Directors
Interviews - Directors
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A MAGA Nightmare Scene, Marketing to Incels and Reacting Against “Performative Wokeness”: Eugene Kotlyarenko and Dasha Nekrasova on Their Reverse Romantic Comedy, Wobble Palace
Wobble Palace is a reverse romantic comedy set in relationship hell tinged by the toxicity of Tinder hookups and Trump’s political rise. “One of the early ideas was to make a movie about a happy break up,” explains director Eugene Kotlyarenko. “The formula for a rom com is whatever happens for the first 90 minutes, by the end, the couple gets together.” Flipping this arc, the film climaxes (spoiler alert!) in the couple splitting up instead. “In a relationship that’s really toxic, staying together is really horrible and breaking up is really liberating,” Kotlyarenko continues. The film follows a millennial […]
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“Imagine How Angels Would Look at Us”: Wim Wenders on Restoring Wings of Desire
As a longtime Wim Wenders fan and devoted admirer of his masterpiece Wings of Desire, I would never have thought it possible that the movie could look better than it did when it was released in 1987. Gorgeous in every sense of the word, from the shimmering black-and-white photography of Henri Alekan (the maestro behind Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast who Wenders prodded out of retirement to shoot the film) to the profoundly romantic story of an angel who wants to fall to earth and experience the human condition, Wings of Desire was a stunner when it came out […]
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“What is Our Responsibility to Survivors?”: Alexandria Bombach on her Sundance-Winner On Her Shoulders
Recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide and a current human rights activist, is the star of On Her Shoulders, Alexandria Bombach’s Sundance-winning (both for Best Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award) portrait of Murad as she navigates a world that would be overwhelming and intimidating for any 23-year-old, let alone one who has experienced unspeakable crimes at the hands of ISIS. But speak Murad must — to the prying media, to the cold bureaucratic UN, to indistinguishable assorted government officials. And to the refugees at camps who look to her as […]
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Alonso Ruizpalacios on Museo, Casting Gael Garcia Bernal For His Shortness and Never Meeting Your Heroes
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ two features to date are both about Mexico City’s recent past. The writer-director first gained international visibility with 2014’s Güeros, a black-and-white road trip movie set in the 1990s using the protests at the National Autonomous University of Mexico as backdrop for an intimate coming-of-age plot. For his sophomore venture, Museo, Ruizpalacios enlisted major star Gael García Bernal and one of Güeros’ cast members, Leonardo Ortizgris, to address a larger than life, yet based on real life, crime story. 1985 was a chaotic year for Mexico City, aside from the devastation left in the wake of a massive earthquake […]
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“Film is of its Nature Unruly… and Your Job is to Master its Unruliness”: Director Paul Greengrass on the Filmmaking and Politics of 22 July
22 July is a difficult film. Any film about the 2011 terror attack and massacre on Utøya island in Norway would have to be. Less expected is the film’s strong political edge. In that sense, 22 July is something of a return to roots for Paul Greengrass. Before taking on the Bourne franchise, the director made a mark with his 2002 docudrama Bloody Sunday, about the Bogside massacre of Northern Irish protesters by British soldiers in 1972. In that film, as in his new one, Greengrass combined his trademark visceral, shaky-cam documentary aesthetic with a strong sense of political urgency. […]
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Peter Bogdanovich on How TV Grew From Rio Bravo, Orson Welles and Making What’s Up, Doc? on a Dare
Having now completed the long journey from upstart/wunderkind to venerated elder statesman, Peter Bogdanovich has amassed a lengthy CV that includes a celebrated career directing pictures, an early post programming films at the Museum of Modern Art, teaching, writing and, not unlike his mentor, Orson Welles, taking up the odd acting job. His contribution to the cinema in 2018 was twofold. First, he made the documentary The Great Buster, an interview-heavy appreciation of the pantheon silent filmmaker, Buster Keaton. His other project this year was, by design, one that required vigilant self-effacement—that’s the long-awaited post-production and release of Orson Welles’s The […]
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“I Don’t Think Reconciliation is Possible”: Benjamín Naishtat on Rojo, ’70s Filmmaking and Living in a Right-Wing Zombieland
A charcoal-black comedy about the early days of the Argentinean Dirty War, Benjamin Naishtat’s third feature Rojo accumulated a small but devout critical following after its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, then went on to win Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Actor last week at San Sebastian. Naishtat’s 2014 debut History of Fear questioned the companionability of day-to-day life with lingering, suppressed trauma, while his black-and-white followup The Movement cast a brutally acerbic eye to 19th century nation-building in the Pampas, satirizing the belief (perennial in Latin America and other places) that a strong autocrat can bring order and stability, […]
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“We Sometimes Think of the Film as a Quirky Guide to Grieving”: Elan and Jonathan Bogarín on 306 Hollywood
At first, the notion of sibling filmmakers creating a doc about clearing out their recently deceased grandma’s house in New Jersey struck me as a potential recipe for a navel-gazing home movie. But the sister-brother team of Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 25 New Faces alum, is not your average documentarian duo (even as their beloved Jewish grandmother is a familiar character — at least to those of us who grew up with idiosyncratic Jewish grandmas in Jersey. My physician grandmother in Teaneck likewise believed there was no wrong time for gefilte fish). Yet it’s this transformation of a very personal […]
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“I Only Want to Tell Caribbean Stories”: DP Shabier Kirchner on His Directorial Debut, the Short Film Dadli
I read a book on architecture and design in the subtropics, once, a long time ago, that described the region as inherently cozy. Palm trees and big-leafed plants, it said, are made for hiding; enough of them, bundled together, will look like home. Tiquan, the thirteen-year-old narrator of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s directorial debut, Dadli, has places to hide, the way teenagers need to. “I go far in the country,” he says. “Hunt, get high — nobody troubles me.” Dadli, a brief and searing documentary portrait of Antigua, where Kirchner grew up, is as short as Tiquan is young, but it […]
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“I Decided to Remove as Much as I Could from the Plot of the Movie”: David Lowery on The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford and Vintage Cop Cars
In The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a true-life outlaw who spent most of his 84 years robbing banks or biding time in prison, always on the lookout for the first opportunity to escape. Set in 1981, the film finds Tucker in his early 70s, living in Texas and pulling off a string of heists throughout the South. He and his partners, played here by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, became known to authorities as the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” and their m.o.–efficient robberies, executed politely and with style–became legendary. “That was when I was a really […]
