Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Narrative Model Used in TV Series Brings Us Back to a Stage That We Long Surpassed in Cinema”: Lucrecia Martel’s Rotterdam Masterclass
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama was one of the few titles to escape the sweeping critical scorn heaped upon the cinematic year 2017. After getting passed on by Cannes (potentially because one of its producers, Pedro Almodóvar, was president of the jury – though that would only have disqualified it from the main competition) and inexplicably landing an out of competition slot in Venice, the long-anticipated fourth feature by one of today’s most distinguished auteurs was received with Twin Peaks: The Return-levels of enthusiasm in certain quarters. The comparison to Twin Peaks isn’t merely incidental: both are works of staggering confidence and […]
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“In the Master’s Narrative, We Don’t Hear the Stories of the Oppressed, the Disenfranchised, of Women”: Director Cathy Lee Crane on Her SF Indiefest Premiere, The Manhattan Front
Developed with the support of a 2013 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, The Manhattan Front is experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s first feature-length narrative film in a career spanning over two decades. True to Crane’s hybrid art film roots, though, The Manhattan Front melds melodramatic acting on silent-film-styled sets with newly digitized archival footage of daily life in New York City and on the front lines during World War 1. Via this unconventional approach Crane presents the true story of how a German saboteur’s plans to prevent American munitions from reaching Britain during a period of official U.S. neutrality became entangled […]
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“Everybody Can Make Their Money Back and You Get to Make the Movie”: Mark Pellington on Nostalgia
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of the connection between mortality, memory, and identity; questions related to how we define ourselves in life and how those lives define our legacies have been key in films as diverse as The Mothman Prophecies (a thriller in which Richard Gere becomes obsessed with the supernatural ramifications of his wife’s death), Father’s Daze (a documentary about Pellington’s father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease) and Of Time and Memory (an unconventional adaptation of Don Snyder’s novel about Snyder’s attempts to know his deceased mother). In Pellington’s last several features, […]
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“You Have to Make Money. It’s a Business”: Jesse V. Johnson on Accident Man, Scott Adkins and the Logistics of Fast DTV Shoots
For over 15 years, Jesse V. Johnson has been a reliable craftsman of action movies for the wildly unreliable DTV market. Born in England, he moved to Hollywood to work as a stunt performer in the 1990s, working on everything from Total Recall (1990) to The Thin Red Line (1999). He has bounced back and forth between stunt work and DTV directing ever since — whatever it took to pay the bills in an unpredictable career. One predictable thing over the last year has been the presence of Scott Adkins as his leading man. Adkins may not have the name […]
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“Being a Filmmaker Wasn’t Something It Occurred to Me… You Could Be”: Film Journalist Neville Pierce on His Path Towards Directing
Over nearly 20 years, film journalist Neville Pierce has collected bylines at most of the U.K.’s top film publications, including Empire (where he’s a contributing editor), Total Film (where he was the editor) and The Guardian. And while he worked as a reviewer early in his career, he’s best known for his long-form profiles of actors and directors, pieces that are deep dives into the art and craft of subjects like Michael Fassbender, Mark Romanek and, most consistently, David Fincher, whose sets he has visited and written about no less than seven times. But since 2011 Pierce has been building […]
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“Maybe When We’re Performing We Feel More like Ourselves than We Do in the ‘Real World'”: Josephine Decker on her Sundance Hit, Madeline’s Madeline
Three fascinating but very different actresses star in Josephine Decker’s exhilarating Sundance feature, Madeline’s Madeline. There’s Molly Parker, the exceptional film and television actress currently seen in Wormwood, who plays Evangeline, an experimental theater director who develops her work out of immersive performance workshops, challenging her company to mine their own feelings and experiences while creating new ones through the sometimes cringe-inducing exercises that can be the stuff of the improvisatory creation. Miranda July, an artist, writer, director and one of the most significant performance artists of the last 20 years, plays Regina, the frazzled single mother of a teenage […]
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“I Kind of Resist Definition… That’s the Realm I Work In: Boots Riley on Writing and Directing the Out-There Sundance Hit, Sorry to Bother You
Before his directorial debut with Sorry to Bother You at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Boots Riley was known for his role in the hip hop group The Coup. But Riley had been a film student before he found fame through music, and 25 years later he’s circled back to that original ambition with a wild film about capitalism, race and his hometown of Oakland. The film, one of the most talked about at the festival (and which was bought by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures), stars Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson and Armie Hammer in, not the future, but an alternate […]
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“You Cannot be Objective When You’re Making a Film about the Peace Process between Israel and Palestine”: Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan on The Oslo Diaries
Receiving its world premiere at Sundance,The Oslo Diaries is the latest from Israeli filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, who last came to Park City with 2015’s Censored Voices, an exploration of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War through long-buried audiotape interviews with its on-the-ground soldiers. A similar reexamination of history, The Oslo Diaries combines unseen-until-now archival footage with the personal diaries of, and present-day interviews with, the handful of participants in the top secret, backchannel — and ultimately doomed — peacemaking process that took place in Norway in the early ’90s. Filmmaker spoke with the two directors prior to Sundance about […]
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“The Bisbee Deportation Doesn’t Matter Unless it Relates to our Real Lives Today”: Robert Greene on Bisbee ’17
Sundance vet Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Actress) returns to Park City this year with a film quite unlike his previous features, at least in subject matter if not approach. For Bisbee ’17 Greene turns his trademark technique of fusing fiction and nonfiction elements on the story of a sordid anniversary, the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, in which 1,200 immigrant miners in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up, shipped out of the copper town on cattle cars and left to die in the desert. Through staged recreations developed and performed by local residents — including an actor whose mom was deported to […]
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“Modern-Day Slavery is Happening in our Neighborhood….”: Bernadett Tuza-Ritter on her Sundance Debut Feature, A Woman Captured
Making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, A Woman Captured is the remarkable debut feature doc from Hungarian filmmaker Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, who stumbled upon a horrifying story in her native country hidden in plain sight. Marish is a housekeeper in her early 50s, though her hard-knock life has aged her considerably. She has spent over a decade cooking, cleaning and serving, mostly as a human punching bag, both verbally and physically, to a mystery woman of indeterminate wealth who remains off-screen. That woman, Eta, who we hear but never see, has allowed Tuza-Ritter access to […]
