Directors
Interviews - Directors
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Barry Director Vikram Gandhi
Barack Obama has four months left in office, and no matter one’s politics, one can already detect a wistfulness, a nostalgia, even, for the charismatic, complex and quite human figure at the center of his administration. In a year that’s already seen one Barack Obama picture (Southside with You) go from festivals to theaters, another — one that goes even further back in time — premieres today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Vikram Gandhi’s Barry looks at Obama’s pre-Barrack early years, when he was defining himself intellectually and forging his identity while a student at Columbia University. The film […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for ARQ Writer/Director Tony Elliott
Orphan Black screenwriter Tony Elliott makes his feature debut with the time-twisting dystopian thriller ARQ, premiering today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Employing the now venerable time-loop trope, ARQ features a couple trying to figure out why their world is repeating, and what that has to do with the giant multi-national they were both involved with. Below, Elliott talks about his various cinematic inspirations, what he learned from writing Orphan Black, and how he made a futuristic science fiction film on a very low budget. Filmmaker: Your short film, Entangled, dealt, in part, with quantum physics. Tell me about […]
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for The Levelling Director Hope Dickson Leach
In 2007, Hope Dickson Leach landed in the pages of Filmmaker Magazine as part of our annual 25 New Faces list. Her darkly comic brother-sister relationship drama, The Dawn Chorus — about siblings who recreate the plane crash that killed their parents — had been tearing up the festival circuit, and the Columbia Film School grad was developing a feature about a teenage girl who blames Princess Diana for her parents’ divorce. Dickson Leach had been working as an assistant for Todd Solondz on his film Palindromes, and her work was occasionally thought of as having the same satiric stripe. […]
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#DocsSoWhite?: A Panel on Diversity in Documentary Filmmaking
#OscarsSoWhite is hardly a new phenomena in dramatic narrative circles and Hollywood, but determining where the doc community fits into the debate – is. Without empirical data, it would seem the doc community is doing a better job at building diverse and inclusive opportunities than Hollywood counterparts. But if that’s true, by how much? What measures are in place to ensure that the people in front and behind the camera better reflect the world in which we live and the stories we tell? How do public vs. private dollars impact this outcome? If, in the end, it is determined that […]
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Five Questions about Essay Films and Digital Distribution for The Royal Road Director Jenni Olson
Available today on DVD and digital platforms, Jenni Olson’s The Royal Road is a beautifully crafted essay film that ruminates on several histories — the Spanish Colonization of California, film history and, through voiceover monologue, the director’s own personal story — all set against elegantly composed (in 4:3 16mm) landscape shots captured along the El Camino Real. Olson’s form here recalls the durational cinema of James Benning even as she brings in a wealth of information and references through her audio track, including, at one point, the words of playwright Tony Kushner, who offers a critique of the kind of […]
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“For One of the Head Explosions We Only Had Four Heads”: Joe Begos on The Mind’s Eye
Made for just $50,000, Joe Begos’ feature debut Almost Human (2013) landed a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, secured distribution, and earned a bit of critical praise for its Carpenter-influenced chills. For his follow-up The Mind’s Eye, the multi-hyphenate (Begos wrote, directed, produced, and photographed) had six times the budget at his disposal. That money brought a few changes – such as paying the crew and expanding the shooting schedule to a robust 37 days. Other things stayed the same, like shooting in Begos’ home state of Rhode Island. Like using practical effects. Like leaving enough blood stains […]
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Seizure, Midnight Express and Platoon: An Excerpt from The Oliver Stone Experience
[Editor’s note: the following interview is an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Oliver Stone Experience, out September 13 from Abrams Books. This excerpt from Seitz’s book-spanning interview with the director covers Stone’s life and career from his first feature, Seizure, through the production of Midnight Express and his initial, frustrated efforts to get Platoon made.] I had a nightmare, and it became the basis of Seizure. It came to you all in a dream? Yeah, it did. It felt like a fever dream. A father ends up betraying his son, like a coward, and runs away and wakes up, and of course he thinks it’s all […]
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Racism in Baltimore via Pest Control: Theo Anthony on Rat Film
An ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film, Theo Anthony’s Rat Film is a free-form experience with topical relevance. Long burdened by a documented history of residential segregation, Baltimore, Maryland — Anthony’s current place of residence — has served as a recent political hotbed due to the unjustified death of African-American resident Freddie Gray while in police custody. Less than a month after a court ruling declared (in the midst of the strengthening Black Lives Matter movement) all tried police officers not guilty of any wrongdoing in the Gray homicide, Anthony’s challenging film debuted in Switzerland at the Locarno Film Festival to much […]
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“I Think Drama is Often More Interesting if it Springs from Love Instead of Hate or Anger”: Writer/Director Andrew Ahn on Spa Night
Fusing the eroticism of an underground cruising culture with surprisingly heartfelt family drama, Spa Night is the debut feature of Korean-American CalArts graduate Andrew Ahn. Developed at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, the Film Independent Screenwriters Lab and the Film Independent Directing Lab, the film follows up Ahn’s well-received 2012 short, Dol, which also addresses coming-out within a Korean-American community. In Spa Night, Joe Seo plays David, a gay 18-year-old who hasn’t told his parents he’s gay. Their struggles with their own family business create pressure on him just as he’s drawn to explore his sexuality after discovering a gay hookup […]
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Mark Pellington on Directing Pilots, Blindspot and Collaborating with TV Creators
One of the most visually arresting pieces of filmmaking I saw last year was the pilot episode of Blindspot, an NBC series that slyly reinvigorates the network procedural genre by fusing the raw materials of 70s conspiracy thrillers with an ingenious puzzle device. The puzzle comes in the form of a body covered with tattoos; the body belongs to “Jane Doe” (Jaimie Alexander), a woman who, in the opening scene of the pilot, is discovered zipped up in a duffel bag left unattended in Times Square. Jane has no memory of who she is or how she got in the […]
