Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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Symphonies and Singin’ In the Rain: Terence Davies on Sunset Song
A long-in-the-works passion project, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song follows Chris (Agyness Deyn), a Scottish farmer’s daughter whose marriage to Ewen Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie) collides straight into the early days of World War I. There are familiar Davies visual and thematic motifs throughout — the film’s first part tracks Chris’ hellish family life under the tyrannical reign of another bad father (Peter Mullan), a wedding sequence has group sing-alongs, and a sweeping crane shot of a muddy WWI battlefield is a textbook example of his penchant for camera movement as primary narrative propellant. In the days before […]
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“Help a Director Out as an Actor by Being a Good Soldier”: Jason Batemen on The Family Fang
After more than 30 years on screen — from his baby-faced days on Little House on the Prairie to his work on Arrested Development — Jason Bateman directed his first feature in 2013 with Bad Words. He now returns behind the camera with The Family Fang, an adaptation of the 2011 bestselling novel by Kevin Wilson. The Family Fang charts the 40-year saga of a family led by a pair of eccentric performance artists: Caleb (Christopher Walken) and Camille (Maryann Plunkett) Fang. In the ’70s, the Fang parents enlisted their children Baxter (Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman) to act in their abrasive art projects. […]
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“Crazy Women, the News, Florida, Guns”: Robert Greene on Kate Plays Christine
To lean on my Sundance write-up to summarize Kate Plays Christine: “Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Keep Quiet Directors Joseph Martin and Sam Blair
A role reversal so outrageous it could only be a work of nonfiction, the story of Csanad Szegedi, an infamous member of Hungary’s conservative Jobbik party, is as preposterously true as they come. A former Holocaust denier and anti-Semite, Szegedi now lives as a practicing Orthodox Jew determined to honor his familial past (his grandparents were Jewish). Fascinated by this turnaround, filmmakers Joseph Martin and Sam Blair created Keep Quiet, an in-depth study of the new life of Szegedi and co-lead Rabbi Boruch Oberlande, as a portrait of internal religious tension and the endless trying struggle to right one’s wrongs. As Keep […]
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Tribeca 2016: Making Guy Maddin’s Seances Interactive
Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the NFB wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]
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Frederick Wiseman on His Banned Classic Titicut Follies
Straight from its premiere at New York City’s Metrograph theater, the new 35mm print of Titicut Follies screened at Portland’s Northwest Film Center on April 21 with director Frederick Wiseman in attendance. The controversial film portrays the wretched conditions at The Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts circa 1967. In unflinching cinema verite-style, Ttticut Follies presents a stark portrayal of the hospital’s predominantly naked inmates as they are mishandled, force-fed, taunted by guards, and locked in empty cells. Titicut Follies was famously banned prior to its planned premiere at the 1967 New York Film Festival. Though Wiseman had gotten the requisite permissions, the state of […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Obit Director Vanessa Gould
While there have been several documentaries exploring the inner-workings of the Gray Lady, the life and challenges of a New York Times obituary writer is a profession that has yet to receive its due. Working on strict deadlines that arrive at a moment’s notice (such is life and, in effect, death), these obit writers have to be on call to craft a minimal but effective summation of character while working with limited time and limitless resources. A fascinating subject that immediately evokes a plethora of questions (what’s the criteria for determining who gets a Times obituary? How quick is a […]
