Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions for First Reformed Director Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]
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“Making a Hammer Film As If It Was Directed by Scorsese”: John Landis on Innocent Blood and Operating Muppets with Tim Burton
One of the most underrated films by one of America’s most underrated filmmakers just arrived on Blu-ray in the form of Warner Archive’s 25th-anniversary release of John Landis’ Innocent Blood. To call Landis underrated might seem perverse given that he’s directed some of the most successful and enduring movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s – National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Coming to America – but I still think his body of work has never quite gotten its critical due in this country, partly because his movies are so damn […]
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Strangers On This Road We Are On: Mia Lidofsky On Her Facebook Watch Series
Mia Lidofsky is the creator and executive producer of Strangers, a strikingly profound seven-episode series now in its first season on an intriguing new platform, Facebook Watch. Lidofsky is a former assistant to her series executive producer Jesse Peretz (director of The Chateau and My Idiot Brother and a producer on Girls), and an associate producer of People Places Things and Tig. In 2015, Lidofsky was selected for the AFI Conservatory Directing Workshop for Women, where she created the series pilot. The director and co-director of several episodes of the first season (along with partner/filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall, a 25 New […]
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“Women Were Afraid to Speak Up — That’s What Made Recy Taylor So Important”: Director Nancy Buirski on The Rape of Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]
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“The Movie Industry Doesn’t Have Any Etiquette, Just Fear”: Director Nathan Silver on Thirst Street and Making Eight Features in Eight Years
Nathan Silver has made eight films in eight years. That doesn’t include other shorts he’s written or executive produced. For anyone not in the business of film, that might seem standard. For anyone who is, it’s wildly impressive, especially taking into consideration the inclusion of pre-production time, when a script is written, money is raised and all the frustrating puzzle pieces of building a team have to fall into place. Silver’s latest film, Thirst Street, centers on Gina (Lindsay Burdge), an American flight attendant who becomes entwined in a toxic obsession. After landing in Paris, she falls for Jerome (Damien […]
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Personal Doesn’t Mean Small: IFP Week Filmmakers On Tackling Big Issues With Intimate Stories
“I think we have this profound misrepresentation around personal films being small,” said Cecilia Aldarondo, one of three filmmakers of personal docs who spoke at IFP Week 2017. The panel was called “When the Personal Gets Political and the Political Gets Personal.” In the case of all three filmmakers’ films, they’re both. “I’ve gotten so many responses from potential funders of people who think that way. They hear ‘personal’ and they hear ‘small.’ They think it won’t have an audience. With these projects, I think we’ve demonstrated that’s not the case. If we’re dealing with questions of social change and […]
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Five Questions for Stronger Director David Gordon Green
David Gordon Green finds it difficult to focus on one type of project at any given time, and as a result, frustrates his agents in working out how to market him. But the Arkansas-born, South Carolina-based writer/ director, whose diverse filmography includes early aughts independent standouts like All The Real Girls and George Washington as well as mainstream hits like Pineapple Express, is okay with that — so long as he is aggressively working on projects that he is both passionate about and that challenge him. Opening today in theaters is his modestly-budgeted drama Stronger, which depicts the true story […]
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“Find a Small, Possibly Unsexy Job You Can Do Well”: At IFP Week, Directors and Producers on Getting Started in Indie Film
So you’ve made a film. Congrats, but you’re not out of the woodwork yet. You may never be. The four filmmakers and one producer who appeared on the IFP Week panel called “On Working (and Staying) in Indie Film Today” had vastly different stories to tell about how they turned movie-making into an actual job. The biggest name on the panel was Gillian Robespierre. Having directed and co-written the indie hits Obvious Child and this summer’s Landline, she has more stability than most in her field, having parlayed those successes into TV work on top of a future making her […]
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Who Gets to Tell Whose Story?: IFP Week Filmmakers and Funders Talk the Politics of Representation in 2017
When Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit came out this summer, some charged that it shouldn’t have been made by Kathryn Bigelow. Critics, including rogerebert.com’s Angelica Jade Bastien, felt that the story — about ten Black civilians (and two Caucasians) tortured and, in some cases, killed by racist white cops during the 1967 Detroit riots — should have been told by Black filmmakers. These commentators argued that Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal, both white, not only lacked the perspective to get the events right; they also ran the risk of aestheticizing suffering and the destruction of Black bodies. This is not a new […]
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IFP Week: Sean Baker and the Safdie Brothers on How To Film Inside Working Businesses
If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]
