Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
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Director Maiko Endo on Kuichisan
Easily the most out-there film I saw at last year’s CPH:DOX was one touted by the programmers as “the discovery of the festival”: Maiko Endo’s Kuichisan, receiving its New York debut tomorrow as part of the LaDiDa Festival. Previously, Endo was a vocalist in the band Battles and co-produced Jessica Oreck’s documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Now, Oreck has produced Endo’s debut picture, with Beetle Queen d.p. Sean Price Williams behind the camera. Stunningly shot in both black-and-white and color, Kuichisan is a tumbling collection of images, organized as much by feeling, sensation and the rhythms of its experimental soundtrack […]
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Director Leslye Headland on Bachelorette
Tall and part blonde/part brunette, Leslye Headland darted into our interview and gave me a warm greeting and an intense gaze. She explained that she had just run across town in Manhattan to walk her dog in between interviews while promoting her debut film, Bachelorette. The film is based on her stage play of the same name, about a gang of attractive girls (Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Kaplan and Isla Fisher) behaving badly before their friend’s wedding. I ask what her dog’s name is. “His name is Ramius. Which is Sean Connery’s name in The Hunt For Red October,” she says, […]
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Golden State Granddaughters Discuss California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown
While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
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Damon Russell & Curtis Snow on Snow on Tha Bluff
After debuting at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2011, Damon Russell’s Snow on Tha Bluff had a small theatrical release earlier this year. Writing about it then, Filmmaker’s own Brandon Harris described the film as “An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, [which] discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about.” Since becoming available through such platforms as iTunes and Netflix Watch Instantly, Snow on Tha Bluff has found a new and highly engaged audience which has discovered and been electrified […]
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Directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing on Detropia
In Detropia, the new documentary from directing partners Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a gleaming sun rises over a handsome stretch of metal and glass, yet much of the landscape it kisses is neglected, overgrown, and decaying. This is the dichotomous portrait of Detroit delivered by the filmmakers, whose breakthrough film, Jesus Camp, likely rattled your core. With similar attention paid to stirring emotional heft, Grady and Ewing’s latest uncovers the splendor and squalor of a very American metropolis, whose all-time-low state of disrepair is punctuated by glimmers of its former — and, perhaps, future — glory. Painstakingly researching their […]
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Director Jamie Travis on For a Good Time, Call…
Journalists are often privy to inside information when a film deal goes down at a festival, but rarely do they take place on the other end of my dinner table. Nor do they generally concern one of my friends, as was the case at a certain dinner party on a snowy night at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Actually, until now, that has never happened. My friend is director Jamie Travis, and it was during a cast and crew dinner at a fancy pop-up steak restaurant when his little, low-budget indie, For a Good Time, Call…, was picked up for […]
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How I Rediscovered My Passion for Film with Blood Brother
Once I had a dream to make a documentary in some sort of third world or developing third world country setting. I had no direction, no story and no clear vision, so unfortunately that dream died. Nearly a decade later, I had moved on to building a career in the music video and commercial world. By this time I had no desire to travel to any third world country, but my best friend Rocky Braat did. After sharing an apartment and parallel lives for about seven years, Rocky had gone off on a much different path. He had stumbled upon […]
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Director Aurora Guerrero on Mosquita Y Mari
Though Aurora Guerrero made Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list in 2006, the director behind this year’s Sundance-premiering, award-winning Mosquita y Mari – which most recently took both Outstanding First U.S. Dramatic Feature Film, as well as Outstanding Actress in a U.S. Dramatic Feature Film for its lead Fenessa Pineda, at Outfest – was a welcome new face to me when I caught the film earlier this year. A tale of two Chicanas coming of age in working-class L.A., Guerrero’s feature debut is breathtaking in its understatement, less your typical “queer flick” than a continuation of the […]
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Storm Song: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tchoupitoulas
After the recent BAMcinemaFest screening that marked the first time Benh Zeitlin’s magical-realist Beasts of the Southern Wild screened alongside Bill and Turner Ross’s immersive New Orleans documentary Tchoupitoulas—both South Louisiana-shot pictures produced by members of the film collective Court 13—there were two celebrations on either side of BAM. At the beautiful dive-bar Frank’s, the Ross brothers and various doc and indie film bros were watching the NBA championships with loud exuberance and strong opinions. There was a rumor that there was a dance party across the street at the Fox Searchlight-hosted party for Beasts, which was flowing with delicious […]
