Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“We Just Love This Beautiful Outsider Art Form”: Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley on Home Haunts and “Room Temperature”
Making an appearance on DC’s, the blog of author Dennis Cooper, each October are haunted houses and their amateur offspring, “home haunts,” the Halloween home makeovers that with varying degrees of imagination turn suburban dwellings into highly personal expressions of horror . For Cooper, the acclaimed author of works such as Closer, Frisk, God, Jr., The Marble Swarm and The Sluts, these necessarily ephemeral stagings are a particular kind of outsider art, which makes their cataloguing each year on Cooper’s website a work of invaluable archiving; they are installations in dialogue with American horror movie iconography in which such figures […]
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Guy Maddin and David C. Roberts Discuss “Song of My City,” City Symphonies and the “Vivisection” of Cinema
Steam pouring from manhole covers, the neon-lights of 42nd street seen through rain-streaked taxicab windows, phalanxes of cops spied from tenement rooftops as they sweep a city block — David C. Roberts’s Song of My City distills the visual rushes of a score of 1970s and early ’80s New York City-set film classics into a 15-minute city symphony of sorts. Drawing inspiration from 1920s pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Roberts has pulled shots from Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Across 110th Street, The Warriors in order to capture not just ’70s New York but the […]
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Source File: Mark Obenhaus on “Cover-Up”
Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]
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Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”
When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]
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The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”
When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]
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Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
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The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee”
What if Jesus already made his way back to us in the 18th century, and we just missed it? The titular British-born spiritual leader played by Amanda Seyfried in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee believed herself to be the female embodiment of Jesus Christ and brought her scripture to Colonial America, enticed by its supposed promise of spiritual freedom. Co-written by Fastvold, who directed, and her partner Brady Corbet, and arriving only a year after their architectural epic The Brutalist, Ann Lee continues the pair’s interest in eccentric individuals who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of what […]
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An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”
Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and […]
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Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly”
30 years after his debut feature Kicking and Screaming (1995), writer-director Noah Baumbach, having crafted a notable career both in Hollywood and outside of it, has made his softest film yet, and that’s not meant as a pejorative. George Clooney stars as a fading movie star who embarks on a European trip to attend a film festival that’s planning to gift him a career tribute, using the honor as an excuse to spend time with his unsuspecting, backpacking daughter. Jay Kelly is a movie made by a parent in a time of reflection. That it was co-written by actress Emily […]
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“A Lot of Women Just Think It’s Fucking Hot”: Sarah Meyohas and Courtney Podraza on Their Taboo Erotic Short “Medusa”
After taking a spontaneous dip in the South of France, visiting Swedish perfumer Mia (Elektra Kilbey) is badly stung by a jellyfish. She rushes out of the water—topless, shivering, limping—and Franck (Franck Sémonin), a local out for a stroll, leaps into chivalric action, giving the bare-chested woman the shirt off his back. Tending to her injury, he runs a credit card over her thigh in order to remove the venom lingering on her skin. In France on a residency to further her craft, Mia grabs the card from Franck’s hand and wafts it under her nose—traces of lavender from her […]
