Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“We are All Cracked Vessels”: Writer/Director Lynn Shelton on Her First Feature in Four Years, Outside In
After several years working in television, veteran independent filmmaker Lynn Shelton (Laggies, Your Sister’s Sister, Humpday) returns to the big screen with Outside In, a tense relationship drama dealing with the complexities of romance. Co-written by Jay Duplass and produced Washington-based Mel Eslyn and Lacey Leavitt, with both Jay and Mark Duplass on board as executive producers, the film opens today in theaters followed by a Netlix release on June 1. Jay Duplass stars as 38-year-old Chris, who is granted early parole thanks to the advocacy of Carol (Edie Falco), his former high-school teacher. As he struggles with the challenges […]
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“When I Write a Script, I Am Making a Hypothesis of What the Film Could Become”: Laurent Cantet on The Workshop
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop boasts a concept that in another picture might result in a piece of twisty, intellectualized metafiction: a semi-successful novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), teaches a writing workshop to a multi-racial group of young students in La Ciotat, a small town just south of Marseille. She encourages the students to explore the concept of genre — to conceive of a murder mystery — and to also connect to the working-class history of the place itself. One student, a young white teenager named Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), seems both engaged and roiled by the assignment; his cooly disturbing writings sit […]
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“We Have Only Scratched the Surface of What is Possible in Erotic VR Media”: Jennifer Lyon Bell on Her Fantasy Film Workshop and Creating Erotic VR
The last time I interviewed veteran filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell for this site topics ranged from “fair trade” porn to the inaugural Holy Fuck Film Festival in Amsterdam (where the expat feminist pornographer has long resided). And now Bell, recipient of both the Feminist Porn Awards 2014 Movie of the Year (for Silver Shoes, which premiered at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) and a psych degree from Harvard, continues to expand her mission of providing sex education for those behind the lens, while also exploring the new media horizon through her own artistic work. I caught up with Bell to […]
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“It’s Like a Drug Movie without the Drugs”: Director Xander Robin on Making his Body Horror Romance, Are We Not Cats
Are We Not Cats, Xander Robin’s nearly unclassifiable debut feature — let’s call it a mashup of downtrodden NYC romantic slacker drama and fantastic body horror — premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, made the festival rounds and is now out on streaming platforms via Cleopatra Films. What makes it particularly worth a watch is Robin’s sure storytelling voice and ability to navigate multiple genres in a single picture. It’s also got a plot twist tied to an extraordinary fetish, one you haven’t seen onscreen before: trichophagia. For those of you to lazy to look that up, that’s eating […]
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“I’ve Left Countless Messages on His 1-800 Number…”: Tommy Avallone and Max Paolucci on their SXSW Doc, The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man”
New Jersey-based filmmaker Tommy Avallone is gathering serious buzz at SXSW for his The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man, a doc charting Bill Murray’s impromptu drop-ins on “the regular folk” — encounters seem closer to urban legends than actual experiences. Even Bill Murray himself said at ComicCon in 2015 that the stories — such as his bartending at the Shangri-la bar in Austin during SXSW 2010 or his showing up at a birthday party in South Carolina after a basketball game or his washing dishes at someone’s house party in St Andrews, Scotland — weren’t […]
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Five Questions with Amber Sealey, Director of No Light and No Land Anywhere
After having premiered at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival, Amber Sealey brings her new feature, No Light and No Land Anywhere, to theaters today. The Factory 25 release screens at the IFC Center, with Sealey doing Q&As at all the evening shows. Tickets and information can be found here at the link. And, below, read Paula Bernstein’s interview with Sealey conducted just prior to the film’s festival launch. Five years after her last feature, writer-director-actor Amber Sealey returns with No Light and No Land Anywhere, a psychosexual drama executive produced by Miranda July. Starring British stage actress Gemma Brockis […]
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“I Went Through Two Marriages But I Still Have the Same Editor”: Gianfranco Rosi’s Qumra Masterclass
An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is a focused event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world as well as a handful of heavy-hitting “Masters” in a mentor-like capacity who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. After earning the Berlinale’s Golden Bear for Fire at Sea (2016), an unconventional exploration of the refugee crisis’s impact on the island of Lampedusa, Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi has become one of the most talked about documentarians in the world. Speaking […]
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Mélanie Laurent on Galveston, Affordable Song Rights and Directors (Not) Working with Actors at SXSW 2018
The movie: Galveston The Plot: On the run from a New Orleans mobster (Beau Bridges), a dying hit man (Ben Foster) and a sex worker (Elle Fanning) hit the road for the titular location. Based on the novel by True Detective author Nic Pizzolatto. The Interviewee: Writer/director Mélanie Laurent. This is the French filmmaker’s first English-language feature as director. As an actress, she has appeared in Inglorious Bastards, Beginners and By the Sea. Filmmaker: There’s an interesting quote from you in the press notes that says something like “This is a story that maybe wasn’t meant for me, but I […]
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“You Must Be Reactive in the Face of Danger”: Dieudo Hamadi on Kinshasa Makambo
Having world premiered at the Berlinale, played True/False and now proceeding to Cinéma du Réel, Dieudo Hamadi’s extraordinary Kinshasa Makambo has a shot at becoming one of the major political documentaries of 2018. The film follows two young activists, Ben and Jean-Marie, organizing for an end to the reign of Joseph Kabila, current president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Kabila assumed the presidency in 2001 after the assassination of his father (US-backed autocrat Laurent-Désiré Kabila), Hamadi’s film centers on their dismayed responses to the government’s decision in 2016 to suspend elections until further notice — upturning a […]
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“Where Are the Men I Can Imagine on a Horse?”: Valeska Grisebach on Western
Given the sense of suspended time often pervading the narratives and atmospheres of classic westerns, perhaps it’s appropriate that the wait for Valeska Grisebach’s own Western was a protracted one. Arriving eleven years after her previous film, the understated Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006), the third feature by the German filmmaker (and Berliner Schuler constituent) sacrifices none of the depth and focus of her previous work. With a plot following a group of German construction workers in Bulgaria, the film is in some ways far removed from the vast plains and Monument Valley iconography we identify with the Hollywood western tradition, while at […]
