Directors
Interviews - Directors
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5 Questions for Lovesong Writer/Director So Yong Kim
A 25 New Face from 2006, So Yong Kim’s Lovesong premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and opens today in New York from Strand Releasing. The below interview was originally published during the film’s Sundance premiere. While continuing to make subtle, emotional, character-based stories, So Yong Kim’s cinema has been one of change and evolution. Her debut feature, 2006’s In Between Days, spent several days surveying the burgeoning first love of two Korean teenagers living in Toronto. Largely filmed in Korean, and shot on a micro budget with non actors, the film landed Kim on our 25 New […]
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Trust Fund Kids in Hollywood: Mike Ott on California Dreams
In Mike Ott’s California Dreams (which I reviewed here), five aspiring actors are shown giving auditions and later acting out scenes in a film-within-the-film. Although this nested film is supposed to be a fiction, and also looks like one thanks to the gorgeous work of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, the script is drawn – or appears to be drawn – directly from the actors’ biographies. One of the fascinating aspects of California Dreams is that Ott never allows you to know for certain how much is real and how much is fabricated. It was therefore a pleasure to be able to […]
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“The Bike is Going to Hit the Camera!” Chad Stahelski on John Wick: Chapter 2, Stair Falls and Other Stunts
“How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” moans John McClane in Die Hard 2. It’s the question at the heart of every high concept action movie sequel. Failing to adequately answer it is how McClane’s New York everyman cop ends up in Moscow, or why half of Bryan Mills’ family gets kidnapped in the Taken series. Following up John Wick poses a similar conundrum – how do you motivate a retired hitman whose bloody swath of revenge is initiated by the death of his wife and the murder of a cuddly puppy? Do you have his […]
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“Drops of Jupiter,” Cancer and Blockbuster Video: Chris Kelly on Other People
In the opening shot of Other People, a family gathers around the body of its matriarch seconds after she’s passed from cancer. This moment of grief – accompanied by no score, just sobbing — is punctured when the phone rings and a well wisher leaves a message that is interrupted when the caller pauses to place an order at Del Taco. It’s an appropriate introduction to the film – which is sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always raw, truthful, and uncannily specific. That specificity comes from writer/director Chris Kelly’s own experiences during his mother’s final months, during which Kelly — […]
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“Television Has Been Good in That It’s Paid the Bills”: Ernest Dickerson on Double Play, The Wire and Spike Lee
Ernest Dickerson’s new film Double Play, an adaptation of the acclaimed Dutch-language Caribbean textbook standard by Curacaoan author Frank Martinus Arion, received its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The novel uses a game of dominoes as a framework to look at the unrest on the Caribbean island during the tumultuous transition from Dutch colonial rule to independence. The film adaptation stars Lennie James, Colin Salmon and Louis Gossett Jr. as men with different personalities but an all too similar interest in women. Director Dickerson rose to fame for his glorious cinematography. He will forever be associated with Spike Lee, with whom he began […]
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Five Questions with The Secret Life of Muslims Director Joshua Seftel
The Secret Life of Muslims is one of the least assuming but most important web series rolling out right now, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s recent order banning Syrian refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Amidst the ensuing melee between supporters and opponents of the ban one point that has been repeatedly raised is that, by and large, those who support the administration have no regular contact with any Muslims. While this is not true in every case, non-Muslims who have had exposure to Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants are more likely to […]
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“Forget Sepia, It’s Garbage”: Maggie Greenwald on Sophie and the Rising Sun
I first became aware of director Maggie Greenwald’s work in 1993, when her extraordinary Western The Ballad of Little Jo was released. That film, the story of a woman choosing to live as a man rather than yield to patriarchal society’s demands and expectations, established a number of ongoing concerns in Greenwald’s work: a richly observed sense of anthropological detail; a dynamic sense of light, color and composition designed to portray the past with immediacy rather than distance; and a concern with the intersection between the personal and the political that makes her films both timely and timeless. All of […]
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Five Questions with Golden Exits Director Alex Ross Perry
The worlds of Alex Ross Perry tend to thrive on confrontation. In 2014, the writer/director arrived at Sundance with Listen Up Philip, an acerbic comedy that showcased his knack for characters at once repellent and compelling. He followed that film with Queen of Earth, a feverish two-hander that pitted Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in a cage match of sniping and passive-aggression. For his fifth feature, Perry gave himself a challenge: To write a film with no outward hostility. That film is Golden Exits. Perry calls it his “mellow drama.” An NYC-set ensemble starring Emily Browning, Mary-Louise Parker and Jason Schwartzman, Golden Exits premieres this week in competition […]
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Five Questions with Crown Heights Director Matt Ruskin
Colin Warner spent 20 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. In 1980, police arrested Warner for the killing of a 16-year-old boy in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. His imprisonment, based solely on a mistaken eye witness, robbed him of his freedom from the years of Jimmy Carter all the way to George W. Bush. Warner’s story is the subject of Crown Heights, the second feature film from writer/director Matt Ruskin. The film stars Lakeith Stanfield (Short Term 12) as Warner and Nnamdi Asomugha (Hello, My Name Is Doris) as Carl King, Warner’s best friend who devotes years of his life […]
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Sundance 2017: Five Questions with Landline Director Gillian Robespierre
Everything changed for Gillian Robespierre after Sundance. In 2014 she arrived at the festival with her debut feature, Obvious Child, a personal, provocative, NYC-set comedy starring Jenny Slate. Before the festival even wrapped, she had found an enviable distributor for the film in A24. Obvious Child would go on to play on 200 screens nationwide, earn more than $3 million and garner Robespierre a directing award from the National Board of Review. She returns to the festival three years later with Landline, an observant family comedy set in ’90s New York. Filmmaker spoke with Robespierre ahead of the film’s world premiere about her love […]
