Directors
Interviews - Directors
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A Conversation with Philippe Garrel (Part 1)
Explaining why Philippe Garrel is one of my favorite working directors can be difficult. Talking with a co-worker, I tried to sketch out his recurring interests: “he makes movies about men, often directors, who cheat on women and have trouble with themselves.” She rolled her eyes, and I’m not blaming her: what, again? Garrel began making movies as a teenager, and his early work that I’ve seen is both gorgeous and the epitome of stereotypical arthouse pretension of the period. There is 1968’s Le lit de la vierge, a very of-its-time film about a particularly mopey Jesus, and 1975’s Le berceau […]
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A Suburban Megachurch in John Hughes Territory: Stephen Cone on Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
Simultaneously a rebellious yell against Christian authority and an appreciation for growing up with evangelical values, Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is neither religious condemnation nor agitprop. Its title character is a gay teenager celebrating his birthday with friends and family; the film, unfolding over 24 hours, keenly observes how temptation and buried secrets can rise to the surface when theological and political debates make their presence known. A rather sexy movie — in part because premarital sex is presented as something risqué or taboo — Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is a beautifully rendered, impeccably scored experience that makes a profound, heady impact. There’s an interesting moment featuring a conversation […]
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5 Questions for Yosemite Writer/Director Gabrielle Demeestere
Distracted fathers and sons left to their own devices; father surrogates and the salve of friendship — these are the themes that circle around Gabrielle Demeestere’s lovely and composed feature debut, Yosemite, which opens today in New York from Monterey Media at the IFC Center. Based on two short stories by James Franco (taken from the same collection that led to the film Palo Alto), as well as Demeestere’s own original material, Yosemite is set in 1985, when pre-adolescent dangers are symbolized by mountain lions descending from the wilds into this Northern California town, and when father-son bonding trips into […]
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A Neighborhood Movie Mentored by Spike Lee: Michael Larnell on Cronies
Michael Larnell grew his black-and-white debut feature Cronies through New York University’s Graduate Film program. Executive produced by NYU professor and project advisor Spike Lee, Larnell’s film follows three young men living in St. Louis as they discuss women, drugs, and other salacious topics of interest to innocently pass the time over a twenty-four hour period. A nonchalant, unassuming look at how men externalize their emotions, Cronies’ pleasures derive from its layered, amusing screenplay, documentary-inspired character interviews, and conflicted study of how far one will go to protect their brethren. As Cronies opens this Friday in IFP’s Screen Forward screening series, I spoke with Larnell about the decision […]
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This Animated Documentary Won the IDA Award for Best Short
Last Day of Freedom is a hand-drawn animated documentary which chronicles Bill Babbitt’s relationship with his mentally ill brother, Manny, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD who was sentenced to the death penalty after murdering a woman. Using a confessional format to tell a compelling story encompassing the treatment of veterans, PTSD, mental illness, the criminal justice system, racism and family, the film won the Best Short Award at at the International Documentary Association’s IDA Awards Saturday night. Directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Last Day of Freedom has taken top prizes at a number of festivals, including the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where it won the Jury […]
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“I Don’t Want to Make Audiovisual Historical Aids”: Kent Jones on Hitchcock/Truffaut
The formal title of Hitchcock/Truffaut (alternately Hitchcock and The Cinema According to Alfred Hitchcock) is a vexed question mooted by its famous title design: Hitchcock’s name on one side, François Truffaut’s on the other. First published in 1966 and revised before Truffaut’s death, it’s one of the most commonly name-checked starter texts for anyone looking to learn more about film. In a series of extensive, probing and relatively unguarded conversations, Truffaut guides Hitchcock through his work film-by-film. Illustrated by numerous stills (including one- and two-page layouts showing every shot choice from particularly famous/intense sequences, breaking them down in a lucid, teachable way), the book allows a director in total command […]
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“There is Really No Such Thing as Objectivity in Film or in Life”: Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden on Almost There
“There was an aura of blunt truthfulness permeating his artwork, a sense of authenticity that really did pull us in” — Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden on Almost There. If you met a mildly deranged looking outsider artist painting portraits at a pierogi festival in Indiana what would you do? Personally I would smile, possibly get my portrait made and then definitely go eat a pierogi. When filmmakers Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden were presented with this scenario this is not what happened. Instead, they befriended the artist, their unlikely relationship slowly evolving into a layered folktale about creative expression […]
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“A Chance to Develop Technique”: Oliver Stone on Talk Radio
From 1986 to 1995, writer-director Oliver Stone directed ten films in ten years which, taken together, comprise the most complex, provocative, and illuminating cinematic inquiry into American values since John Ford. The magnitude of his achievement seems virtually impossible in today’s Hollywood and was probably nearly as unlikely then. After a pair of powerful independent films exploring American foreign policy in Latin America (Salvador) and Vietnam (Platoon), Stone used the commercial success of the latter to harness studio resources at the service of a series of massively ambitious works, including an epic answer to and repudiation of the postwar mythology […]
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“Always Give Exposition While Running From a Bear”: Drew and John Erick Dowdle on No Escape
For the past few years I’ve been bemoaning the decline of the mid-range genre film, the action movie or horror flick that is neither a contained micro-budget opus straining against its resources nor an oppressive studio behemoth in which all sense of character, theme, and nuance is suffocated under the weight of its own scale and CGI. That mid-range has always been the source of many of America’s best, most enduring films; it’s the arena where masters like Don Siegel, Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann plied their trade under the classical studio system, and in more recent decades auteurs like […]
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From Ida Lupino to Reese Witherspoon: Female Representation Onscreen at the Viennale and BFI Film Festival
“Hard, Fast, and Beautiful” is the title of a dedicated Ida Lupino program at the recent 53rd Vienna International Film Festival. The program is named in honor of Lupino’s film, which New York Times critic Bosley Crowther reviewed in 1951. “It simply recounts the quick parabola that a girl tennis player describes in becoming a tennis champion and then chucking it all for love,” he wrote of the “trite and foolish” script. Hard, Fast, and Beautiful was Lupino’s third directorial attempt. Well, technically, it was her fourth. When director Elmer Clifton had a heart attack in 1949 during Not Wanted, Lupino […]
