Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Five Questions with A Fierce Green Fire Director Mark Kitchell
In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola and the cast and crew of The Godfather Part II took over a Lower East Side block in Manhattan. An NYU film student and resident of that block, Mark Kitchell, focused his camera on the proceedings. The result, The Godfather Comes to 6th Street, was not a fluffy “making of” film but a document of the good, the bad and the ugly that happens when a film crew descends on a neighborhood. A portrait of a community, the film also captured the efforts of a group of local activists who objected to the film’s presence; […]
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Dan Sallitt on The Unspeakable Act
With an exacting intelligence, a hyper-articulate quality that brings to mind the characters of American systems novels, Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act meditates on the burgeoning mutual attraction of two Brooklyn siblings in a manner that, while leaving many unsettled, has already marked his third feature as a potential breakout for the critic-filmmaker. The scions of an old-school Brooklyn bohemian writer, Jackie Kimball and Matthew Kimball (Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron) have long harbored a forbidden desire for one another, although it is most intensely felt on Jackie’s side. Medel’s big green eyes under dark, foreboding bangs fill in all the gaps […]
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Director Keith Miller on Welcome to Pine Hill
Keith Miller readily admits that when he first tried to make a film he didn’t really know how to talk to actors. He wasn’t quite sure of himself. He thought he was doing a feature; he ended up with a film that was a half-hour long. But over the next few years he kept writing, kept shooting. After a time, he gained his footing, thanks in no small measure to the fellowship he found amongst the directors, writers and actors of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. These days he’s confident enough in his vision — and his collaborators — that he […]
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Five Questions with Remedy Writer/Director Cheyenne Picardo
Opening the 10th anniversary edition of CineKink NYC tonight is writer/director (and “habitual submissive”) Cheyenne Picardo’s Remedy, a look at the business side of BDSM through the eyes of a character crafted from Picardo’s personal experience Filmmaker spoke with the accidental director – who originally set out to be a critic – about converting a barn into a NYC dungeon, casting non-kinksters, and why Steve Martin’s The Jerk is more influential than Godard. Filmmaker: I noticed this quote from you in the press notes, “I’m hoping to demystify professional BDSM in a way that’s personal and accessible by showing it […]
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Animating 1000 Parts: Creating the Short Day Shift
Ian Timothy, 18, is about to graduate high school — applying to art schools hoping to study animation — but he already has several years of animation experience under his belt. He created his first stop motion at 12 using a DV camera, and quickly discovered he liked doing it so much that it became “pretty much a full-time thing.” Timothy won a Silver Telly Award for animation in 2013, has created animation for music videos, and is currently working on an animation for Adult Swim for the Cartoon Network. In the following interview Timothy talks about the short Day […]
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Second-Time Director: Jane Weinstock and The Moment
“Complexity” is a word that Jane Weinstock likes to use when describing her ideal movie, and it’s certainly an attribute that could be applied to her own work. “I crave it as an audience member. I think people are contradictory, and I like that kind of psychological realism,” she says. The same word is an apt description for her own pathway into the director’s chair, especially for her most recent film, The Moment. It was a fulfilling journey for the filmmaker, but one she also calls “a really long struggle.” Weinstock has had a varied career, having gotten her start […]
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Snitch’s Ric Roman Waugh: From Stuntman to Writer/Director
There is no one set way to progress to the role of writer/director, but now — when all it takes to make your own movie is having a DSLR and a Kickstarter account — the story of Ric Roman Waugh’s rise stands out. The son of an old school Hollywood stuntman, Waugh took a path similar to those directors who emerged in Tinseltown’s golden age: learn a craft (writer, editor, production designer, etc.), and then move up through the ranks until you’ve earned the right to have your name on the back of that canvas chair. Waugh followed in his father’s […]
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Seven Questions for People of the Delta Director Joey L.
Is it possible to produce a cinematic narrative based on the collective wisdom of a tribe with no real actors? Can a film be made where true stories are brought to life by the people who have actually lived them? Joey L. not only believes it is possible, he has every intention of making it happen. By the age of 18, he was commissioned to photograph the movie poster for Twilight. Currently his work, on National Geographic’s Killing Lincoln promos, can be seen on billboards from Times Square to Sunset Boulevard. So how does someone who makes a living routinely […]
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Five Questions with Future Weather Director Jenny Deller
Jenny Deller’s Future Weather takes an unusual look at Middle America, forgoing the clichés of its demography for ecology. Introverted Laudurée (Perla Haney-Jardine) is abandoned by her mother (Marin Ireland), who flees their trailer for Hollywood, with gelatinous aspirations for a career as a make-up artist. Fiercely independent, Laudurée carries out her daily life as though nothing happened, her days consumed by experiments and the threat of global warming. Yearning to be taken under the wing of her science teacher (Lili Taylor), Laudurée is nevertheless snatched up by her alcoholic grandmother (Amy Madigan), who plans to move to Florida to […]
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Ruba Nadda on Inescapable
In Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda’s elegant and oddly topical thriller Inescapable, Adib Abdul-Kareem (Alexander Siddig) is a computer operations manager at a Toronto bank who fled Syria some 30 years ago. Married to a Canadian with whom he’s fathered two pretty teenage girls, he’s kept his checkered past a secret from his family the whole time, but after the disappearance of the older of his two daughters (Jay Anstey) during a clandestine visit to Syria in order to find out where her father is from, Adib heads to Damascus despite the possibility of repercussions for long ago sins. With combative ex-flame […]
