Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Things Happen that are Too Big for You…”: Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan on the Director’s Cut of his Masterpiece, Margaret
Margaret may be one of the best movies you’ve never seen. It’s the second film from writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose first, You Can Count On Me, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000, and third, Manchester by the Sea garnered two Academy Awards for Lead Actor and Original Screenplay. But Margaret suffered a different journey, shooting in 2005 and being released much later in 2011 for a very limited run — and a cut 36 minutes shorter than the one Lonergan preferred. As part of its series, “The Way I See It: Directors’ Cuts,” the Quad in New […]
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“… A Running Dialogue Between Past and Present Notions of Screen Culture”: Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes on Room H.264
In 1982, in the Hotel Martinez at the Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Spielberg’s E.T. was the closing night film, German auteur Wim Wenders set up a stationary 16mm camera in a room on the sixth floor and asked a succession of directors to film themselves answering a single question: “Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?” Respondents ranged from yes, Spielberg, to Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni, and topics covered included film vs. television, the rise of blockbuster “sensation-oriented” cinema, and the evolving theatrical experience. […]
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Sex Crimes and Virtual Reality: Best VR Storytelling of 2017, Gina Kim’s Bloodless
Nabbing Best VR Story at Venice, Bloodless is veteran filmmaker Gina Kim’s (perhaps best known for 2007’s Vera Farmiga-starring Never Forever) 12-minute immersive stunner. The US-South Korea coproduction was also selected as part of this year’s IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling program, which is where I experienced it, having gone into the VR Cinema without even bothering to read the synopsis. And because of my cluelessness, the story’s climax packed a punch I never saw coming — one that shook me to the core. This is another way of saying that if you plan on experiencing the project on a future […]
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“To Dominate out of Fear is Our Worst Characteristic as Humans”: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on Their Oscar-Shortlisted One of Us
Directing partners Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady — selected for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2005 — first came on to the filmmaking scene with heartfelt documentaries The Boys of Baraka and Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. In their latest documentary One of Us, currently available on Netflix and just shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, their signature cinema verite style of filmmaking unveiled a level of suspense and drama they were not expecting. Centered around three people who are attempting to leave the tight reigns of their New York-based Hasidic Jewish communities, the film goes deep inside an overly controlling, […]
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“My Approach is More Novelistic than Journalistic”: Director Frederick Wiseman on His Oscar-Shortlisted Doc, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
Now 87, Frederick Wiseman is showing no signs of slowing down. His most recent documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, which gives an inside look at the esteemed institution, has been shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Staying true to the filmmaker’s distinctive style of organic, no-fuss lensing, with subtle opinions about his subject matter teased out through his editorial process, Wiseman assuredly conveys in this latest work, via 197 minutes of filmic snapshots, the rich intellectual life offered — and symbolized by — the Library and its offering of community events and talks with figures […]
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Tall Trees and Inner Lives: Kate and Laura Mulleavy on their Debut Film, Woodshock
A24 is having a good year. Again. After last year ushering Moonlight to Oscar gold, they are now poised to do the same with Lady Bird, Good Time, The Disaster Artist and The Florida Project. If they were distributing Call Me By Your Name, they’d have a monopoly on hip films of the season. Indeed, the distributor has a knack for creating pop-culture phenomenon out of independent films that might have been buried by other distributors. I’ve really been enjoying the “Lady Bird for President” posters and seeing pink hair trending. But what happens to the films in their packed […]
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“Speaking to a New World”: Addison O’Dea on the Virtual Reality Series Discovery TRVLR
Last month Discovery Communications, Google, and Here Be Dragons released one of the most ambitious virtual reality documentary series yet produced, Discovery TRVLR. Writer-director Addison O’Dea and his team created 38 episodes on all seven continents, going to as remote locations as possible and focusing on the universality of the people who live there. Available on DiscoveryVR.com, the Discovery VR app, and YouTube, the series marks the next step, after works like Felix & Paul Studios’ Nomads series, to push VR into the field of ethnographic nonfiction. But as O’Dea emphasizes in our conversation below, TRVLR is first and foremost a travel show, not an anthropological […]
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“He Was On Facebook, Having Trouble with His Computer, So I Helped Him…”: Mohammed Naqvi Talks Filming Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in Insha’Allah Democracy
Insha’Allah Democracy sees filmmaker Mohammed Naqvi investigate politics through a series of interviews with Pervez Musharraf, who became the head of the Pakistani government following a bloodless coup in 1999. In June 2001 the general became the tenth President of Pakistan. The attack on the World Trade Center took place a few months after Musharraf’s presidency began, and the War on Terror was the major cloud that hung over his head throughout his regime. In 2008 he resigned from office in the face of impeachment proceedings being taken against him by the Pakistani parliament. For filmmaker ‘Mo’ Naqvi, it wasn’t […]
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“If You Were a Real Filmmaker, You’d Have a Fancier Camera”: Oren Jacoby on Shadowman
One of the most celebrated street artists of the 1980s, Richard Hambleton created a collection of equally eccentric and harrowing work that decorated the walls, alleyways and sidewalks of New York City. Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton was an unrivaled challenging artist and, as his contemporaries tragically died before middle age, one of its remaining beacons of inspiration. While known for his “murder art” — chalk outlines of fictitious crime scenes splattered with red paint resembling blood — and his Marlboro Man paintings crafted from a thick tar-like substance, Hambleton’s most iconic pieces serve as the namesake of Oren Jacoby’s new documentary in theaters this week. Debuting […]
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“We Wanted to Make it a Very Sexy Fish…”: Five Questions for The Shape of Water Director Guillermo Del Toro
If Guillermo Del Toro hasn’t already cemented his place as one of the great storytellers of today, he certainly has with his latest film The Shape of Water, a Cold War-era twisted fairy tale opening today. Sally Hawkins stars as a mute cleaning lady, Elisa, working at a government agency, whose only friends are her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her gay neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins). An imposing government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives with a mysterious amphibious creature in tow, played by Doug Jones. While Strickland is intent on studying the creature for whatever military value this research might […]
