Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Create Something That Is Undeniable”: Director Dee Rees Talks Mudbound And Life After Pariah at IFP Week
The highpoint of Dee Rees’ IFP Week appearance was a complete surprise. There to discuss her latest feature, the Sundance fave Mudbound (hitting theaters and Netflix on Nov. 17) with Buzzfeed film critic Alison Willmore, the Pariah filmmaker waxed nostalgic over one of the films that most inspired her to take up the craft: Sugar Cane Alley, Euzhan Palcy’s 1983 César-winner about life in a small village in Martinique during the 1930s. Rees’ mother had it on VHS when she was a kid, and she would watch it over and over again. “That was before I understood what a director did,” […]
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“Find Your Tribe”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins and Producer Adele Romanski Give Advice at IFP Week
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
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“I Think There’s a Parallel Between Gender Politics and Politics of the Land”: Clio Barnard on Her TIFF Premiere, Dark River
UK-based Clio Barnard has impressively transitioned from video artist to acclaimed feature filmmaker in the span of just seven years. After making several short films, her feature debut The Arbor, a hybrid documentary about the late playwright Andrea Dunbar, went on to win a bevy of awards, including London Film Festival’s Best British Newcomer award, Tribeca Film Festival’s Jury Award, British Independent Film Awards’ Douglas Hickox Award, and subsequently a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer. Her second feature The Selfish Giant, loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s children’s story of the same name, also […]
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It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
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Letter From Rome
For Abel Ferrara, now living and working in Rome, there’s no love lost between the renegade director and the New York of yesteryear, the New York of Bad Lieutenant. “Being in Europe, it’s very different,” Ferrara explains. “We thought we were free then, but it’s nothing compared to where we’re at now. We’re outside the system, working within the European financial community, which includes the socialist brand of government financing and various cultural ministries.” Continues Ferrara, “On Bad Lieutenant” — the cover of Filmmaker’s second issue — “we were totally free. The director has to have absolute freedom. Now, you […]
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Forced Perspective: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]
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The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
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When Christopher Nolan Met Takanori Iwata: The Director Speaks at Dunkirk‘s Japanese Press Launch
Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese are not totally averse to watching war movies, with Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Peter Webber’s Emperor being fairly well-received in recent years. However, those films undoubtedly owed their success to the presence of revered Japanese actors Ken Watanabe and Toshiyuki Nishida, boy-band idol Kazunari Ninomiya and the calmly authoritative Tommy Lee Jones (who is so big over here that he fronts a major coffee brand). Given that Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk offers none of the above, one wondered how the Tokyo media conference, held at the plush Roppongi Hills complex on Thursday […]
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“You Plan to Make a Film and Then You Try Not to Make the Film You Planned on Making”: Jake Mahaffy on Free in Deed
Filmmaker readers first encountered the singular cinema of Jake Mahaffy back in 2005, when we placed him on our “25 New Faces” list on the basis of his extraordinary, Tarkovsky-esqure War, a post-collapse saga shot on a handcranked camera (and made years before post-collapse films and television became suddenly fashionable). On the basis of that film and the two features that have followed — including his latest, Free in Deed, currently in theaters (in New York, it’s playing Cinema Village) — Mahaffy has, in my opinion, staked out a quiet reputation as one of our most accomplished and necessary of […]
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“Nazareth is a Violent City… But It’s also Hilarious”: Director Annemarie Jacir on Wajib
Annemarie Jacir’s third film, Wajib, a wry comedy set in the run up to Christmas in Nazareth, premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival before heading to, this week TIFF. The film pairs legendary Arabic actors Mohammed and Saleh Bakri together in a movie for the first time. Naturally, the father and son play father and son. Saleh, who has appeared in all three films directed by Jacir, plays Rome-based Shadi, who is returning to Nazareth after a period away for the wedding of his sister Amal (Maria Zreik). In keeping with Palestinian tradition, Shadi, alongside his divorced father, […]
