Directors
Interviews - Directors
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A Visual Portrait of a Profoundly Internal Person: Finlay Pretsell on His Original Take on the Cycling Doc, Time Trial
Hearing the phrase “a decade in the making” is not that unusual in feature documentary circles, particularly for those stories that, on the surface, look fairly simple and straightforward, yet somehow beg to be told on a big screen. That long duration, though oftentimes frustrating, lends itself to finding the more peripheral, ephemeral elements around the main story. So many documentaries about athletes are reliant upon heavy use of archival footage and sit-down interviews with everyone whoever knew the person, with family members, friends, fellow athletes and coaches all weighing in to form a portrait of the protagonist as champion, […]
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The Explosions Within: Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here
Joe uses a hammer. A tough guy for hire — one who specializes in cases involving pedophilia and child trafficking — Joe owns a gun, of course, and he uses that, too. But for the jobs that truly matter, ones triggering the dark memories that clank painfully around inside his brain, he prefers the brutal simplicity of a simple hammer that can fell an adversary with one silent, well-timed swoop. Arrestingly embodied by Joaquin Phoenix in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s fleet, impressionistic work of hardcore noir, You Were Never Really Here, winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year’s […]
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The Politics of Waiting: Lucrecia Martel on Zama
Lucrecia Martel’s ambitious historical drama Zama opens with a decidedly muted image. The film’s eponymous protagonist stands alone at a river’s edge staring into space with a look of quiet expectation. The water faintly laps at his feet, and a pale sky provides an indifferent light. Suited in full colonial regalia, he appears small and lonely against the rugged landscape, a man lost at the edge of the world. Moments later, he is seen hiding in the grass like a naughty child, spying on a group of naked women bathing in the river. They laugh and call out, “Voyeur! Voyeur!” […]
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Beautiful Abyss: Eliza McNitt on her Visionary VR
Filmmaker Eliza McNitt’s second VR film, SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, has made history as the first VR film to sell at Sundance. CityLights, a VR financing and distribution company, acquired the project as a three-part series for a significant seven-figure deal. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, SPHERES is inspired by the recent discovery that gravitational waves make their own music, and it visualizes the collision of two black holes that produce these movements. With the Oculus Rift headset and hand controllers, the viewer uses their voice and body to interact with the cosmic landscape, drawing stardust circles while being pulled into […]
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Rodeo Dream: Chloé Zhao on The Rider
The Rider, Chloé Zhao’s miraculous second feature, possesses a narrative that feels both as old as time and riveting in its newness: A young rodeo star has a tragic accident and must battle adversity on his way to recovery. You know this story. Except, through Zhao’s eyes, “redemption” looks different from what we’ve been conditioned to expect in a culture built on stories of success and celebrity. Every character on screen in The Rider is a real person, playing a version of themselves. But this is not a documentary. The performances in The Rider are exhilarating and deep and true. […]
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“The Future is What We See It to Be”: Raoul Peck on James Baldwin, Karl Marx and The Young Karl Marx
The Young Karl Marx is the latest film from Raoul Peck, a filmmaker who still believes in the intelligence of the audience. It’s his first film since his incredible success with the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin. Like so many radical filmmakers he has found acclaim when he has been able to marry his own political beliefs and curiosity with society’s infatuation with celebrity. The film on Baldwin came at the right time and struck a chord at a moment when #BlackLivesMatter entered the public consciousness and the realisation that the election of an African-American president […]
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It’s Really About You and Your Friends: Alex Henning on Creating Social Virtual Reality and Coco VR
With the release of Coco last year Pixar created yet another film that won over critics and audiences with rich visuals and a compelling story; it’s earned over $200 million so far and just took home the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Pixar wanted to use the property to push forward into new territory, though, and thus used Coco as the vehicle for its first virtual reality experience. To do so they tapped Magnopus, a Los Angeles-based VR/AR company that had previously produced Moana‘s virtual reality product for Disney. The result is Coco VR, a visually arresting gaming experience that also constitutes Oculus’s largest foray into social VR thus far. […]
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Airing the Dirty Laundry: Three Documentarians on Making a Film About Their Own Families
Ben Stillerman — director of Taking Stock, a new film about his father’s South African family business — talks with two other documentary filmmakers about the particular joys and challenges of making films about family. Leah Warshawski is the director of Big Sonia, about her inspiring Holocaust survivor grandmother; Kate Dandel’s Gold Balls is about professional senior tennis and features her father-in-law. Stillerman: I came up with the idea for doing a film about my father and our family business partly because I knew I would have unfettered access to a very interesting person and story. I also knew that […]
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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 […]
