Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Director Dominic Allan on Calvet
The titular tattooed protagonist of Dominic Allan’s Calvet is Jean Marc Calvet (pictured), who went from being a hustling, drug-addicted street kid in the south of France to an NYC art world darling. But the path he took to get there is equal parts winding, fascinating and downright insane. After being discovered in a shooting competition by a guy who ran a security firm, Calvet joined the “world of bodyguards,” taking care of the likes of Mel Gibson, Forest Whitaker and Tim Robbins at Cannes. But he was soon enticed to leave his young family and “disappear” to America with […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Persepolis Director Marjane Satrapi
Director Marjane Satrapi’s freshman effort Persepolis had all the success a first film could dream of having. The animated coming-of-age tale set in Iran, directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, earned the 2007 Jury Prize at Cannes, as well two César awards and an Oscar nomination. It’s a tough act to follow, but the graphic novelists turned filmmakers are back with a worthy live action film Chicken with Plums, forthcoming this summer from Sony Pictures Classics. Add it to today’s rich catalogue of films helping change audience perceptions about Iran. Alongside this year’s Academy Award winner The Separation, other directors are […]
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Director Marshall Curry on Racing Dreams
Ask a filmmaker how to go about making your first film, and 99% of them will impart the easier-said-than-done advice, “Just go and make it.” The technology is there, filming and editing equipment have never been more affordable, and the internet has broken down the barriers between filmmakers and distributors. Few of those filmmakers, however, can give that advice as genuinely as Marshall Curry, who did just that with remarkable results. While working at a New York multimedia design firm, Curry decided to pursue a latent desire to make documentary films. With no prior experience in filmmaking, he bought a […]
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Director Jeff Kusama-Hinte on Charlotte
We are filmmakers. We are artisans. Or so we forget. With filmmaking so often abstracted from the actual work of making a film, so enmeshed in conversations about new models and plans and strategies, we sometimes lose touch with what should be the main reason we make movies in the first place: to take pride in works of art made beautifully and with love. It is precisely the love of artisanal creation that is celebrated in Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story, a verite doc chronicling the making of a 50-foot gaff rigged schooner, “Charlotte,” by a team of […]
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From the Archives: Mike Kelley Interviews Harmony Korine
Mike Kelley, who passed away this month, contributed to Filmmaker once, in 1997, when he interviewed Harmony Korine about Korine’s debut feature, Gummo. From our archives, here is that interview. With a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative, a visual style incorporating everything from elegantly framed 35mm to the skuzziest of home camcorder footage, and a startling mixture of teen tragedy, vaudeville humor, and sensationalist imagery, Harmony Korine’s first feature Gummo is perhaps the only recent film whose artistic strategies draw as much from visual art as the film world. (A gallery installation of work from Gummo opens at L.A.’s […]
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Director Marius Van Neikerk on My Heart of Darkness
The journey of an international documentary to the United States is an uncertain one. Make its subject a lesser-known foreign war and the post-traumatic effects thereof, and you’ve got what an American agent calls a “hard sell.” My Heart of Darkness, a brooding foray into four veterans’ pasts, has been traveling the international festival circuit since premiering at IDFA in 2010. The years between then and now, where it’s having its U.S. premiere at L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), has been marked by all manner of revelations and misunderstandings—appropriate for a film about the reconciliation of four former enemies […]
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Kirsten Sheridan and the Factory: Assembling Ireland’s Actors
Talk to Kirsten Sheridan, director of August Rush and her latest Dollhouse (pictured and premiering in the Panorama section of the 2012 Berlinale) about The Factory, the collective she co-founded with fellow filmmakers John Carney (Once) and Lance Daly (Kisses), and it soon becomes apparent that Ireland’s recent financial woes have done little to dampen Dublin’s DIY spirit. If anything the collapse has, ironically, helped artists, Sheridan theorizes, by making their outsized dreams affordable. Indeed, in a thriving economy just meeting the rent on a space big enough to house everything from production studios, to a fully equipped camera department […]
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Director Micha X. Peled on Bitter Seeds
Monsanto, the agriculture biotech company maligned in such docs as Food, Inc. and King Corn, found renewed opposition this month with the launch of an online petition gone viral called “Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto.” The petition protests the president’s 2009 appointment of the company’s former VP, Michael Taylor, to the position of senior advisor to the FDA. That this years-late call to action has inspired more than 380,000 signatures attests to the toxicity of this particular marriage between government and a multinational corporation. If you’ll remember, Monsanto is the company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange, both of […]
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An Interview With The Invader Director Nicholas Provost
A sort of Taxi Driver set within the world of European immigrant culture, Nicolas Provost’s The Invader is one of the most intriguing and seductive films currently on the festival circuit. It premiered in Venice before screening in Toronto (where the below interview was conducted) and now Rotterdam, and it marks the feature debut of Provost (pictured above), a Belgian video and installation artist whose work has always taken as its subject the way cinema orders images into narrative. The story opens with the camera fixed on the vagina of a beautiful blonde woman, sunbathing nude on a Southern European […]
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Director Terence Nance on An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty
Watching Terence Nance’s Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is like being talked through the contents of a shoebox, each item another memento of The One That Got Away. Live action, animation, claymation reenactments, direct-to-camera address by him, on-camera interviews of her by him, blurry, amateur footage shot by her of him, all guided by a formally written voice over, delivered with somber, staccato clarity by an anonymous older man. Descriptions and depictions of other girls slide in and out of the narrative, intercut with shots of The One, whose name is Namik. One animation of a long-distance affair depicts a hand-drawn […]
