Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Of Ghosts and Made-For-TV ’70s Horror Films: Ted Geoghegan on We Are Still Here
Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here is a love letter. Two parents, grieving over their lost son, move to a new house in Massachusetts. The house, of course, is haunted. It’s like Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery – intentionally so. It hearkens back to an older time, and it doesn’t really feel like a modern horror movie. Among the glut, it stands out, and the universally high marks it’s received from critics show that Geoghegan was onto something. After working as a writer and producer for years, this marks his feature debut as a director. It’s certainly a […]
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A Sense of Crisis: Directors Paula Ortiz, Mercedes Moncada, and Hanna Sköld at the San Sebastián Film Festival
“Life doesn’t have punch lines or a plot. It unfurls in ways that are somewhat random,” says Laurie Anderson. We’re sitting in a small room with fluorescent lighting and acoustically challenged walls. Anderson is wrapping up her last morning at the San Sebastián Film Festival with her newest hit, Heart of a Dog. She isn’t happy I showed up for the interview without having seen her film. I wasn’t happy myself, having missed the screening after several bus route missteps when I arrived in town the night before. If I hadn’t missed the film though, I wouldn’t have gotten the […]
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“If That Kid Hits Me in the Face, I’m Going to Hit You in the Face”: Tony McNamara on Ashby
In an early scene in Ashby, an English teacher asks the film’s young protagonist Ed (Nat Wolff) to expound on the themes of Ernest Hemingway. Wolff answers, “Proving you’re a man by trying to get killed,” tossing off the line as if it were an absurd relic of a less enlightened era. He then spends the remainder of the film embracing that antiquated view of American masculinity, whether it be in pursuing classmate Emma Roberts, taking a hit on the football field or befriending his terminally ill, ex-CIA assassin neighbor Ashby (Mickey Rourke). Ashby writer/director Tony McNamara describes the film as […]
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Lolo’s Julie Delpy and Eugenie Grandval at the Venice International Film Festival
“She’s an auteur,” Eugenie Grandval tells me. “She has a lot to do on set between directing other actors and creating as she goes. I’m just there to be supportive.” Grandval is the co-writer of Lolo, a comedy about a single-mom whose love life is sabotaged by her only child. The auteur whom Grandval is referring to is her co-writer and the film’s director and star, Julie Delpy. Together, the writer duo recently traveled from Lolo’s world premiere at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival to their North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Several decades ago, Delpy […]
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“I Didn’t Really Like Directors”: The Fits Filmmakers Anna Rose Holmer and Lisa Kjerulff at the Venice International Film Festival
About 4,500 miles away from my home state, I find myself back in Ohio. What’s cool about a film festival is experiencing stories from different places all over the world on the same screens all day everyday. What’s not cool about a film festival is spending more time experiencing Ohio on a screen than discovering Italy outside on the street. But in the case of two Cincinnati-based stories programmed in the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, I was delighted to be transported home. I use “home” loosely. I’m actually from Cleveland, and it’s not as if the stop-motion iteration of […]
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“If You Read the Script You’re Not Gonna Want to Do the Movie”: Mark L. Lester on Commando
Thirty years ago this month, director Mark L. Lester changed the course of action cinema forever when he solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger’s persona in the gloriously excessive Commando. Schwarzenegger was already a star thanks to the Conans and The Terminator, but Commando is the film that established the identity he would revisit in film after film – and that introduced the “bigger is better” combination of exaggerated action and comedy that producer Joel Silver would apply to his Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Predator series, among many other pictures. Those movies would be heavily influenced by Commando’s vivid palette and precise attention […]
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“We Basically Had Pianos Falling the Whole Time”: The Creative Team of MA at the Venice International Film Festival
With Celia Rowlson-Hall’s bold and original MA opening today in New York at the IFC Center, with wider digital distribution next month, we’re reposting Taylor Hess’s interview with the writer/director/star and her collaborators out of Venice. Check the IFC site for screenings and Q&A moderators, who include, tonight at 8:30 PM, Lena Dunham. Barefoot on a sandy shore of the Mediterranean coast, I’m only mildly bothered by the luxury cruise ships obstructing the horizon. It’s an otherwise picturesque pre-dusk afternoon in Venice, and I’m focused mostly on keeping up with Celia Rowlson-Hall, who sets an intimidating pace as we walk […]
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“Most of the Movies You’ll Want To See This Fall Will Be Independents”: Edward Zwick on Pawn Sacrifice
Writer, producer, and director Ed Zwick is a singular presence in the American media landscape – and a presence whose gifts become increasingly valuable as they become less and less common. He’s a filmmaker committed to serious, important subject matter who never succumbs to didacticism or pat conclusions; he has never once compromised the complexity of the issues his films address or the people whose lives are affected by them. What’s all the more remarkable about his work is that he achieves this complexity via mass entertainments that are as straightforward and involving as they are ambitious and adult – […]
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Managing Rubble and the Degradation of the Building: Ben Wheatley on High-Rise
Perhaps the most divisive film at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival was in the inaugural Platform competition section. High-Rise was originally published by author J.G. Ballard in 1975; now, English filmmaker Ben Wheatley (Sightseers) has brought to the big screen the tale of Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a new resident in a luxury apartment building who becomes entangled in a civil war between the building’s different social classes. The media interest kicked into overdrive for the social satire when Soda Pictures purchased the Canadian distribution rights. During the craziness, Filmmaker was able to sit down with Wheatley to talk about […]
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Solving Crimes by Night, Fixing Septic Tanks by Day: Scott Christopherson & Brad Barber on Peace Officer
When Brad Barber and Scott Christopherson launched a Kickstarter in February to finish their documentary Peace Officer, I felt that they were on to something. The film is the first documentary since the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to deal with the growing militarization of the police in the United States, and it could not be more timely. The film follows William “Dub” Lawrence, the retired sheriff of Davis County, Utah — the sparse suburbs just north of Salt Lake City — who, in an attempt to protect citizens against high-risk situations like terrorists or hostage takers, created the county’s SWAT team […]
