Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“We Will Be Fine. We Will Absolutely Be Fine”: A Conversation with Artist and Filmmaker John Akomfrah
In the early 1980s, the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah became a founder member of the innovative, seven-strong Black Audio Film Collective, who curated programs of avant-garde world cinema and made their own work using slide-tape texts, film, and video. Their serious-minded, multifaceted output, much of which was directed by Akomfrah, alighted on subjects from the causes of race-related inner-city U.K. unrest and its media representation (Handsworth Songs) to the origins of Afrofuturism (The Last Angel of History). The group disbanded in 1998, but Akomfrah has since operated extensively across film, television, and galleries, often in collaboration with former BAFC members. […]
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Ghost of a Ghost: Alain Gagnol on His Animated Noir Feature Phantom Boy and Co-Director’s Jean-Loup Felicioli’s Designs
Heroically serving as a lifeboat of ingenuity and sophistication while a flood of CG talking animal features drowns the animated landscape, GKIDS offers uniquely conceived, handcrafted and thoughtful storytelling in a medium that has often reached its greatest potential through the pencils and brushes of those seeking to create art rather than doll-selling tentpoles. The independent animation distributor has eight Academy Award nominations under its belt, and few companies in field have remained as truthful to their mantra as these New York-based dream confectioners. Earlier this year GKIDS released in the States the acclaimed, Paris-set steampunk adventure, April and the […]
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“I Tried Not to Be Didactic”: Werner Herzog on His MasterClass
A frequent and vocal opponent of film schools, the director Werner Herzog founded his own, the Rogue Film School, in 2009. He teaches students in weekend seminars held at varying locations around the world in what it feels like an oppositional practice to the standard four-year university programs. Now, Herzog has taken the Rogue Film School concept one step further by devising his own online program through MasterClass. The course is available online for $90 and offers 26 video lessons with accompanying exercises and course materials. I spoke to Herzog about the production of the class, his expectations for the course, […]
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“I Never Knew How to Make a Film”: Michael Cimino in 2005
“The Last of the Mavericks” – that was the very appropriate title that the Portuguese Cinematheque gave to its November 2005 series on Michael Cimino (during which this interview was conducted). And all you needed was to see the director himself walk into the lobby of Lisbon’s fusty, old-fashioned Tivoli hotel to realize how much a maverick he was. At that time, Cimino had not directed a feature film in a decade, and little did we know he would never come to direct another, despite the swirling constellation of rumors that always surrounded him. And yet, for someone who freely […]
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Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
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Todd Solondz on Wiener-Dog, Not Directing TV and Working with “Remarkably Stupid” Dogs
Todd Solondz has been exploring his animal side. Granted, the films that first placed him at the forefront of independent American auteur cinema – Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001), and Palindromes (2004) – were well-acquainted with the bestial side of human behavior, offering unflinching and sometimes repulsive examinations of bullying, pedophilia, abortion activism, racial fetishization and the adhesive properties of semen. Since 2009’s Life During Wartime, a theoretical sequel to Happiness, Solondz has toned down the bad-boy transgressions of his first few films, allowing his humanist sympathies to rise to the surface. Building on the structural aspects […]
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“I’m Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women”: Anna Biller on The Love Witch
Over the last decade, Los Angeles-based film artist Anna Biller has eked out a small but fervid following; watching her films is like undergoing hypnosis by means of feng shui, wherein the viewer is lulled into a stilted, cheeky and brilliantly manicured simulacra of golden-era Hollywood staging, blocking and delivery. However indebted these forms are to their masculinist forebears, Biller is not content to be considered a pastiche artist: in the below discussion she concedes that her choices are guided by what gives her cinephilic pleasure, although — because? — the feminist interrogations of her work are impossible to ignore. She […]
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New Documentaries Use Animation to Bring Nonfiction Stories to Life
In recent decades, some of the best documentary films — including Oscar-winners such as Bowling for Columbine and Searching for Sugar Man, and, more recently, festival favorites Point and Shoot and Meet the Patels — have have relied on animation to tell compelling nonfiction stories in nontraditional ways. It’s a technique audiences have grown accustomed to and nonfiction filmmakers have learned to adopt with varying degrees of success. While in the past, documentary purists might have posited that animation had no place in non-fiction storytelling, it’s now largely accepted that even observational documentaries involve some degree of manipulation. If anything, by using animation in a documentary, the manipulation is more […]
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The Full-Time Job of Survival: Martin Bell on Streetwise and TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell
To revisit Martin Bell‘s landmark documentary Streetwise 32 years after its initial release is an experience that would at times seem to beggar an audience’s capacity for prejudice. Never was a community so commonly perceived as forlorn and despondent as Seattle’s homeless youth population ever depicted in such a sharp contrast to common notions of indigence. To endure the film alongside Bell’s feature-length update, TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell — made possible as part of BAMCinemaFest’s NY Premiere Double-Feature this Saturday — is to stand the test of self-questioning that belies any deeper look into the reality of poverty and its lifelong repercussions. TINY, […]
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“Whether It Takes One Camera or 12”: TV Director Anthony Hemingway on Underground and The People v. O.J. Simpson
Two of the best television series ever to tackle America’s endlessly complicated relationship with race premiered almost simultaneously in the first half of this year. First up was the FX series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, in which two of the greatest living American screenwriters, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, found their greatest subject in the tragicomic bouillabaisse of race, class, sex, and violence that was the O.J. Simpson trial. A darker and more unsettling – though no less entertaining and riveting – examination of the same issues could be found just a matter of weeks later […]
