Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Josh Koury and Myles Kane on Their Controversial Gay Talese Documentary Voyeur
With character driven films such as Journey to Planet X and We are Wizards, duo Josh Koury and Myles Kane have carved out a reputation as observational filmmakers. Their Voyeur — which premiered at NYFF and is now streaming on Netflix — explores the unique relationship between famed writer Gay Talese and former motel owner/self declared voyeur Gerald Foos. Foos, who claims to have secretly watched guests having sex at his Colorado motel for several decades, sent Talese an anonymous handwritten letter detailing his “secret life” back in 1980. Intrigued by the subject matter, the writer agreed to fly up to […]
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“I Don’t Think Movies are Old-Fashioned”: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on His RIDM Retrospective (and Making Art in the Internet Age)
For this year’s 20th anniversary of RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival teamed up with Visions, the city’s experimental documentary film series, for a truly cutting edge retrospective titled “James N. Kienitz Wilkins: Vessels/Containers.” Wilkins, a 25 New Face” of 2016, was honored with four programs containing seven of his works, created from 2012 through 2017. This includes 2012’s nearly two hour Public Hearing, a 16mm, B&W-filmed performance of the transcript from a town hall debate about replacing a Walmart with a Super Walmart, all the way to 2017’s 38-minute Mediums, a medium-length movie made up entirely of medium […]
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DOC NYC 2017: Peter Braatz on Blue Velvet Revisited
The past year has proven to be a uniquely rewarding time for David Lynch obsessives, with the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks being the obvious highlight, but also marked by recent Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD special editions of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the new documentary, David Lynch: the Art Life, focused on Lynch’s painting roots. However, one of the most fascinating Lynch-related features in recent memory has yet to receive the widespread U.S. exposure it richly deserves, and it reflects back to a more traditionally structured Lynch favorite (indeed, still the film that some cite as his key work) that those […]
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“We Digitized Every Frame”: Andrew Sherburne on Saving Brinton and Film Preservation
“I like to save things,” Mike Zahs says in the opening seconds of Saving Brinton, “especially if they’re too far gone.” He’s referring, in the moment, to the stray animals that have hobbled onto his property over the years: a lost cat that birthed 11 kittens, a rotund dog named Tuesday. He’s also alluding to his great passion project, which originated at an estate sale in 1981. Zahs found a cache of mysterious boxes from the estate of Frank Brinton, a showman who traveled the country with his wife from 1895 to 1909 to project films and other pre-cinema entertainments […]
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DOC NYC: Barbara Kopple on Her True Crime Tale, A Murder in Mansfield
“A friend of mine has this absolutely fantastic story that we should all do together.” Barbara Kopple heard these words, she tells me, on a phone call last year with producer John Morrissey (American History X). She’s likely heard such preambles before. Kopple has directed documentaries for more than 40 years, from her landmark labor-strike feature Harlan County U.S.A. to her profiles of Woody Allen (Wild Man Blues), the Dixie Chicks (Shut Up & Sing) and the late, eternally great Sharon Jones (Miss Sharon Jones!). Morrissey wanted to pitch Kopple a film on Collier Landry, an L.A.-based filmmaker whose mother […]
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“What Kind of Pain is This Coming From?”: Martin McDonagh on Creating the Award-Winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
If the road to the Oscars is paved with festival accolades, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is already well on its way to victory. Opening this week, playwright Martin McDonagh’s third feature has already picked up two major prizes: the Best Screenplay award in Venice as well as People’s Choice Award in Toronto, the festival’s top prize. The actors masterfully balance humor with despair throughout the film. In what has been called her best role since Fargo, Frances McDormand plays a grieving mother who decides to take matters into her own hands after local police have failed to track down […]
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“A Horror Film in Slow Motion”: Greg Barker on His DOC NYC Opener The Final Year
Opening this edition’s DOC NYC on November 9th is Greg Barker’s The Final Year, a truly up-close-and-personal, behind-the-scenes look at the Obama administration and its foreign policy team during its last 12 months. To say that Barker gained unprecedented access to the president’s men (and one woman) during that period is an understatement. The veteran documentarian (Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma, Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden, etc.) managed to shadow three heavyweight insiders — Secretary of State John Kerry, Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, and “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor […]
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“No One Knew I Was There”: Ana Asensio on Most Beautiful Island
It takes a herculean effort to produce a first film that’s accepted to festivals and showered with praise (and prizes – SXSW handed it the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award this past March), but first-time director Ana Asensio pulled it off in her debut Most Beautiful Island, a grounded-in-reality genre film following a Spanish immigrant who moves to New York City to start a new life. Emotionally distraught over the death of her child, Luciana (played by Asensio) works dead-end jobs—in one scene, dressing up as a chicken to promote a local poultry joint—trying to make ends meet and keep […]
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Stephen Cone on Princess Cyd, George Cukor and the Bisexual Cowboys of Brokeback Mountain
In brief—this interview is long as is—Stephen Cone’s new feature Princess Cyd begins with what’s almost a feint: a phone call to 911 reporting trouble next door and a potentially helpless young girl, heard before we actually see now-grown protagonist Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) on the soccer field. 16-year-old Cyd comes to Chicago to spend some time away from her father, crashing with her writer aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence). They’re opposites: Cyd’s all body and bluntly atheist, Miranda is cerebral and Christian. The question of what happened to Cyd fades away over the course of a seemingly low-key movie in which Cyd […]
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Five Questions with Night Night Director Guy Shelmerdine about the Future of Horror and VR
Earlier this month — and just in time for Halloween — the production company Dark Corner, known for its genre films and virtual reality projects, launched a new app that aims to become the go-to platform for horror, science-fiction and other genre VR. The app itself, named after the studio, is available for iOS and Android devices as well as Oculus Rift, Google Daydream and Samsung GearVR. It’s free to download, and offers individual titles as both free content and in-app purchases, generally for around a dollar each. The initially available projects include two past works from Dark Corner founder […]
