Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Transfigured Night: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast
The anxious energy running through the films of Bertrand Bonello is fueled by seemingly contrary cross currents: a mix of naturalism and dream logic, coolness and hysteria, the emotional equivalents of ice and fire. While hopping across distinct genres—his filmography includes a portrait of a bordello in fin-de-siècle Paris (House of Tolerance), a 1960s/’70s fashion biopic (Saint Laurent), a contemporary zombie movie (Zombi Child) and a take on millennial hipster terrorists (Nocturama)—Bonello stays close to characters who get lost in psychic underworlds, highlighting the mind’s slippery dark side and the human tendency (abetted by genre conventions) to fall into one […]
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“We Were a Bit Like a Circus That Came to Town”: Sara Summa on Arthur&Diana
Filmed during a genuine road trip between Germany, France and Italy, Arthur&Diana, the sophomore film from writer-director Sara Summa is fueled by experimentation. Summa and her real-life brother Robin play the titular sibling duo as they embark on a trip from Berlin to Paris in order to renew documentation for the car which carries them, itself a cherished familial relic. In tow is Diana’s two-year-old son, Lupo, also embodied by Summa’s own child. As they drive through Europe and encounter faces old and new—a magnetic young hitchhiker, the pair’s zany Parisian mother, Diana’s partner and co-parent—it becomes clear that their […]
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“I Didn’t Want It to Get Too ’80s”: Rose Glass on Love Lies Bleeding
Equal parts romantic horror movie, revenge thriller and twisted, small town family drama, Rose Glass’s second feature after Saint Maud, is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, complete with Hollywood stars (Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone) doing wild and crazy things all in the name of intense body horror. Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Katy O’Brian as Jackie, a woman making her way through the American Southwest en route to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. In New Mexico, Jackie picks up a job as a waitress at a tacky shooting range run by […]
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“When I Started Putting the Talking Head [Interviews] In, It Didn’t Feel as Beautiful”: Director Antony Crook on His SXSW-Premiering Mogwai Doc, If the Stars Had a Sound
On X recently, a poster asked for song titles named after movie directors. One of the few that came to mind was from the Glasgow-based band, Mogwai — “Stanley Kubrick,” from their 1999 EP. It’s a vintage Mogwai track, bass and drums in mid tempo as a reflective melody rises and falls over seesawing organ chords. The song’s connection to the great director is left up to the listener, the way of virtually all of Mogwai’s imaginatively titled, mostly instrumental songs, which over a 25-year-career have captured fans with their mixture of gentle beauty and then, in bursts, beautiful noise. Few […]
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“The Frame Is a Proscenium”: Graham Swon on An Evening Song (for three voices)
Set in 1939 and told through the intertwining perspectives of characters enmeshed in a bizarre love triangle, writer-director Graham Swon’s sophomore feature An Evening Song (for three voices) is as visually robust as it is dramatically intimate. The story revolves around married couple Richard (Peter Vack) and Barbara (Hannah Gross)—a pulpy crime writer and a prodigious novelist, respectively—who move to a rural Midwestern town after years of city living. Shortly after arriving, they hire a local young woman named Martha (Deragh Campbell) who the couple find independently alluring despite (or perhaps largely due to) her striking innocence and pious nature. […]
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“I Don’t Feel Comfortable Making Cinema That Gazes From Afar”: Tatiana Huezo on The Echo
Located within the Mexican municipality of Chignahuapan in the state of Puebla, the rural village of El Eco acts as a microcosm for various stages of life and the oft-small moments that herald them in filmmaker Tatiana Huezo’s documentary of the same name. The Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker weaves together intimate scenes among three local families, exploring themes of gender, labor and generational shifts in attitude amid a sprawling and bucolic—yet unpredictably volatile—stretch of Mexico’s highlands. The Echo is Huezo’s fifth feature, marking her return to nonfiction storytelling after helming her 2021 debut narrative film Prayers for the Stolen. With this transition, […]
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“On Our First day It Was 100°, and It Basically Went Up From There”: Writer/Director Shannon Triplett On Her SXSW-Premiering Psychological Thriller, Desert Road
A woman, a car, a gas station and a factory — from this minimalist set of locations Shannon Triplett has crafted a surprising work of supernatural suspense in her writing and directing debut, Desert Road, which premiered this weekend at the SXSW Film Festival. Kristine Froseth is the woman, a 20-something would-be professional photographer on a solo trip. When her car’s tire blows out on the ribbon-like highway, she’s momentarily dazed before coming to and walking back to that gas station to call for help. In a chilling and quickly rendered series of events, she realizes that help is not […]
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“We Wanted the Film to be Available for Free”: Kris Bowers & Ben Proudfoot on the Oscar-Winning The Last Repair Shop
On an unassuming downtown block, the Los Angeles Unified School District (L.A.U.S.D.)’s Musical Instrument Repair has excelled for many years. A big fuss is never made by tireless employees (former musicians or quick learners who grew on the job) working long hours while tending to the wear-and-tear of damaged instruments public school students have relied on. Arts programs are severely neglected and underfunded in the United States; this repair facility—essentially a warehouse with minimal lighting but hundreds of tools and thousands of spare parts—provides an essential if underappreciated essential service. Hoping to enhance the visibility of these dedicated craftsmen, Ben […]
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The Sadean Horror of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex: Artist and Filmmaker Charles de Agustin on Mission Drift
The precarious and conflicted economics of non-profits — both material and libidinal — are the subject of artist and filmmaker Charles de Agustin‘s short narrative essay film Mission Drift, which, over the past year, has screened at festivals, art spaces and microcinemas in conjunction with panel discussions that are integral to the piece itself. (Writes D’Augustin on his website, “The medium of Mission Drift is described as ‘video and discussion:’ the work may only be publicly presented if it is followed by a robust audience discussion on the issues at hand, structured in consultation with the artist if he is […]
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Women in the Wilderness: How Nat Geo’s Queens Aims to Close the Gender Gap in Natural History Filmmaking
When National Geographic’s Janet Han Vissering and Wildstar Films’s Vanessa Berlowitz got the idea to make Queens, a six-part natural history series about female animals made by an all-woman production crew, they knew it would be a challenge. Only something like five percent of wildlife filmmakers are women, a number far short of the 20 to 30 percent average across the entertainment industry overall. They didn’t know how hard it would be, though. “On the camera side, before Queens there were probably about five women who’d had the opportunity to get to the ‘premium wildlife’ level of work,” Berlowitz explains. “There […]
