Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Cosmic Mash-Up: James Gunn Talks Making Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 With Bobcat Goldthwait
Sheer, unbridled glee — it’s not an emotion one would associate with today’s increasingly portentous blockbusters, their apocalyptic grimness ineffectively untempered by their series of rote one-liners. Indeed, while there is certainly a place for the adult-themed superhero movies following in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and a certain fascination to the interlocking narratives of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too often in superhero movies one hopes for more of the out-there, the bizarre and, even, the childlike. All those qualities were what fueled the unexpected success of Marvel’s 2014 picture Guardians of the Galaxy, in which a misfit […]
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The World Below
The Lost City of Z, James Gray’s latest writing-directing effort, adapted from David Gann’s 2009 award-winning nonfiction work of the same name, tells the story of an Edwardian-era British military officer, Percy Fawcett, sent on a map-making expedition to the jungles of Brazil. There, he becomes obsessed with finding proof of a “lost” civilization whose existence would challenge all Euro-centric models of history. Lost City has many rich elements woven together: It’s a traditional heroic adventure where men affirm their solidarity against the arbitrary violence of nature at its most unpredictable and murderous. It’s a meticulous allegory of British imperialism […]
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Helicopter Parent: Cristian Mungiu on Graduation
Cristian Mungiu’s feature debut, 2002’s Occident, was an accomplished exercise in the then-fashionable mode of multiple narratives, which slowly overlap and converge, but it wasn’t until 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days that he received significant international attention. Building on the style established by his contemporary, Cristi Puiu, in 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (as well as using Puiu’s DP Oleg Mutu), Mungiu crafted an intense portrait of a woman trying to get a proscribed abortion in the waning days of Ceaușescu’s Romania. The film won the Palme d’Or, solidifying the rise of the Romanian New Wave. […]
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“I Relate to Gambling — Not as a Card Player but as an Independent Filmmaker”: Joe Swanberg and Jake Johnson on their Netflix Original, Win it All
With his new, SXSW-premiering Netflix Original, Win it All, the famously improvisatory writer/director Joe Swanberg has dealt his fans a real surprise: a picture with a much clearer plot, rhythm and character journey than his previous films. Indeed, with this movie about risk-taking, Swanberg has taken on a risk many successful filmmakers have avoided — the risk of artistic evolution. Pairing up again with collaborator Jake Johnson (Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, TV’s New Girl), Swanberg puts his focus on gambling and the addiction to both winning — and perhaps losing too. Johnson, who co-wrote the script, plays Eddie Garrett, a down-and-out […]
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The Sorrows of a Young Vampire: Writer/Director Mike O’Shea on The Transfiguration
In Mike O’Shea’s insidiously unsettling and remarkably assured debut film The Transfiguration — the most unlikely official selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — Milo (Eric Ruffin), a black teenager in a far flung outer borough ghetto, is first seen hunched over a dead white man in a public bathroom stall, his mouth wrapped around the cadaver’s jugular. Although he might be the super predator of Hillary Clinton’s nightmares, this kid is no regular old vampire; he can walk around during daylight hours and eats actual food. Perhaps he’s just a killer? The movie gives you little certainty on […]
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“You Gotta Know the Chord Changes Before You Can do the Improvisation”: Ron Shelton on the 25th Anniversary of White Men Can’t Jump“
Growing up in the basketball-crazy early ’90s, Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump was iconic long before I took the time to actually sit down and watch it: the title (that font stretching!), the baggy tanks and starched casquettes, the deadpan visages of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes all but daring me to rent the movie every time I saw the VHS. Starring the duo as pickup basketball players who combine forces in an uneasy con-alliance, Shelton’s followup to Bull Durham is a stone cold classic: a big-hearted buddy comedy of dazzling cinematographic musculature, the camera bobbing and weaving cross-court […]
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Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on Their Noir-ish Stasi Doc, Karl Marx City
Now playing in New York at Film Forum, Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s follow-up to 2013’s The Flag. An entirely different meditation on national identity, in Karl Marx City Epperlein — who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall — travels back to her East German homeland, and the film follows her as she attempts to discover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence that he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to the Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in […]
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“It Was a Long Uphill Battle”: Richard Kelly on Donnie Darko
A midnight movie for those not old enough to stay up past midnight, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko was, for a great number of millennial teens and college students, the ultimate cult classic. Along with Larry Clark’s Kids and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, I remember Kelly’s film being shared on home video like the Holy Grail, a movie viewed over and over again in sheer shock, fascination, and debate. A director’s cut followed three years later and only further mystified the film’s elaborate puzzle; subsequent ephemera — an explanatory book and an unwarranted sequel — cashed in on the growing fanbase. In 1988, a troubled suburban teenager (played by then-newcomer Jake Gyllenhaal) […]
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“Don’t Ever Ask Me For A Shot List”: Walter Hill on The Assignment
America’s greatest living action filmmaker returns in top form in The Assignment, the deliriously entertaining new film from director Walter Hill. The premise, from a screenplay co-written by Hill and Denis Hamill, is pure lurid pulp: male assassin Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) runs afoul of a brilliant but deranged surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who has him abducted and knocked unconscious. When Frank comes to, he discovers that he’s been surgically altered and now has the body of a woman – a revelation that only briefly slows down his obsessive quest for revenge. It’s a provocative conceit that might be offensive in […]
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“It Just Wasn’t Easy to Set Up a Movie About a Murdered Atheist”: Tommy O’Haver on The Most Hated Woman in America
The media dubbed her “the most hated woman in America,” and famously eccentric atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair wore that claim like a badge of honor. As played by Academy Award-winner Melissa Leo, O’Hair was an outspoken but noble mother who stood for her family’s First Ammendment rights in providing a voice to the voiceless. Protesting for basic civil rights with local African-American men and women and fighting back against the practice of prayer in public school, O’Hair fought very loudly against religious and anti-constitutional rhetoric beginning over fifty years ago. Her impact remains: the non-profit organization known as American Atheists, founded by O’Hair, is […]
