Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions for Boy Meets Girl Director Eric Schaeffer
When Filmmaker last checked in on Eric Schaeffer in 2013, he was busy making his web series, Eric Schaeffer: Life Coach. The article focused on Schaeffer’s determination to create the piece in any format necessary, as he transformed what was originally planned as a feature film into a self-produced web series that he produced himself. Schaeffer’s next project is a feature film that took much of the same DIY determination. Boy Meets Girl is a romantic coming-of-age comedy, a staple of indie fare, but here featuring a transgender protagonist. The film investigates sexual identity and gender in very relevant ways in […]
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“I Have One Camera Position Each Day”: Force Majeure Director Ruben Östlund
Structurally, tonally and formally indebted to Roy Andersson — not least in opening and closing to the sardonically mournful strains of Benny Andersson’s “Briggens blåögda blonda kapten,” along the lines of the other Andersson’s ever-present ambient musical commentary — Ruben Östlund’s second feature Involuntary lays out five situations in which people behave contrary to how they should. The entire thrust of Östlund’s multi-film project is summed up early, with an elementary school classroom recreation of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment. A subject is asked to identify which line of several on a cardboard display is the longest. Everyone in the room says the shortest line is the longest, […]
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Director Maro Chermayeff on the Independent Lens Doc A Path Appears
Two years ago a team surrounding journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof and producer Maro Chermayeff released a four-hour documentary and multimedia project called Half the Sky, a companion to WuDunn’s and Kristof’s book of the same name. It dealt with basic human rights issues for women, focusing on topics like women’s healthcare, domestic violence and rape, and girls’ education in countries like Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Somaliland, and Cambodia, and I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about its transmedia components and outreach efforts. Late last year WuDunn and Kristof released their follow-up book, A Path Appears, shifting their focus from women in extreme […]
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transmediale 2015: Vicki Bennett and Citation City
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 runs this week from January 28 through February 1, and I spoke with a number of artists who are presenting video-based pieces at the festival. British artist Vicki Bennett has been working under the name People Like Us since […]
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Online Hoax: Sophie Deraspe Discusses Her Sundance Doc The Amina Profile
Girl meets girl online. They fall in love from afar — Sandra in Montreal, Amina in Syria. The Arab uprising occurs and soon Amina, star blogger and creator of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” gets swept up in the chaos, then kidnapped, and then disappears. Her frantic paramour goes on a global quest to find her — only to discover that the game-changing World Wide Web is also a web of intrigue and deceit. Fortunately, Sophie Deraspe’s doc The Amina Profile is more than the sum of this now infamous hoax. By smartly training her lens on the unwitting victim […]
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Five Questions for Directors Bryan Carberry & Clay Tweel of Finders Keepers
An eccentric Southern tale that feels like a Harry Crews-scripted edition of Storage Wars, Finders Keepers tells the story of two men battling — in courts of law and public opinion — over the ownership of a severed foot. The foot belonged once to John Wood, amputated following a small plane crash that also killed Wood’s father. When Wood failed to make payments to his storage unit, it became the property of local North Carolina huckster Shannon Whisnant, who parlays his contested ownership of the foot into a roadside tourist attraction. Directed by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, collaborating for […]
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Five Questions for Welcome to Leith Directors Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker
Documentary has a rich history of films by filmmakers who must honestly engage subjects with odious views. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker stumbled across one such fellow in Craig Cobb, a white supremacist with a devious and possibly quite legal plan to produce a white power enclave in the American heartland. Premiering at Sundance in the Documentary Competition, their Welcome to Leith chronicles the story of the town of Leith against Cobb but also, implicitly, their own story of engaging their subject — who says he’s available for Skype interviews after the premiere. Welcome to Leith premieres Monday, […]
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Five Questions for Rick Alverson of Sundance NEXT Premiere, Entertainment
Let’s all be inspired by Rick Alverson and agree to ban the very concept of “sympathetic character” from our movie-viewing brain. We’re all fixated on this idea, that we have to “like” characters and “connect” to them. Instead, let’s just decide to be interested in watching what is put before us, and let’s let ourselves enjoy having our expectations for how we want to feel while we’re sitting in a movie theatre get subverted once in a while. Alverson — a musician as well as a filmmaker — has made three feature films before this, his latest, Entertainment. Each one […]
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“Reality is Not, I Believe, a Fixed Entity…”: Michael Madsen on Alien Encounter Doc, The Visit
As a conceptual artist Michael Madsen doesn’t so much create nonfiction films as craft mind-blowing experiences, introducing even the most jaded of us docu-philes to people and places we’d no idea even existed. (Prior to IDFA 2010 I, for one, never knew about Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility Onkalo, the subject of Madsen’s Into Eternity and an underground cavern the size of a large city set for completion in the 22nd century.) In his latest The Visit the Danish director turns his attention and limitless imagination towards mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligent life. With the help of expert guides […]
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Adam Salky On His Sarah Silverman-Starring Sundance Addiction Drama, I Smile Back
Based on Amy Koppelman’s book published by the independent press Two Dollar Radio — a book depicting the destructive despair of a housewife spiraling into drugs and bad sex — I Smile Back is being touted here at Sundance as the feature dramatic debut of Sarah Silverman, the comedian whose shocking riffs are always delivered with an unnerving sweetness and sexy demeanor. Attempting to channel — or perhaps remold — Silverman’s persona to the demands of the novel (adapted by Koppelman and Paige Dylan) is Adam Salky, who returns to Sundance following his debut picture, Dare. I Smile Back premieres […]
