Directors
Interviews - Directors
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for The Headhunter’s Calling Director Mark Williams
Making his feature directing debut at the Toronto International Film Festival with The Headhunter’s Calling is producer Mark Williams. Gerard Butler plays Dane Jensen, a hard-nosed corporate headhunter whose ambition to take over his job placement company is put in conflict by a sudden family tragedy. The world of corporate headhunters is a world well known by screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge), and life balance difficulties posed by a demanding profession — headhunting but, one could also say, the entertainment business — are understood by Williams too. That’s because he’s a founder and partner of Zero Gravity Management, an L.A.-based […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Strange Weather Writer/Director Katherine Dieckmann
Receiving its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Katherine Dieckmann’s fourth feature, Strange Weather, a Southern road trip movie in which the landscape is both physical and psychological. Holly Hunter stars as a fifty-something academic administrator whose job is suddenly in peril due to university budget cuts. Her son committed suicide seven years ago, and when she learns that his best friend is now profiting from a restaurant concept he stole from him, she decides to hit the road and possibly settle an old score. Before the festival we asked Dieckmann to tell […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for In the Radiant City Director Rachel Lambert
With In the Radiant City, I wrote in my Toronto preview, Louisville, KY native Rachel Lambert has brought to Toronto a debut film that seems like it might be the kind of laconic, unexpectedly emotional regional drama associated with filmmakers like Victor Nunez. Executive produced by Jeff Nichols, In the Radiant City follows a man, Yurley (Michael Abbott, Jr.), estranged from his family, who returns home to finally deal with the aftermath of a violent act in his family’s past. Supporting players include the always excellent Marin Ireland and Paul Sparks. Below, Lambert discusses how she connected with Nichols, why […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for In Dubious Battle Director and Actor James Franco
Continuing his strike as one of the most tireless and unpredictable multi-hyphenates working in film today, James Franco brings to Toronto the North American premiere of his latest feature, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s first novel, In Dubious Battle. A tale of labor strife amongst fruit pickers and orchard owners in 1930s California, the work mixes politics with human drama as it captures the rivalries and conflicts that arise in times of activism. In addition to directing, Franco stars alongside Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall and Selena Gomez. The screenplay is by Matt Rager, who scripted Franco’s other recent Great Novel […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Katie Says Goodbye Writer/Director Wayne Roberts
Katie Says Goodbye reps the feature directing debut of Alaska-born NYU writer/director Wayne Roberts. An alumni film of the IFP Narrative Lab, Katie Says Goodbye is described as “a cautionary tale for dreamers,” a dark drama about a young waitress striving to leave New Mexico for a new and better life in San Francisco. There’s a brutal scene at the film’s core, which we circle around in non-spoiler fashion in the below interview, in which we also discuss Roberts’ casting of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl‘s Olivia Cooke in his lead role as well as his advice to […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Girl Unbound Director Erin Heidenreich
Erin Heidenreich brings the documentary Girl Unbound to the Toronto International Film Festival as a first-time feature director, but she’s already amassed a great amount of experience in the world of independent film. She’s been a documentary producer, executive producer, second-unit director as well as an original employee of Cinetic Media, where she was involved in the sales of many of the most successful independent films of the ’00s. Girl Unbound follows squash player Maria Toorpakai as she competes internationally, representing her native Pakistan in tournaments around the world. But Girl Unbound isn’t simply a sports doc as Toorapaki hails […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Buster’s Mal Heart Writer/Director Sarah Adina Smith
“There are a lot of places people can go to find simple stories. My brain is just not one of them.” That’s writer/director Sarah Adina Smith talking about her filmmaking sensibility, which gravitates towards psychological mystery and cinematic mindbenders. She follows up her haunting, SXSW-premiering drama The Midnight Swim with Buster’s Mal Heart, a movie dealing with psychological breakdown set against the expansive natural spaces of the Montana wild. In a time-skipping narrative, Mr. Robot star Rami Malek plays an eccentric fugitive who breaks into luxury mountain homes while their owners have decamped for the winter. As we learn, he […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea Writer/Director Dash Shaw
Where is all the great independent animation? While Pixar and LAIKA are spinning out animated classics for a new generation, and independent filmmakers are putting their own idiosyncratic spins on nearly every genre, there have been relatively few animated independent features in recent years. And this is despite a boom in quality graphic novels and the new talent that creates them. It’s too early to know whether or not My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is the beginning of a new movement in independent animation, but the feature, premiering tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival, brings with […]
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Five Questions for Lady Macbeth Director William Oldroyd
With William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth now in U.S. theaters, we’re resposting this interview that originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Heading into its world premiere today in the auteur-centric Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival with considerable buzz is the feature debut of acclaimed theater director William Oldroyd, Lady Macbeth. Adapted by the young British playwright Alice Birch from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a work compared in its day to another work of literature with a strong female protagonist, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, published just a year later. A Director in […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Tramps Writer/Director Adam Leon
Adam Leon’s fleet-footed Gimme the Loot was a giddy discovery out of SXSW in 2012. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize there, it went on to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and announced Leon as a promising new voice in American independent film, one who married specificity of character and location with keen storytelling chops. Four years later, Leon has made a follow-up feature, Tramps, which premieres in Toronto in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Once more, there’s a man and a woman — in this case, rising stars Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten — and a peripatetic caper. Here, […]
