Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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“I Need to Feel When I Make a Film That I’m Not the Same Person Who Made the One Before”: Director Leos Carax on Holy Motors
“The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online,” said Sheryl Sandberg on Charlie Rose last year. “I have to be ‘me’, and you have to be ‘Charlie Rose,’” the Facebook COO told the talk show host. “It’s me” — that single line appearing late in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors unexpectedly devastated me at the film’s Cannes premiere, and perhaps its memory is what’s causing me to recall Sandberg’s statement, which is certainly in line with similar comments by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg. In an age in which online platforms offer the possibility for anyone to craft for themselves a variety […]
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Dreams from a Petrified Head Director Dan Ouellette
Dan Ouellette has had a long career in the New York independent film community, starting with his work as a production designer for Hal Hartley in 1990 with Trust and then, in 1992, with Simple Men. He’s also an accomplished visual artist (examples of which can be seen at his Neurotica Divine site) and has directed stylish music videos for the bands Android Lust and The Birthday Massacre. Dan is also, full disclosure, an old friend who I’ve also worked with professionally many times. (Films he’s production designed that Robin O’Hara and I produced include What Happened Was…, Saving Face, […]
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Ursula Meier and Agnes Godard on Sister
Switzerland’s submission for the best international picture is Ursula Meier’s Sister, starring the stunning and earthy Léa Seydoux as a Swiss hot mess and Kacey Mottet Klein as her weedy 12-year-old brother who supports them both through petty thefts. It’s a subtle, complex film that avoids obvious polarities of class, family, even landscape. As director Meier said to me recently of the mountain resort setting, and about finding her way into the script by focusing on the location of the ski lift cable cars, “It’s the place where he belongs, between two worlds. And it’s also the rhythm of the […]
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Dennis Dortch on the Secrets of Web Success
Dennis Dortch is the director of the Sundance film A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy, available to watch on Netflix now. He also has created a veritable empire on YouTube with his channel Black & Sexy TV consisting of two successful web series, The Couple and The Number, and two more on the way. He and his team are currently crowdfunding a film based on The Couple. In this interview he talks about the difference between creating a film and creating content for the Web, how to juggle multiple web series at a time and how to keep […]
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Director Ted Kotcheff on Wake in Fright
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, but as the film made its way across the Atlantic, its stateside distributor decided to do a bit of rebranding. Against Kotcheff’s will, his intense fish-out-of-water tale was released in New York the following winter as Outback, a perfectly bland title for a movie that’s anything but. If the new name threw some film-goers off the trail, United Artists’ failure, as Kotcheff recalls it, to “spend 25 cents on publicity” made certain that the rest of its potential audience never heard about it in the […]
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on the Personal and Political in Docs
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, is being aired as part of the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and Sin País director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of their […]
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on Image and the Roles of a Filmmaker
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, is being aired as part of the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and Sin País (below) director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of […]
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on Documentary Filmmaking and Photography
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, is being aired as part of the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and Sin País director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of their craft. […]
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Writer/Director Stephen Chbosky on The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky has been influenced by a lot of angsty classics, like The Graduate and Catcher in the Rye. In 1999, he made his own contribution to the canon, releasing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a young-adult novel whose tough themes helped make it a formidable word-of-mouth success, becoming the best-selling title from MTV Books by 2000. Within seven years, it sold nearly 800,000 copies, while also getting regularly challenged by the American Library Association for its exploration of drug use, homosexuality, and adolescent suicide. A film version seemed inevitable, but Chbosky wasn’t ready to hand over his polarizing […]
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Born Out of Grief: Kathy Leichter’s Here One Day
I first found out about Kathy Leichter’s documentary, Here One Day (above), via an email announcing the film’s Kickstarter campaign. Like many independent filmmakers, I receive many such emails. But what set this one apart from the others was the sender, filmmaker/editor (and friend) Pola Rapaport, whose work I greatly admire – and the film’s subject. Here One Day (screening at IFP’s Independent Film Week, Spotlight on Documentaries) is about Kathy’s mother’s bipolar disorder and suicide. It’s a story about what a person with mental illness does to a family — a story many of us can relate to — and […]
