Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Am Completely Oblivious to Risk When I Film”: Five Questions for The Other Side Director Roberto Minervini
Italian-born, American-based Roberto Minervini’s fourth feature The Other Side grew out of his previous film, 2013’s Stop the Pounding Heart. That hybrid documentary followed the (fictionalized) romance between Colby Trichell, a teen rodeo rider, and Sara Carlson, a young girl in a devoutly Christian family. Moving from Texas to West Monroe, Louisiana, Minervini’s new documentary starts by following Lisa, the sister of Colby’s dad Todd, and her boyfriend Mark. This is a dark story, one of drug abuse and disenfranchisement, and the second half plunges further into the backwoods, riding along with a virulently anti-Obama militia as they train and prepare to confront their perceived enemies. The […]
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In North Dakota with the Neo-Nazis: Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker on Welcome to Leith
Chances are that if you’ve heard anything over the past few years about Leith, North Dakota, it was related to infamous white supremacist Craig Cobb’s attempted takeover of the micro-sized city. Self-proclaimed as “one of the most famous racists in the world,” Cobb descended upon Leith’s unassuming community (population size: twenty-four) in the summer of 2013, attempting to purchase as much land as possible to morph into a haven for fellow white nationalists and white supremacists. What first sounded like a deranged urban legend ultimately became a reality, as families with similar points of view moved in with their swastika flags displayed […]
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Six Questions for David Wain About Wet Hot American Summer and They Came Together
Moving with shark-like restlessness between webseries, TV and film, the prolifically talented David Wain has been on a particular roll of late. For his next project after last year’s tragically underseen/dumped romcom parody They Came Together, Wain has come back strong with Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a Netflix miniseries prequel to his most widely/cultishly beloved film to date. Wain will be in conversation with his longtime collaborator Michael Ian Black at IFP’s Film Week on Sunday, September 20 (details and tickets here), and agreed to answer a few questions by email beforehand. Filmmaker: Like a lot of people who enjoyed They Came Together, […]
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“It’s Possible That There are Two Bosses”: Goodnight Mommy Directors Severin Fiala and Veronica Franz on Gender Disparity and Directing as a Team
Austrian filmmaker Severin Fiala accused me of being a sexist. We were in Poland, and it was the night his film, Goodnight Mommy, won the Audience Award at the New Horizons Film Festival. I found his accusation horrifying, tantalizing and ultimately not inaccurate. In the last year, I’ve interviewed 57 women and zero men. My intention wasn’t to disregard men, but rather, to hear from women. My goal wasn’t to create a ghetto whereby the marginalized are defined by their gender, but to try and normalize standards from which the male-dominated industry was built and still prevails today. I wanted […]
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“The Camera Doesn’t Even Exist”: Kalyanee Mam on the She Does Podcast
Kalyanee Mam is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the preservation, the meaning and the importance of home. She was raised in the U.S. but was born in Cambodia, generating an ongoing desire to explore the notion of home and displacement, specifically in Cambodia. Her first feature, A River Changes Course, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance in 2013. Her 2014 short, Fight For Areng Valley, was featured as a New York Times Op-Doc. Kalyanee is currently working on her second feature, The Fire and the Bird’s Nest, which tells the story of a […]
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Man Down: Ira Sachs Interviews Writer/Director Oren Moverman about Time Out of Mind
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2015 issue. It is appearing online today for the first time. Time Out of Mind opens today via IFC Films. Alongside his biggest professional success as a screenwriter — he co-wrote Bill Pohlad’s hit Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy — Oren Moverman returns to theaters this summer as a director with an equally striking yet very different film. Time Out of Mind, which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, joins Moverman’s previous features — The Messenger and Rampart — in its politically aware depiction of compromised masculinity, […]
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“The Mid-Size Studio Feature is Gone”: Ken Kwapis on A Walk in the Woods
When Ken Kwapis was a cinema student at USC, he ran the school’s film society and programmed retrospectives that enabled him to not only study the classics but also to meet several of the directors who made them – among his guests were Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Don Siegel. The experience clearly influenced Kwapis when he became a director himself, as he forged a career similar to that of many of the filmmakers of the classical studio era, albeit without the same corporate support system. Like a Michael Curtiz or Victor Fleming, Kwapis employs a self-effacing style and often […]
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Women Directors in Locarno: Anne Émond, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Petra Costa and Lea Glob
Chevalier is a film about six men vacationing on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea. After the world premiere in the main international competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, I climbed an arduous, though relatively small Swiss mountain to sit down with director Athina Rachel Tsangari during her final hours in Locarno. My own last hours in Switzerland were spent with Anne Émond, whose film Our Loved Ones also celebrated its world premiere in Locarno. Our Loved Ones is about how a suicide affects a family living in a small town outside Quebec. Both Our Loved […]
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“I Don’t Feel Like I Gave Birth to Jesus”: Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wes Craven, one of the greatest horror directors of all time, a man who directed classics in almost every decade of his professional life,passed away yesterday, August 30, of brain cancer in Los Angeles. Last October, Craven spoke to Filmmaker‘s Jim Hemphill about perhaps his most celebrated creation, A Nightmare on Elm Street. As a way of remembering Craven, we are reposting it today. On November 9, 1984, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street opened in American theaters and changed the movie industry forever. Serving as a bridge between the primal ferocity of Craven’s earlier work (Last House on […]
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Discovering the Spiritus Loci: Simone Rapisarda Casanova on The Creation of Meaning
The primary subject of The Creation of Meaning — the second feature by the delightfully named Simone Rapisarda Casanova — is the equally delightfully named Pacifico Pieruccioni, who lives in a village at the very top of the Tuscan Alps. He makes a living by selling his goats’ milk, walking briskly from his home down to a tiny locker built into the woods so customers don’t have to walk all the way up the mountain to him. In the dark forest, it seems as if the liquid is glowing, as if the light bulb Hitchcock put in a glass of milk in Suspicion had been employed here. […]
