Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Global Warming ‘Knows No Ideology, No Political Boundaries'”: Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk on The White House Effect
Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s The White House Effect is an intriguing all-archival trip back in time to the precise moment in US politics when we arguably could have turned the page on climate change. From 1988-1992, Yale grad and oil company founder George H.W. Bush was commander-in-chief; not only did Bush. Sr. improbably make vocal his belief that global warming (“The Greenhouse Effect”) was real, but promised to employ “the White House effect” to counter it. Which included appointing as EPA chief Bill Reilly, an avid conservationist and veteran of Nixon’s Presidential Council on Environmental Quality and […]
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“There’s an Opera Out On the Turnpike”: Benny Safdie on The Smashing Machine
Benny Safdie’s mixed martial arts drama The Smashing Machine, currently in theaters from A24, is brutal and tender, and both in surprising ways. Working with blockbuster actor Dwayne Johnson, who, shapeshifting into the role of fighter Mark Kerr, is even more bulked up than usual, Safdie dramatizes an early 2000s time when MMA was in a transitional phase, with its fighters touring internationally on a loosely regulated circuit where the purses weren’t so huge, there was still a camaraderie among fighters, and the rules felt a bit slippery. Drawing from John Hyams’s 2002 documentary, The Smashing Machine: The Life and […]
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Shooting from the Heart: Craig Renaud and Juan Arredondo on Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
As I wrote in my capsule review for this year’s SXSW curtain raiser, Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud is a film that Craig Renaud, Brent’s brother (and my friend for the past dozen years, ever since I met the tight-knit siblings covering their now defunct Little Rock Film Festival) should never have had to make and instigated by an event no family should ever have to live through. And that puts Brent’s loved ones in the grieving company of untold numbers of families around the world — the very same people the award-winning […]
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“Deception Was Inherent to Teacher Wang’s Work, and We Had to Figure Out How to Handle This from an Ethical Perspective”: Elizabeth Lo on Mistress Dispeller
Perhaps one of the strangest and most captivating docs of the year, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller centers on a middle-aged wife and husband, the latter of whom is having an affair that the former is desperate to end. Enter Wang Zhenxi, one of a growing number of China’s professional “mistress dispellers.” For a fee, Teacher Wang will orchestrate scenarios that allow her to get to know the man and his mistress in order to discern how she can best manipulate a breakup – one in which all parties hopefully emerge for the better. A series of staged deceptions that add […]
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“Collapsing the Past Into the Present”: Connor Sen Warnick on “Characters Disappearing”
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present. Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and […]
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“We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor
With Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor premiering on Netflix today, we’re reposting our interview with Gandbhir out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. — Editor Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given […]
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“The Algorithm of It All”: Tucker Bennett and Chris Corrente on “In the Glow of Darkness”
Drawing heavily from internet aesthetics that feel at once contemporary and dated, In the Glow of Darkness is a sprawling, hand-made cyberpunk ensemble film following detectives, streamers, pop stars, struggling families, corporate conspiracies and a rave-dancing hitman. Eschewing direct references to our world’s online space, In the Glow of Darkness constructs a parallel reality of tech-run nightclubs, LAN party fraternities and a “meme-tripping” drug culture, where users get have their subconscious uploaded to a QR-code tramp stamp, which, when scanned, gives them euphoric hallucinations as well as sending AI-generated targeted ads directly to their brains. Tucker Bennett started making films […]
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Girls Rock: Nobuhiro Yamashita, Doona Bae, and James Iha on “Linda Linda Linda” at 20
Indie director Nobuhiro Yamashita was not under the impression that he had much insight into the lives of high-school girls. For his first three features (Hazy Life (1999), No One’s Ark (2003), and Ramblers (also 2003)) he’d focused on what he knew best—“lazy men.” But Yamashita’s fifth feature, Linda Linda Linda (2005), would prove pivotal, expanding the horizons of his career, his cast and Japanese independent cinema itself. A gentle slice-of-life drama, Linda Linda Linda tells a story in snapshots of four high-school girls as they prepare for their debut performance as a band at their school’s culture festival. “I […]
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“We Had to Test the Audience’s Own Morality”: Harris Dickinson on Urchin
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), stars Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) as a homeless addict trying to rehabilitate after his latest stint in jail. I spoke to Dickinson […]
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“Seduction: the Cruel Woman Was Banned for 18 Years”: Monika Treut on her Queer Trailblazing Career
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically exploring for over three decades — Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) hit screens in 1985! — were just beginning to […]
