Directors
Interviews - Directors
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TIFF: 5 Questions for A Flickering Truth Director Pietra Brettkelly
American independent filmmakers who moan over long-term storage bills, failed hard drives and misplaced optical tracks will receive the corrective they need to their First World Film Preservation problems by viewing Pietra Brettkelly’s new documentary, A Flickering Truth. Receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the picture follows a group of film archivists who have secretly fought to preserve Afghanistan’s storied film culture from the violence of the Taliban era. Below, Brettkelly answers questions about filming in a war-torn country, Afghan cinema and how her own archival practices have changed as a result of making this film. […]
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How To Complete Post-Production Quickly to Meet a Festival Deadline: The Making of Joe Begos’ The Mind’s Eye
In order to make the submission deadline for the Toronto International Film Festival, writer/director Joe Begos and producer/editor Josh Ethier had a locked cut of The Mind’s Eye seven weeks into the editing; the effort paid off as the psychokinetic thriller is getting a World Premiere as part of Midnight Madness programme. The cinematic tale features Zack Connors (Graham Skipper) attempting to use his special abilities to prevent the mysterious Dr. Slovak from descending into a psychic rage. “Joe is a visual director who shoots and operates on his own films,” explains Ethier, who has collaborated with Begos ever since […]
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“I’m Not Qualified For Anything Else”: Writer/Director Steve Kloves on The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone
Twelve years before he became the screenwriter of the most successful franchise in film history, adapting all but one of the Harry Potter novels for the screen, Steve Kloves directed the first of two extraordinarily powerful and original films – movies all the more remarkable for how different they were from each other. Kloves had one produced screenplay to his credit, 1984’s Racing with the Moon, when he assembled the dream cast of Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Beau Bridges to create The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989. Its story of two piano-playing brothers and the singer that upends years […]
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Recreating ’50s NYC in Montreal: Director John Crowley on Brooklyn at TIFF 2015
Just like Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel, which revolves around Eilis Lacey having to cope with the changes caused by her immigration from Ireland to America during the 1950s, the cinematic adaptation of Brooklyn encountered some alterations over the course of its development. Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) was to play the lead female protagonist but delays in the production required a new actress to be cast (Saoirse Ronan) and a non-Irish filmmaker was sought for the project that ended up being directed by John Crowley, a native of Cork, Ireland. While attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Crowley shared […]
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“We Were Doing a Scene Without a Camera”: Five Questions for Mustang Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven
The story of five young sisters locked up by overprotective guardians with predictably dire consequences, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s first feature Mustang has prompted inevitable widespread comparisons to The Virgin Suicides. Despite the plot-level resemblance (Ergüven has said she’s both read the book and seen the movie but it’s not a meaningful influence), Mustang is its own distinctive debut, contextualized by a virulently patriarchal culture that barely disguises its controlling nature. After an afternoon frolic on the beach with male friends, five sisters arrive home to find themselves rigorously interrogated by their grandmother about what kind of sluttish hijinks they’ve been up to. In a scene resembling […]
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TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Meddler Writer/Director Lorene Scafaria
Screenwriter-turned-director Lorene Scafaria burst onto the scene with her screenplay for Peter Sollett’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Since that 2008 film she has bounced between film and television, writing and directing episodes of New Girl while also debuting her first feature, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So it’s fair to ask Scafaria what made The Meddler, a comedy/drama about an intrusive widowed mom (played by Susan Sarandon) and her frazzled Angeleno daughter (Rose Byrne), a story for the large screen instead of the small. That’s just one of several questions she offers cogent answers to in the […]
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TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for Born to Be Blue Writer/Director Robert Budreau
More than three decades after Charlie “Bird” Parker, nearly three decades after Thelonious Monk and just a couple of weeks before Miles Davis, the jazz great whose trumpet style his own owed something to, West Coast jazzman Chet Baker is brought to the screen in Robert Budreau’s appropriately intimate biographical drama, Born to be Blue. I write “appropriately intimate” because the constricted scale of Budreau’s picture, in which Baker’s troubled life is evoked through scenes set at and in the beaches, cafes, apartments, recording studios and even film sets of California’s “cool jazz” scene, scales the trumpeter’s life just right. […]
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Respect and Integrity in 27 Days: Peter Sollett Discusses Freeheld at Bloomberg/IFP’s “Business of Entertainment” Breakfast
“Finding a way to produce this movie in 27 days was a riddle we were always solving,” recalled director Peter Sollett. “And doing it in a way that had integrity, the kind that Laurel and Stacie had, was a challenge and a mission statement.” Sollett was speaking at a Bloomberg/IFP “Business of Entertainment” breakfast, hosted by IFP board member and Bloomberg principal, Katherine Oliver, high above downtown Toronto and overlooking Lake Ontario on the eve of the world premiere of his latest feature, Freeheld, at TIFF. Oliver was introduced by IFP and Made in New York Media Center Executive Director […]
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“Humor Is Always Butting Up Against Tragedy”: Sterlin Harjo on Mekko
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th, Sterlin Harjo’s latest narrative feature Mekko treads territory both familiar and new to this Oklahoma-based, Native American director. An ex-con-versus-thug thriller set in the world of Tulsa’s real-life Indian homeless community, the film stars Hollywood stuntman Rod Rondeaux and boasts an all-Native cast (many of whom are part of that aforementioned homeless community). Filmmaker caught up with Harjo prior to TIFF to talk about his fourth feature – as well as German Indian-philia, Herzog’s Stroszek, and Native humor. Filmmaker: Mekko takes place in an Indian homeless community, and you use […]
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TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Missing Girl Writer/Director A.D. Calvo
A.D. Calvo is known in the independent horror community for frightening features like The Midnight Game and House of Dust, but with The Missing Girl, premiering in Toronto’s Vanguard section, he dials down the jump scares in favor of a bittersweet character study that’s still not without a sense of mystery. Robert Longstreet, who has given indelible performances in films like This is Martin Bonner and Septien, plays a sad sack owner of a comic book store who becomes unhinged when his pretty young employee, played by Alexia Rasmussen, disappears. Below, Calvo discusses his change of direction, his interest in […]
