Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“That Feeling Inside You That Never Explodes”: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Evolution
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution is her long-awaited sophomore feature; her first, Innocence, premiered in 2004. At the time of Evolution‘s premiere, I wrote: Innocence followed a group of young women being schooled in etiquette, beauty et al. at a vaguely sinister private institution, preparing themselves to be sexualized for a lifetime before an implicit male gaze; Evolution gender-switches the sexual fears attendant to puberty. The setting is, again, an isolated incubation facility, this one for the grooming of young boys. Nicolas (Max Brebant) is one of many interchangeable blond youths (the vibe is very Village of the Damned) being raised by an equally interchangeable group of orange-haired mothers (?) in […]
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The Red Turtle Director Michaël Dudok de Wit on Silent Metaphors, Charming Flaws, and Takahata’s Influence
Spoken language is direct and concise, but the most necessary messages are never successfully conceived or delivered through words. Silent gestures, decisive actions, and tangible kindness construct the most vivid memories of an individual’s existence. Michaël Dudok de Wit’s heart-rending masterpiece The Red Turtle engages in conversation with the core of the human condition without ever uttering a single sentence. A man with no name, past, religion or even nationality becomes a castaway after a brutal storm. Alone on an island, the man battles solitude, desperation, fear, and anger with only nature as witness. The existential grandeur of Terrence Malick’s works is […]
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“Young People More and More Dream of Making Films”: Claire Simon on Le Concours
The French state film school La Fémis is the closest thing to a state-sanctioned religion under the secular French administation. Situated in Paris, it is the French temple of cinema, the film school that has educated more Cannes, Berlin and Venice prizewinners than any other faculty in the world. To go to La Fémis has become a badge of honor; the only trouble is that it’s seemingly impossible to get accepted into it. The entrance exam involves a critical written essay on a film clip, a presentation of a potential film project with research, and a discussion on film during a meeting […]
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DOC NYC: Five Questions for The Guys Next Door Directors Allie Humenuk and Amy Geller
Shot over three years, The Guys Next Door looks at what the filmmakers, Allie Humenuk (Shadow of the House) and Amy Geller (For the Love of Movies) dub “a real Modern Family” — a gay male couple parenting a child and forming an extended family with that child’s surrogate mother. Premiering today at DOC NYC, and co-presented by NewFest, the film catches its principal characters at a time when their commitments to each other are challenged by circumstance, geography and subtle changes in our society. Filmmaker: First, how did the two of you — Amy and Allie — wind up […]
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DOC NYC: Five Questions for City of Joy Director Madeleine Gavin
World premiering last night at DOC NYC, City of Joy tells the story of a center for young women in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo dedicated to helping them overcome the aftermath of rape, abuse and traumatic violence. Directed by Madeleine Gavin, well known in the independent film world for editing films like Mean Creek, Meadowland and, most recently, Nerve, the film documents the relationship between the center’s three founders — Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congo doctor; The Vagina Monologues playwright and actress Eve Ensler; and Congolese human rights activist Christine Schuler-Deschryver — while also […]
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“This is a Show about Dread”: Nick Antosca on the SyFy Series, Channel Zero
Although the Netflix series Stranger Things has received more mainstream attention, the Syfy series Channel Zero is arguably more unsettling and less predictable, and executed with a more determined vision. With six episodes this season (“Candle Cove”) and six in production for 2017 (“The No-End House”), the series has more in common with the French horror series Beyond the Walls (Shudder) in terms of its willingness to allow for slowness and its non-clichéd approach to characters. Both shows suggest the increasing prominence of, for lack of a better term, “weird fiction” — stories that treat horror as a kind of […]
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Five Questions for The Secret Scripture Director Jim Sheridan
In Jim Sheridan’s new film The Secret Scripture, based on the novel by Sebastian Barry, the six-time Oscar nominated director returns to themes familiar to him: politics, religion, family and truth. Vanessa Redgrave stars as Rose McNulty, a woman imprisoned for four decades in a mental ward, accused of killing her own son. Not only is she convinced she didn’t kill him, but she believes her son is still alive, and keeps a journal in the margins of a Bible recounting her stories. When the decaying mental ward is on the verge of being turned into a resort, she refuses to move, […]
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I’m Directing My First Documentary Short… Who Cares?
So I’m making my first short documentary. Tentatively titled Sole Doctor, it’s an observational-style film about George, an African-American cobbler who, after keeping shop for 50 years in Portland, Oregon, plans to retire and pass the business on to his son, Joshua. As I’ve chronicled in previous journals for Filmmaker, as a first-time filmmaker, I knew enough to seek advice from the pros before proceeding, and then I made sure to hire a good DP and sound mixer. But, of course, as much as I planned ahead, I still hit some bumps along the road — like our first shoot, when we planned to film […]
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“Student Filmmaking at its Finest”: Don Coscarelli on Phantasm
The first filmmaker I ever interviewed was Don Coscarelli. It was 1998 and I was a junior in college, toiling away at the University of Kentucky student newspaper. Coscarelli agreed to chat about his career for the paper’s Halloween movie page and, clueless as to proper interview decorum — or what might be an appropriate amount of time to monopolize — I asked him about every movie he had ever made. Every. Single. Movie. It was a Frost-Nixon length tête-à-tête, but he was nice enough to humor me. Two decades later — and on the eve of another Halloween — I had […]
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Writer-Director Zach Clark on His Twisted Little Sister
In Zach Clark’s Little Sister, Colleen (Addison Timlin), a former goth girl turned nun, returns home to her dysfunctional family for the first time in years after learning that her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) is back from fighting the war in Iraq. To cope with her passive father, Bill (Peter Hedges), her bipolar, pot-smoking mother, Joani (Ally Sheedy), and her depressed, disfigured brother, Colleen resurrects her goth persona in hopes of livening things up. Set in 2008, against the backdrop of President Obama’s election, the dark family comedy manages to be both tender and pointed. In a review of the film in Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein called Little Sister “an unaffected masterpiece,” […]
