Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions about Essay Films and Digital Distribution for The Royal Road Director Jenni Olson
Available today on DVD and digital platforms, Jenni Olson’s The Royal Road is a beautifully crafted essay film that ruminates on several histories — the Spanish Colonization of California, film history and, through voiceover monologue, the director’s own personal story — all set against elegantly composed (in 4:3 16mm) landscape shots captured along the El Camino Real. Olson’s form here recalls the durational cinema of James Benning even as she brings in a wealth of information and references through her audio track, including, at one point, the words of playwright Tony Kushner, who offers a critique of the kind of […]
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“For One of the Head Explosions We Only Had Four Heads”: Joe Begos on The Mind’s Eye
Made for just $50,000, Joe Begos’ feature debut Almost Human (2013) landed a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, secured distribution, and earned a bit of critical praise for its Carpenter-influenced chills. For his follow-up The Mind’s Eye, the multi-hyphenate (Begos wrote, directed, produced, and photographed) had six times the budget at his disposal. That money brought a few changes – such as paying the crew and expanding the shooting schedule to a robust 37 days. Other things stayed the same, like shooting in Begos’ home state of Rhode Island. Like using practical effects. Like leaving enough blood stains […]
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Seizure, Midnight Express and Platoon: An Excerpt from The Oliver Stone Experience
[Editor’s note: the following interview is an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Oliver Stone Experience, out September 13 from Abrams Books. This excerpt from Seitz’s book-spanning interview with the director covers Stone’s life and career from his first feature, Seizure, through the production of Midnight Express and his initial, frustrated efforts to get Platoon made.] I had a nightmare, and it became the basis of Seizure. It came to you all in a dream? Yeah, it did. It felt like a fever dream. A father ends up betraying his son, like a coward, and runs away and wakes up, and of course he thinks it’s all […]
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Racism in Baltimore via Pest Control: Theo Anthony on Rat Film
An ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film, Theo Anthony’s Rat Film is a free-form experience with topical relevance. Long burdened by a documented history of residential segregation, Baltimore, Maryland — Anthony’s current place of residence — has served as a recent political hotbed due to the unjustified death of African-American resident Freddie Gray while in police custody. Less than a month after a court ruling declared (in the midst of the strengthening Black Lives Matter movement) all tried police officers not guilty of any wrongdoing in the Gray homicide, Anthony’s challenging film debuted in Switzerland at the Locarno Film Festival to much […]
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“I Think Drama is Often More Interesting if it Springs from Love Instead of Hate or Anger”: Writer/Director Andrew Ahn on Spa Night
Fusing the eroticism of an underground cruising culture with surprisingly heartfelt family drama, Spa Night is the debut feature of Korean-American CalArts graduate Andrew Ahn. Developed at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, the Film Independent Screenwriters Lab and the Film Independent Directing Lab, the film follows up Ahn’s well-received 2012 short, Dol, which also addresses coming-out within a Korean-American community. In Spa Night, Joe Seo plays David, a gay 18-year-old who hasn’t told his parents he’s gay. Their struggles with their own family business create pressure on him just as he’s drawn to explore his sexuality after discovering a gay hookup […]
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Mark Pellington on Directing Pilots, Blindspot and Collaborating with TV Creators
One of the most visually arresting pieces of filmmaking I saw last year was the pilot episode of Blindspot, an NBC series that slyly reinvigorates the network procedural genre by fusing the raw materials of 70s conspiracy thrillers with an ingenious puzzle device. The puzzle comes in the form of a body covered with tattoos; the body belongs to “Jane Doe” (Jaimie Alexander), a woman who, in the opening scene of the pilot, is discovered zipped up in a duffel bag left unattended in Times Square. Jane has no memory of who she is or how she got in the […]
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“It’s Quite a Scary Responsibility, Making a Film”: David Mackenzie on Hell or High Water
Hell or High Water is a no-nonsense, confidently executed thriller, operating in the same tone and terrain as Rolling Thunder and No Country for Old Men. Two brothers — Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) — pull off a series of bank robberies across Texas, raising money for a purpose revealed halfway through the film. Even before that disclosure, the subtext is firmly on economic dispossession and the role financial institutions play in suckering the small customers they ostensibly service (this may well be the first film in which a reverse mortgage — pace the late Fred Thompson — serves as a major […]
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“The Biggest Challenge was Working Amidst the Radiation”: Jake Price on The Invisible Season
Just days after the March 2011 tsunami in Japan, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and documentarian Jake Price made his way to the Tohoku region of northern Japan, the area hardest hit by the devastation. He stayed for months, and the result was Unknown Spring, an engaging interactive documentary that he spoke with me about when it was released in 2013. Unknown Spring focused on the catastrophe of the tsunami itself, but even before finishing it Price knew that he wanted to follow it up with another project on the less visible but longer lasting catastrophe of radiation from the hydrogen explosions at […]
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Daniels’ Possibilia Explores the Possibilities of Interactivity
Billed as an “interactive love story set in the multiverse,” Possibilia, a short film from the dynamic writing/directing duo known as Daniels, tells the story of a couple (Alex Karpovsky and Zoe Jarman) on the verge of a break-up with 16 potential outcomes that are left to the viewer. The project, which screened at both Sundance, Tribeca, and other festivals back in 2014, now gets an online release over at Eko (previously Interlude), the interactive video creation platform. Like Daniels’ recent feature Swiss Army Man, Possibilia relies on humor to subvert the genre and push the conventions of the medium. Filmmaker recently […]
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Every Film Is a Consciousness Working Through an Idea: Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan on For the Plasma
As an anxious, post-youth New York City cinephile with a dismaying penchant for missing out, I found For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s debut feature, an intimidatingly hep first watch. The tone, somewhere between goofy and morbid, between airless and chaotic. The horror-red title font. The surprisingly fun synth score. The high-waisted jean shorts. The blondeness. After I saw it at its sold-out premiere screening at BAMcinemaFest, way back in the spring of 2014, I scrambled to get ahead of the young, well-spoken directors’ influences, hoping to solve their self-proclaimed “digital-pastoral” puzzle the way I thought I knew […]
