for the 33 ⅓ series about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Instead, Grace loses herself […]
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Magic Mirror: Guy Maddin Interviews Caroline Golum on Revelations of Divine Love
Revelations of Divine Love, filmmaker Caroline Golum’s 14th century-set chamber piece, recounts the legacy of Julian of Norwich through impressively homespun props, costumes, and miniatures. After a mid-life bout of illness, Norwich (Tessa Strain) was rapt with feverish visions that depicted the crucifixion of Christ. After three long days, she awoke with a newfound devotion to the Catholic church. Julian vowed to spend the rest of her life entombed in a single room, where she could commit herself to the Lord and her book, Revelations of Divine Love, often regarded as the first English-language text written by a woman. Ahead […]
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“Decontextualized Little Clips of Violence”: Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei on Faces of Death
When Faces of Death was released almost fifty years ago, the idea of being “extremely online” was a distant glimmer, probably somewhere in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. If you had a predilection for the grotesque or a passing fascination with that which should not be seen, darkened theaters or pulpy true crime rags were the only source. The idea of seeing “real” human death, bodies dismembered, viscera strewn all over the street, was all taboo, but a softening one as we emerged from the Vietnam War. The horrific imagery from those senseless massacres awakened something in the general public. It certainly […]
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Let’s Play: Genki Kawamura and Jirô Nagae on a New Kind of Video Game Cinema
At first glance, film producer and novelist Genki Kawamura would not appear an obvious fit to helm a big-screen adaptation of an indie video game. Best known for producing major titles such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, Kawamura made his directorial debut in 2022 with A Hundred Flowers, a muted and focused dementia drama. “There was one sequence in that film that was well-received in how it showed how the world looks from that perspective,” reflects Kawamura. “I was hoping to expand on that, so I searched for some kind of elevated horror project to do […]
