Directors
Interviews - Directors
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The Reagan Years Producer Sierra Pettengill on the Textures of Archival Footage, the Value of Community and Pitching at CPH:FORUM
In the decade after graduating magna cum laude from Boston University, Sierra Pettengill hasn’t wasted much time carving a niche for herself in competitive New York City as an award-winning producer. Originally from nearby Nassau County, she has utilized her wide-ranging interests, innate curiosity, whip-smart instincts and indefatigable work ethic to establish herself rather quickly in an increasingly tough marketplace. She was exposed early on in her career to the PBS model as an associate producer for American Experience’s Walt Whitman (an Emmy Award nominee in 2008), and Triangle Fire, a Peabody Award recipient in 2009. She would partner again […]
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Kickstarting the Joan Didion Documentary We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
One of the most high-profile projects to take advantage of Kickstarter’s support system, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live turns its lens onto Joan Didion. President Barack Obama referred to her as “one of the most celebrated American writers of her generation” when presenting her with the 2012 National Humanities Medal, adding “I’m surprised she hasn’t already gotten this award.” It’s equally surprising that no documentary has yet been made about the essayist, journalist, novelist and screenwriter. That changed when her nephew made the pitch. Actor, director and producer Griffin Dunne is related to Didion through his father Dominick, whose younger brother John Gregory was married […]
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“You Might as Well be Selling Drugs”: Robert Greene on Actress
“I consider the industrious Robert Greene a friend, but that makes me no less cautious in deeming his new film Actress a big deal,” I wrote after seeing the film at True/False this year. The quick takeaway: This collaborative psychodrama follows and subjectively sculpts his friend/neighbor Brandy Burre’s attempt to simultaneously separate from her longtime boyfriend and return to the acting world she left for suburban motherhood. Sliding from seemingly straightforward self-presentation to ambiguously unfeigned snapshots of daily life, director and subject collude, not so much valorizing her attempts to jumpstart her career and finances (“I have to make a […]
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Shouting Loudly through Social Issue Documentary: Orlando von Einsiedel on Virunga
The most notable moment of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival arguably occurred over 6,000 miles away from downtown Manhattan in the Virunga National Park, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Two days before Orlando von Einsiedel premiered his film Virunga — a stunning documentary about the park and rangers’ attempts to protect its wildlife from poachers, civil war, and a billion-dollar oil company — park director Emmanuel de Merode was ambushed and shot while driving alone in his car. He survived the ordeal and has returned to work, but the moment highlighted the issues the film explores, primarily environmental […]
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“Always Have a Low-Budget Back-Up Plan”: Whit Stillman in Wroclaw
Long regarded as one of the more singular, idiosyncratic voices in American independent cinema, Whit Stillman made his debut in 1990 with Metropolitan, the Oscar-nominated comedy of manners. Further dialogue-heavy comedies set among the urban haute bourgeoisie followed (1994’s Barcelona, 1998’s The Last Days of Disco), but it took another 13 years for Stillman to release a fourth film: 2011’s peppy Damsels In Distress. Yet with the pilot of a new Amazon series — Paris-set The Cosmopolitans —recently released to strong reviews, and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s short novel Lady Susan in the cards, it seems like Stillman is truly back in business. At the recent 5th annual American Film Festival […]
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Five Questions for St. Vincent Writer/Director Ted Melfi
With his debut feature, St. Vincent, Ted Melfi may seem like one of those out-of-nowhere independent sensations that pops on the scene a few times a year. But as he explains in the interview below, he has actually been behind the camera for years — shooting all styles of commercials and music videos — and has been producing independent films for even longer. (And, as he further explains, all those out-of-nowhere people — they didn’t come from nowhere either.) For St. Vincent, Melfi drew on his own family experiences — and star Bill Murray’s unique mixture of irreverence and poignancy […]
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“Nothing is Simple, Nothing is Easy”: Two Shots Fired Director Martín Rejtman
Its title threatens a sudden loud blast, but Two Shots Fired wrongfoots viewers when its first sound isn’t from a gun but the jolting bass in a club where young Mariano (Rafael Federman) is dancing. He leaves, goes home, mows the lawn, finds a gun in the shed and fires twice — once at his head, once at his stomach, an action taken with the same blankfaced lack of passion as all the ones preceding it. “It was an impulse,” he non-explains. “It was very hot.” Mother Susana (Susana Pampin) removes all knives and other potential implements of self-harm from the house and has Mariano move in with […]
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“My Vampire has a Beer Gut”: Director Onur Tukel on Summer of Blood
Charmingly crude and equipped with the gift of gab, filmmaker and painter Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood is a Brooklyn-set vampire comedy with a love for witty banter. The film’s writer, director, and editor, Tukel also stars as the pugnacious Erik, a fast-talking pessimist who shoots down a marriage proposal from his longtime girlfriend. Now a solitary bachelor with a dead-end job, Erik takes to the streets to contemplate life and has an unfortunate encounter with an ominous vampire. A thirst for blood, a higher sex drive and fear of sunlight soon follow. Watching Summer of Blood, you observe a lead at […]
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“We’re Doing All the President’s Men, and Then We’re Doing The Parallax View“: Michael Cuesta on Kill the Messenger
Although it is a ’90s-set story dealing with an ‘80s political cover-up, Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger, the true story of journalist Gary Webb, couldn’t be more of the moment. When filmmaker Laura Poitras is documenting the work of a new breed of crusading journalists, it’s enlightening to revisit the work of a writer like Webb and to remember the opposition he faced from not only the U.S. government but his fellow scribes in the mainstream press. In Kill the Messenger, Jeremy Renner delivers a quietly gripping turn as the San Jose Mercury News reporter who comes across information revealing […]
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“Set Up like Drama, Shot like Documentary”: 20,000 Days on Earth Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
The Guardian recently republished a 1988 profile of Nick Cave in which the infuriated musician veered over the course of days from open, insightful and analytical to infuriatedly seething “I have to spend hours talking to fucking idiots like you who have no kind of notion about anything” and throwing a boot at his interlocutor. As with Richard Hell — who over decades went from alarming Lester Bangs for his nihilistic abandon to writing poetry reviews for The New York Times — Cave is a former self-destructive dark messiah turned elder statesman, a respected screenwriter and still recording/touring musician who’s […]
