Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions with Tracktown Directors Alexi Pappas and Jeremy Teicher
It’s rare, if not unheard of: a first-time feature film director who is also an Olympic athlete. Such is the case with competitive long distance runner Alexi Pappis, who, along with her boyfriend Jeremy Teicher (one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2013), co-wrote and co-directed Tracktown, a new feature film which will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 4. In addition, Pappas, who will compete for Greece at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Brazil, stars as Plumb Marigold, a young Olympic hopeful trying to find balance in life. Filmed and set in the real-life “Tracktown,” […]
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Five Questions with The Witness Director James Solomon
More than 50 years ago, the murder of Kitty Genovese stunned the nation when 38 witnesses in nearby apartments witnessed her brutal stabbing and did nothing. The incident came to represent urban apathy and spawned the “bystander effect” theory. But The Witness, a gripping new documentary about Genovese’s murder, challenges our long-held beliefs about the case. The directorial debut of screenwriter James Solomon, The Witness had its world premiere at the 2015 New York Film Festival and will open theatrically at New York’s IFC Center on June 3, with a national rollout to follow. The multi-layered documentary investigates what actually happened on that fateful […]
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Brian De Palma on Directing Actors and The Boardroom Scene in Scarface
A master director gets the cinematic treatment he deserves in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, which is quite simply the greatest film about filmmaking that I’ve ever seen. That it consists almost entirely of a feature-length interview with its subject, interspersed with impeccably selected clips from his films, makes it all the more remarkable – it’s a deceptively simple piece of work that yields infinite insights. Using the intimacy gained from their years-long friendship with the auteur, Baumbach and Paltrow interrogate Brian De Palma about each of his films in chronological order, and the result is not only […]
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Remaining Gaps: Thom Andersen Discusses The Thoughts That Once We Had
The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015) takes the form of a conversation. The most recent feature by American filmmaker Thom Andersen unfolds as a running dialogue between him and the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote extensively about cinema. Throughout this new film, clips from older films are interwoven with lines of text that appear onscreen — some of which are direct quotations from Deleuze, and some of which are personal ruminations, responses, and elaborations from Andersen, who taught his two volumes on cinema for a quarter-century at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). A few of […]
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“Stupidity is the Only Big Risk”: Chevalier Writer/Director Athina Rachel Tsangari on Power, Greece and Filmmaking without Rules
Athina Tsangari is a director and producer whose films examine the negotiation of power. While they span genres and approaches, her pictures — including her latest, Chevalier — are consistently organized around this theme. Chevalier takes place on a boat in the Aegean Sea. The men on board decide to play a game in which they judge each other on… everything. I spoke with Tsangari about her past and future projects and about returning to Greece, which has just wrapped up another tense debt relief negotiation with the IMF and EU. Chevalier opens at the IFC on Friday. Chevalier opens today […]
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“Why Don’t We Just Make it Seven-and-a-Half Hours?” Director Ezra Edelman on O.J.: Made in America
How could close to 150 million people watch with rapt attention the exact same televised trial and come away with such passionately different responses to the verdict? Ezra Edelman’s epic, important and masterful documentary, O.J.: Made in America, spends close to eight hours exploring why you might have felt very differently from your neighbor. And, despite its length, nothing included is filler. OJ: Made in America, will air on ABC and ESPN beginning June 11th. I sat down with Edelman — a producer and director whose previous works includes sports documentaries for HBO and ESPN’s “30 for 30” series — […]
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Five Questions for Almost Holy Director Steve Hoover
In the early 2000s, amid political turmoil in the Ukraine, a pastor named Gennadiy Mokhnenko battled child homelessness and drug addiction using unorthodox methods. The controversial pastor abducted homeless children, many of whom suffered drug addiction, and forcibly brought them to Pilgrim Republic, a rehabilitation center he founded in the city of Mariupol. Relying on a mix of interviews and footage which tracks the self-appointed savior’s mission over fifteen years, Almost Holy is a complex portrait of a complex person. The film was directed by Steve Hoover, who directed the Sundance Grand Jury and Audience prize-winning Blood Brother, which also focused on a self-appointed savior […]
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Directors Frida and Lasse Barkfors on Their Complex Portrait of a Sex Offender Community, Pervert Park
When first-time filmmakers Frida and Lasse Barkfors read an article in a Danish newspaper about a community of sex offenders living in Florida they immediately wanted to go there. Traveling from Scandinavia to Florida they were surprised by the place they found. Without any outside funding, the couple soon embarked on the four-year process of making their first documentary about the Florida Justice Transitions Park — commonly referred to as “Pervert Park,” telegraphing the opinions held by the rest of society. Pervert Park, which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, […]
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Being Reborn as a 16-Year-Old Girl: Nicholas Winding Refn on His Vampiric Assault on the Beauty Industry, The Neon Demon
Nicholas Winding Refn’s new The Neon Demon, premiering in Competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, is a nightmarish, outlandish fashion-world riff on A Star is Born in which vampiric models struggling to remain alluring in a swipe-to-the-next-one culture provide a ready-made metaphor for beauty industry soul-sucking. Elle Fanning is Jesse — blonde, beautiful, 16, and something of an empty vessel waiting to be anointed the next “It Girl.” Her journey through Angeleno nightclubs, booking agencies and photography studios is one of ribald psychological horror, as physical spaces twist and expand, friends become alien, and even her scuzzy, entirely unfashionable […]
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Cannes, 2016: Five Questions for Tramontane Writer/Director Vatche Boulghourjian
Finding political resonance within the intimate story of a blind man, his past, and the Lebanese countryside, Tramontane is the debut feature of filmmaker Vatche Boulghourjian. Based in Beirut, Boulghourjian studied at NYU Film School, and his filmmaking draws upon the community he found in both his home and place of study. Premiering in Critics’ Week at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Tramontane also received early development support from the Venice Biennale College Cinema, where I was one of its mentors several years ago. At the time, I was struck by Boulghourjian’s intelligence, empathy and ability to articulate the larger […]
