Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Ra’anan Alexandrowicz on The Law in These Parts
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts sheds new light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an unexpected perspective. Interviewing nine military judges, the director explores how Israel created a new legal system to control the Gaza Strip and West Bank after occupying them in 1967. At first, the state may have begun with the understandable desire to defend itself from violence, but its justifications quickly became self-serving. In one of the film’s most memorable examples, a woman was sentenced to a year and a half in jail for giving a “terrorist” bread. The film consists of stylized interviews with the […]
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Five Questions with Marfa Girl Director Larry Clark
Border patrol police and racial tension are not your usual ingredients for a teen movie. Like the adolescent characters they feature, teen dramas tend to be self-referential: they are rarely concerned with anything beyond drugs, unprotected sex, and emotional confusion. Larry Clark, best known for his 1995 film Kids, specializes in this genre, but his latest feature, Marfa Girl, somehow eludes the teen canon to offer a diagonal take on an oft-predictable format. Marfa Girl takes place in a small Texas border town that is home to a community of artists and a threatening number of border policemen. While hostility […]
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Five Questions with Tricked Director Paul Verhoeven
Chiefly known for his Hollywood output, which includes films such as Robocop, Basic Instinct, Total Recall and Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven is part of a distinguished lineage of European expats who have made the dream factory great. But the latest project from Verhoeven is the furthest thing from Hollywood one could possibly imagine. This manifests itself not so much in stylistic terms — Tricked (Steekspel) is in fact a soap opera of a comedy — as in the film’s creative process, which saw it being openly crowd-scripted by whomever wanted to contribute. After the first five minutes had been written, the […]
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Five Questions with 28 Hotel Rooms Director Matt Ross
Matt Ross’s directorial debut is an inventive look at an affair between a married account (Marin Ireland) and a novelist (Chris Messina) that unfurls within the walls of 28 hotel rooms across the country. Dictated by checkout times and the call of the “real world,” their truncated encounters are marked by a growing sense of urgency, as their physical connection turns emotional. Ireland and Messina shoulder the challenge of being the sole recipients of Doug Emmett’s lens with magnetic grace, crafting their characters’ dimensions in varying increments of restraint and ebullition. 28 Hotel Rooms, currently streaming on iTunes and VOD, […]
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RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
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Five Questions with North Sea Texas Director Bavo Defurne
The most striking thing about North Sea Texas is the handsome precision of its aesthetic, which, from the windswept beaches of its coastal setting to the ’70s duds that match home décor, comes close to endowing the film with a magical-realist vibe. A native Belgian and graduate of a Brussels art school, writer/director Bavo Defurne isn’t interested in being a fly on the wall. From a portfolio of ethereal photography to a handful of short films (including Campfire, which gobbled up praise as it cruised the international festival circuit), Defurne has an affinity not for the affected, but for the […]
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Game Changers Part 2: Funding and Casting
Game Changers is an indie film currently being shot in Buffalo, New York. In this second part of the interview with filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer), they discuss funding a low-budget movie, how the budget effects the production, as well as casting and location scouting. Filmmaker: So you had a script, but then you had to fund the movie. How did you go about doing that? Imbs: Funding was always an Indiegogo thing. Just as I fell in love with Twitter, I also fell in love with the idea of Indiegogo. I really believe in supporting artists, […]
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Adult Friend Finder: Writer/Director Sean Baker on Starlet
Dree Hemingway is a sweet porn star and Besedka Johnson — Best Actress winner at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival — is the mysteriously bitter older woman she befriends in Sean Baker’s sun-streaked relationship drama, Starlet. Interview by Scott Macaulay.
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Game Changers Part 1: Getting Started
Filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) are currently shooting a low-budget independent feature film, Game Changers, a drama/comedy about two video-gamers who are approaching their late twenties. With an initial target budget of $30,000, Game Changers might be better described as a shoestring budget feature, given that they began shooting with only half that amount raised. Though this is their first film together, Imbs has previously made a feature-length video, Eckstein has extensive shooting experience in corporate video and documentaries, and Imbs is an experienced editor who will be doing most of the editing. Imbs, who is based […]
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Director Matthew Lillard on Fat Kid Rules the World
Matthew Lillard has been in the movie business for a long time, racking up a sizable resume as an actor in films from SLC Punk and Scream to The Descendants and Trouble with the Curve, but with this , year’s Fat Kid Rules the World, Lillard makes his directorial debut. Fat Kid Rules the World tells the story of Troy Billings, a lonely, overweight teen, and Marcus, the magnetic-yet-troubled local musician/high school dropout as they fight to save each other from their inner demons (depression/attempted suicide and drug addiciton respectively). After a serendipitous offer out of the blue and feeling […]
