Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Take What You Can Carry Director Matthew Porterfield, Producer Zsuzsanna Kiràly and d.p. Jenny Lou Ziegel on Collaborating Outside the System in Germany
With only three features under his belt, Matthew Porterfield has proven himself one of the most original voices in low-budget independent cinema, winning deserved praise from critics and audiences in both the US and Europe. Last year Porterfield made his first short film, the 30-minute Take What You Can Carry, which had its world premiere at the 2015 Berlinale. Inspired by a quote from French author Georges Perec, this self-described meditation on “communication, creativity and physical space” finds the Baltimore native working once more (in a somewhat more abstract mode than his features) with girlfriend Hannah Gross as Lilly, an American in […]
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“There’s No Space for that Old Style of the Big Barking Orders Coming from the Big Man”: Debra Granik Talks Documentary Filmmaking on the She Does Podcast
We’re so excited and honored to feature Debra Granik in our fourth episode of She Does. Granik is the Academy Award-nominated director and writer of Winter’s Bone, which features a young Jennifer Lawrence in a gripping story set in the Ozarks. Winter’s Bone won several awards including the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It also received four 2011 Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. Previously, she wrote and directed Down to the Bone, starring Vera Farmiga. Her narrative work is heavily influenced by real life […]
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transmediale 2015: Erica Scourti, Banks of Body Parts and Body Scan
Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. I spoke with a number of artists who presented video-based pieces at the festival. Erica Scourti (seen above in an image from another project) is an Athens-born, London-based artist focusing on video art and, increasingly, Internet-centered artwork; as she describes below, her work gradually transformed […]
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transmediale 2015: Nicolas Maigret, BitTorrent and The Pirate Cinema
Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. It ran last week, and I spoke with a number of artists who presented video-based pieces at the festival. Nicolas Maigret is a French artist who has been active since 2001. His work explores the internal functioning of media like the Internet by making its processes — […]
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“I Had to Be Initiated, Shave My Head, Be Frightened”: Teboho Edkins’ Gangster Project at transmediale 2015
Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. It ran from January 28 through February 1, and I spoke with a number of artists who presented video-based pieces at the festival. Teboho Edkins (on the right, above) is an American-born filmmaker who grew up in Lesotho, South Africa, Germany, and France. His work blends […]
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Five Women Directors Discuss Their Art and Craft at the Berlin Film Festival
I walked out after the first 15 minutes of 50 Shades of Grey. Granted, I thought I was walking into a meeting, so this unexpected private screening caught me off guard. I was also thrown by the venue’s attempt to mirror the film’s billion-dollar company, “Grey Enterprises.” Christian Grey impersonators literally barked orders and insults at the arriving guests. This did not get me in the mood. Also, the film was dubbed in German (which is not to say that I would have preferred to suffer through it in English). Somewhere between the 15 minutes of 50 shades of folly […]
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“To Film Children in Ways You Don’t Usually See on Film”: Amanda Rose Wilder on Approaching the Elephant
A gripping, obsessively watchable observation of adolescent behavior set free, first time feature filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder’s Approaching the Elephant finds its inspiration in the inaugural semester of New Jersey’s Teddy McArdle Free School. Following co-founder Alex Khost, a wide-eyed, determined optimist who dreams of (and gets his chance to) run a not-entirely-anarchistic Free School, the film immerses itself amongst the young children experiencing a drastically unfamiliar educational environment. Neither polemical condemnation nor evidence of its success, Wilder’s camera observes the “experiment’s” highs and lows, as school rules/punishments are democratically voted on by the students. Lovingly photographed (post-converted to black-and-white) and framed in the […]
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Coming of Age While Dying: Henry Corra on Farewell to Hollywood
In the late ‘70s, Henry Corra was attending Franconia College, a small experimental liberal arts school in New Hampshire. While there, he and his classmates watched a film called Grey Gardens. Immediately upon graduation, with a smoking-hot performing arts degree in hand, he made his way to New York City and made a beeline to the offices of Albert and David Maysles, the directors of this film that had galvanized him. He told them he wanted to work for them. They promptly hired him. The first time I met Henry was in 2008 at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). […]
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Benson Lee on Returning to His Independent Roots with the Sundance Comedy, Seoul Searching
Korean-American filmmaker Benson Lee won the Jury Prize at Sundance with his Competition Drama, Miss Monday, in 1998. A decade later he returned with Planet B-Boy, a critically-acclaimed, commercially-successful doc about breakdancing crews competing in an international competition. Lee’s success with Planet B-Boy led to both a studio deal and a career setback. Battle of the Year, a Sony production based on B-Boy, was as critically derided as the doc was praised, and it was a commercial failure to boot. This year, Lee returned to the site of his Miss Monday success — the Sundance Film Festival — with an […]
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“It’s Too Important to be Tucked Away for Another 30 Years”: Don Argott on Kickstarting Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
Don Argott’s interests are eclectic, to say the least. Just in the past five years the Philly-based documentarian has followed the downward spiraling of rock stars, explored a nuclear-reactor community and, most recently, launched a Kickstarter campaign for his latest project Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The in-production doc is co-directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm co-creator Bob Weide and is about his decades-long attempt to make his own film about the iconic author, who in the process became a close friend. Argott spoke with Filmmaker about meeting Weide at an overseas film festival, going the indie financing route, and how […]
