Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“For Every LeBron James, There Are a Thousand Lenny Cookes”: Josh Safdie on Lenny Cooke and LeBron James
One of my favorite memories of Josh and Benny Safdie is sitting at a table with them at a gala event where they were receiving an award: their attention was on their phones the entire time because the Knicks were playing. The Safdies’ twin obsessions with basketball and filmmaking came together three years ago in making the documentary Lenny Cooke, about the rise and fall of a one-time basketball prodigy who was a rival to LeBron James. One of the most remarkable thing about the film is the way LeBron is used as a main character in the film, primarily through […]
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Watch: Directors David Farrier and Dylan Reeve on Tickled, Their Working Relationship and the Importance of Graphic Design
The documentary Tickled begins as a story about the bizarre world of competitive endurance tickling but evolves into an investigation of the ominous company behind videos in which young men tickle one another. Co-directors David Farrier (a New Zealand TV journalist) and Dylan Reeve have endured harassment and lawsuits in the process of digging into what seems to be an extended history of intimidation and coercion. Following substantial media coverage, the film is set to open in the United States on June 17 after premiering at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. I talked to the duo about what it’s like to work with a […]
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Producer Miranda Bailey Debunks Swiss Army Man Controversy and Challenges Conventions about Women in Film
You may not know Miranda Bailey’s name, but you probably know her work. As an actress, writer, director and producer, Miranda Bailey has a hand in just about every aspect of the independent film business. Early in her career, she executive produced Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and since then her producing credits have included Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind and the award-winning documentary Spinning Plates. Bailey’s production company Cold Iron Pictures was behind the award-winning 2015 Sundance sensation Diary of a Teenage Girl, in which she played a supporting role opposite Kristen Wiig. This summer two other films that […]
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“Enjoy the Ride”: Bang Gang Writer/Director Eva Husson on Female-Driven Stories, Teens and Social Media, and Learning How to Be a Director
“Enjoy the ride,” said Eva Husson before she screened her first feature film in January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Roughly 100 minutes later, a stumbling crowd poured out of the cinema as if collectively descending a roller coaster exit ramp, vertigo subsiding with each stabilizing step. Husson’s Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story , which opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 17 from Samuel Goldwyn, is about the sexual unleashing of French suburban teens and the boundaries that shape their relationships. An explosive score integrating electronic and classical music reverberates within the rhythm of the […]
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Mary Lambert on Pet Sematary, Non-Linear Narratives and Child Actors
As haunting and macabre as when it was first released in the spring of 1989, Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is fondly remembered for being one of the more faithful and rich screen adaptations of a Stephen King novel. (A documentary on the film’s production, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary, is to be released later this year.) The story of a nuclear family who move to small-town Maine and, through a series of unfortunate events (i.e. the death of a beloved feline), discover an ancient Indian burial ground that brings the dead back to life, Pet Sematary’s playfully dark twist stems from reincarnation […]
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“This is What a Movie Feels and Breathes and Looks Like”: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow on De Palma
It’s always been a convenient avenue for critical dismissal to view Brian De Palma’s films as impersonal. As the director says himself in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s eponymous documentary opening this week, he makes films from the outside in — beginning with the visual lexicon of the narrative, then connecting that architecture with living characters and scenes. Some struggle to defend their affinity for his films. The targets are legion. One is the voyeur’s presence in most of them — almost always misconstrued by detractors and, if only in the most fleeting moments, pegged as either contrivance, obsession, or […]
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Ted Kotcheff on Making First Blood, Changing Rambo’s Suicide Mission and (Not) Working with Kirk Douglas
Most filmmakers are lucky if they can master one genre in their lifetime, but over the course of a sixty-year career Ted Kotcheff has conquered several. He helmed a grimly funny suspense classic (Wake in Fright); a literate, witty Gregory Peck Western (Billy Two-Hats); fast and funny comedies (Fun with Dick and Jane, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe); and dramedies where the laughs coexist with unsettling insights into the dark side of the human condition (North Dallas Forty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). All of his films are characterized by a vibrant pictorial sense – no one […]
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Five Questions for The View from Tall Directors Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss
Hailing from the Chicago theater community is A View from Tall, a debut independent feature telling a story of teen sexuality and its collision with institutional power dynamics. Directed by Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, and based on Parrish’s play, the film deals with a loner teen, Justine, who is ostracized from her peers because of a sexual relationship with a teacher that became public. She bonds with her therapist, a disabled man with issues of his own. Since writing The View from Tall, playwright Parrish has become a successful television writer, working on shows like Supergirl and Under the Dome. […]
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Five Questions for My First Kiss and the People Involved Writer/Director Luigi Campi
Born in Rome, based in London and with a degree from Columbia University, Luigi Campi — whose debut feature, My First Kiss and the People Involved, premieres today at the Los Angeles Film Festival — is a truly international independent filmmaker. As he explains in our interview below, his Columbia colleagues are now dispersed around the globe, and his American connections and European passport allow him to slip between filmmaking scenes — or, perhaps, create a scene of his own. Witness My First Kiss, which finds him drawing fresh acting talent from the worlds of performance and visual art, music […]
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Five Questions for Paint It Black Writer/Director Amber Tamblyn
Making her feature debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival is actress, writer, director and poet Amber Tamblyn with Paint It Black, an adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel. It tells the story of two women — a punked-out nightclubber, Josie (Alia Shawkat), and an older classical pianist, Meredith (Janet McTeer) — who share a Venn-diagrammed slice of memory. Meredith is the mother of Josie’s recently suicided boyfriend, and the film finds their grief, recollections and emotional wounds intertwined within a dreamy L.A. that’s as much a psychological landscape as a real place. Below Tamblyn answers five questions about securing the […]
