Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Framing is its Own Dark Art”: Karyn Kusama on The Invitation
Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation achieves the kind of cinematic alchemy one finds in Blood Simple or the best of Hitchcock, where genre meets philosophy and character to yield something both razor-sharp in its clarity and infinitely complex in its provocations. The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi follows a group of friends over the course of one night when they reunite after a tragedy that has affected all of their lives. The intentions of the hostess, Eden (Tammy Blanchard), are mysterious and only grow increasingly troubling as the night progresses, at least as far as her ex-husband Will (Logan […]
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Five Questions for SXSW Feature Documentary Winner Tower Director Keith Maitland
One of the busiest filmmakers at this year’s SXSW, documentary filmmaker Keith Maitland has two films premiering at the festival, both with roots firmly in Texas. A Song For You: The Austin City Limits Story is a loving look back at the PBS program that featured some of the music industry’s most iconic talent like Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Tower, a partially animated documentary that incorporates archival footage and first-person testimonials, reconstructs the University of Texas campus shooting that took the lives of sixteen people in the summer of 1966. The Grand Jury winner for Documentary Feature, Tower has been praised for […]
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“Start Budgeting for Everything You Can’t Do”: Five Questions for Donald Cried Director Kris Avedisian
An acclaimed short that developed into the filmmaker’s first feature, Donald Cried, a buddy comedy set in director Kris Avedisian’s home state of Rhode Island, had its world premiere last weekend in the Narrative Feature Competition section of SXSW. Jesse Wakeman and Avedisian (as the title character) reprise their leading roles as the odd couple pairing, friends reunited in their hometown thanks to the death of a grandmother. Taking John Hughes’ Planes, Trains & Automobiles as its road trip, structural inspiration, the film finds the two men sharing a van as tensions from their past arise. Donald Cried will next screen in the Film Society of […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Boone Director Christopher LaMarca
Placing the viewer amidst the everyday workings of a goat farm in southern Oregon, Christopher LaMarca’s Boone represents a daring exercise in direct cinema filmmaking. Originally a photojournalist interested in environmental causes, LaMarca found the setting of the farm to be an ideal location for one of his two feature filmmaking debuts (The Pearl, which he co-directed, premiered recently at True/False). Boone immerses the viewer in the fields, barns and homes of the farm’s human and animal inhabitants. As discussed below, LaMarca spent much more time on the farm than originally planned, finding it necessary to fully immerse himself in the day-to-day experience of the strenuous grind. With […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for The Arbalest Writer-Director Adam Pinney
As part of the Atlanta-based film collective Fake Wood Wallpaper, Adam Pinney has accumulated credits as an actor, editor, cinematographer, camera operator, grip, producer and director on projects such as Joe Swanberg’s 24 Exposures and Alex Orr’s A Is for Alex. With his latest project, The Arbalest, which has its world premiere tonight in the narrative feature competition at SXSW, Pinney makes his feature debut as a writer-director with a distinct visual aesthetic. The Arbalest, which was selected for the 2015 IFP Narrative Lab, tells the story of Foster Kalt (Mike Brune), a famous and reclusive toy inventor, who reflects on his lifelong obsession with Sylvia Frank […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for The Bandit Director Jesse Moss
Jesse Moss’ documentaries often take on heavy material, and his last film — 2014’s The Overnighters — was no exception. The experience of profiling pastor Jay Reinke — a North Dakota minister whose decision to open up his congregation to homeless laborers seeking oil field work placed him at odds with his flock — took a heavy toll on Moss. His new documentary The Bandit is a completely different kind of movie, an archival-based profile of Burt Reynolds and his good friend Hal Needham. Moss examines their complicated relationship through the making of 1977’s Needham-directed Smokey and the Bandit, a film still in regular circulation […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Claire in Motion Directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell
Five years after premiering their pregnancy road trip drama Small, Beautifully Moving Parts at SXSW, the writing/directing team of Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell return to Austin with their Competition entry Claire in Motion, a drama about a woman grappling with the disappearance of her husband — as well as the secrets of his life that disappearance has caused to surface. Below, we talk to the duo about the nature of their collaboration, being female directors working with female subject matter, and whether comparisons to Gone Girl are accurate or not. Filmmaker: It’s been five years since Small, Beautifully […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Beware the Slenderman Director Irene Taylor Brodsky
An incident so horrific it could only be attributed to an otherworldly paranormal presence, the stabbing of a twelve-year-old girl by two of her friends in Waukesha, Wisconsin made national headlines in the spring of 2014. Lured into the woods, stabbed nineteen times and left for dead, the girl survived and her two assailants, also twelve years of age, were quickly apprehended. Claiming that they were carrying out the deadly attack in honor of the Slenderman, a fictional murderer whose mystique had been bolstered by rabid internet lore and perverse fascination, the girls’ reprehensible act was a unique case of the […]
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SXSW: Producer Dan Schoenbrun and Five Directors on their Dreamy Anthology Film, collective:unconscious
In November, 2014, Dan Schoenbrun threw down a provocative artistic challenge on Kickstarter. The former IFP-staffer, sometime Filmmaker writer, and current Film Partnerships lead at the crowdfunding platform conceived of an anthology film that would charge a stellar group of up-and-coming directors with adapting each other’s nocturnal visions. Each director would write down a dream and give it to Schoenbrun, who’d then assign it to another director. As you’ll read below, the pairings wound up being more natural and forced, with the intent being not a VHS-style horror anthology but rather a more diverse film unlocking all the meanings dreams, […]
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“A Little Like Borat but Without the Punchlines”: Five Questions for Rainbow Time Writer/Director Linas Phillips
Back in 2005, young filmmaker Linas Phillips paid homage to a cinematic hero by recording a cross-country pedestrian journey in Walking to Werner — the “Werner” being, of course, Werner Herzog. At the time, he told Filmmaker, “I remember Werner saying if there is a big decision in your life, it should be done on foot.” Over a decade later, Phillips’ career has ambled through a number of interesting digressions, including acting in Manson Family Vacation and this latest, a narrative feature about the strange relationship between two brothers, one mentally challenged. It’s premiering at SXSW, and below Phillips updates […]
