Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“VR is Not Another Kind of Filmmaking”: Baobab Studios’ Eric Darnell on Animated VR
If you’d mentioned Eric Darnell’s name a few years ago, most people would have thought of the Madagascar films or the Penguins of Madagascar spin-off, all of which he co-directed while at DreamWorks Animation, where he also directed Antz and contributed to films like The Prince of Egypt and Shrek. But think of him today and you’re just as likely to conjure up images of bumbling aliens, a fluffy and resourceful bunny or a multicolored crow, and all in virtual reality. That’s because Darnell is the co-founder and chief creative officer at Baobab Studios, which in just two years has established itself as one of the United […]
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On the Cusp: Person to Person Director Dustin Guy Defa on Turning a Short into a Feature, Directing Actors and the Question of Agents
Dustin Guy Defa is on the cusp of big changes. The filmmaker’s second feature film, Person To Person, opens tomorrow. In it, Defa delicately interweaves multiple stories taking place over one day in the lives of New Yorkers portrayed by an ensemble of legendary performers (Phillip Baker Hall, Isiah Whitlock Jr.), name actors (Michael Cera), newcomers (Abbi Jacobson, Tavi Gevinson, George Sample III), and so-called “non-actors” (Bene Coopersmith). It’s a bighearted, hilarious and impressive display of Defa’s directorial skills and the kind of film that can jump start a career. The road to getting it made is a bit unusual. […]
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Storytelling, Memory and Alternate Worlds: Michael Almereyda on Marjorie Prime and Escapes
Michael Almereyda has two films this year, the curiously rhyming duo of Marjorie Prime and Escapes. The former, as I wrote from Sundance, is “a heavily modified adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s play, customized to fit the ever-adventurous Almereyda’s tastes and frames of reference. The premise is both simple and tricky: in the future, your deceased loved ones can be brought back as holograms for company. Marjorie (Lois Smith), aging and losing her memory, has her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), eternally in his 40s, for company, a development which makes her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) a little nervous. From this low-key sci-fi […]
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Sharon Van Etten and Katherine Dieckmann on Scoring Strange Weather
In 2015, the year this story begins, Sharon Van Etten had never scored a film. She’d also never heard the name Katherine Dieckmann. Van Etten had just released I Don’t Want to Let You Down, the follow-up EP to her exquisite 2014 album Are We There. Van Etten’s music does things to people, and it did a number on Dieckmann, a former music video director for Aimee Mann, R.E.M., and Wilco. Enchanted by her songs of muted melancholy, Dieckmann became convinced that Van Etten had to score her latest feature, a road movie set in the American South. The two […]
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“We Don’t Want Them to Be Brilliant, We Want Them to Be as They Are”: Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel on Mister Universo
You wouldn’t typically catch me recommending a movie on the basis of its crowd-pleasingness or heart-warmingness, dead or alive. But we’re living in warped times, and it’s a travesty that Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s crowd-pleasing, heart-warming not-quite-documentary feature Mister Universo — which I caught by happenstance at last year’s Festival International du Film de Marrakech — didn’t have the good fortune of securing a US distribution deal after playing festivals around the world last year. The movie stars Tairo Caroli, a 19-year-old lion tamer from a real-life traveling circus in Italy, as himself. Among his few prized possessions is an […]
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How Viral Video Contests Led to Will Blank’s Beautiful Fantasy Short, Limbo
Recently receiving its online premiere after months of plaudits on the genre festival circuit, Will Blank’s Limbo is a beautifully executed fantasy short concluding with an unexpected philosophical gut punch. Adapted from Marian Churchland’s graphic short story, the set up is simple — a man coping with the detritus of a failing relationship heads to the desert, where he comes across a dying dog able to grant him one wish. The starkness of the environment and the pathos of the situation — nobly conveyed by Sam Elliott, who voices the (skillfully animatronic) dog — elevates this simple story into something […]
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“Trump Was Always Going to Be in Our Film”: Brian Knappenberger on Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
An iconic figure of brute force, wholesome values and exaggerated patriotism, the red-and-yellow bandana-wearing Hulk Hogan was a pop culture phenomenon throughout the’80s professional wrestling boom. The face of the World Wrestling Federation under Vince McMahon, Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) was a childhood hero for many children of a certain age, bodyslamming giants and providing leg-drops to bad guys who threatened to disrupt the concept of a wholesome America. Things have changed. Hogan left the company several times over rampant steroid abuse scandals and larger paydays for other promotions, but he always returned for one final run to pay […]
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“I Don’t Want to Find a Method… I Like Questoning What I Make”: João Pedro Rodrigues on The Ornithologist
This interview with João Pedro Rodrigues was originally conducted in 2016 when his new feature, The Ornithologist, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. We’re reposting today on the occasion of the film’s U.S. release via Strand Releasing. The Ornithologist opens today in New York at the IFC Center and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. The last few years have been truly a whirlwind period for Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues, with career retrospectives in the US and Japan, filmmaker residencies at France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy and at the Harvard Film Archive, and even a competition slot at Locarno for […]
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Michael Showalter on Working with Kumail Nanjiani and Judd Apatow on The Big Sick
Michael Showalter was a known quantity in the comedy world before he gave feature directing a shot in 2005 with the unassuming indie The Baxter. He started out in the early 90s on MTV’s sketch show The State, which spawned the careers of many talents with whom Showalter has continued to collaborate on shows like Stella and films like They Came Together and Wet Hot American Summer (which stars Showalter and has led to two Netflix follow-up series). Much of this work, as well as Showalter’s excursive, vaguely non-committal standup, is characterized by a warm disdain for the form. In […]
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Splitting Off from Powerlessness: A Conversation with Director Deborah Kampmeier
2016 might have been the year when the dire position of women film directors finally broke into wider consciousness. After a monumental effort, spearheaded by Maria Giese, the ACLU and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) agreed to hold major film studios, TV networks, unions and agencies to account, citing Title VII violations in all perimeters. 2016 was also the year the Cannes International Film Festival proudly announced that they showcased “only” 86% male directors — down from their average of 93%. Yet even as dismal statistics prove women are severely discriminated against at every level of film production and […]
