Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
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Todd Solondz on Wiener-Dog, Not Directing TV and Working with “Remarkably Stupid” Dogs
Todd Solondz has been exploring his animal side. Granted, the films that first placed him at the forefront of independent American auteur cinema – Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001), and Palindromes (2004) – were well-acquainted with the bestial side of human behavior, offering unflinching and sometimes repulsive examinations of bullying, pedophilia, abortion activism, racial fetishization and the adhesive properties of semen. Since 2009’s Life During Wartime, a theoretical sequel to Happiness, Solondz has toned down the bad-boy transgressions of his first few films, allowing his humanist sympathies to rise to the surface. Building on the structural aspects […]
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“I’m Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women”: Anna Biller on The Love Witch
Over the last decade, Los Angeles-based film artist Anna Biller has eked out a small but fervid following; watching her films is like undergoing hypnosis by means of feng shui, wherein the viewer is lulled into a stilted, cheeky and brilliantly manicured simulacra of golden-era Hollywood staging, blocking and delivery. However indebted these forms are to their masculinist forebears, Biller is not content to be considered a pastiche artist: in the below discussion she concedes that her choices are guided by what gives her cinephilic pleasure, although — because? — the feminist interrogations of her work are impossible to ignore. She […]
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New Documentaries Use Animation to Bring Nonfiction Stories to Life
In recent decades, some of the best documentary films — including Oscar-winners such as Bowling for Columbine and Searching for Sugar Man, and, more recently, festival favorites Point and Shoot and Meet the Patels — have have relied on animation to tell compelling nonfiction stories in nontraditional ways. It’s a technique audiences have grown accustomed to and nonfiction filmmakers have learned to adopt with varying degrees of success. While in the past, documentary purists might have posited that animation had no place in non-fiction storytelling, it’s now largely accepted that even observational documentaries involve some degree of manipulation. If anything, by using animation in a documentary, the manipulation is more […]
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The Full-Time Job of Survival: Martin Bell on Streetwise and TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell
To revisit Martin Bell‘s landmark documentary Streetwise 32 years after its initial release is an experience that would at times seem to beggar an audience’s capacity for prejudice. Never was a community so commonly perceived as forlorn and despondent as Seattle’s homeless youth population ever depicted in such a sharp contrast to common notions of indigence. To endure the film alongside Bell’s feature-length update, TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell — made possible as part of BAMCinemaFest’s NY Premiere Double-Feature this Saturday — is to stand the test of self-questioning that belies any deeper look into the reality of poverty and its lifelong repercussions. TINY, […]
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“Whether It Takes One Camera or 12”: TV Director Anthony Hemingway on Underground and The People v. O.J. Simpson
Two of the best television series ever to tackle America’s endlessly complicated relationship with race premiered almost simultaneously in the first half of this year. First up was the FX series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, in which two of the greatest living American screenwriters, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, found their greatest subject in the tragicomic bouillabaisse of race, class, sex, and violence that was the O.J. Simpson trial. A darker and more unsettling – though no less entertaining and riveting – examination of the same issues could be found just a matter of weeks later […]
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“For Every LeBron James, There Are a Thousand Lenny Cookes”: Josh Safdie on Lenny Cooke and LeBron James
One of my favorite memories of Josh and Benny Safdie is sitting at a table with them at a gala event where they were receiving an award: their attention was on their phones the entire time because the Knicks were playing. The Safdies’ twin obsessions with basketball and filmmaking came together three years ago in making the documentary Lenny Cooke, about the rise and fall of a one-time basketball prodigy who was a rival to LeBron James. One of the most remarkable thing about the film is the way LeBron is used as a main character in the film, primarily through […]
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Watch: Directors David Farrier and Dylan Reeve on Tickled, Their Working Relationship and the Importance of Graphic Design
The documentary Tickled begins as a story about the bizarre world of competitive endurance tickling but evolves into an investigation of the ominous company behind videos in which young men tickle one another. Co-directors David Farrier (a New Zealand TV journalist) and Dylan Reeve have endured harassment and lawsuits in the process of digging into what seems to be an extended history of intimidation and coercion. Following substantial media coverage, the film is set to open in the United States on June 17 after premiering at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. I talked to the duo about what it’s like to work with a […]
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Producer Miranda Bailey Debunks Swiss Army Man Controversy and Challenges Conventions about Women in Film
You may not know Miranda Bailey’s name, but you probably know her work. As an actress, writer, director and producer, Miranda Bailey has a hand in just about every aspect of the independent film business. Early in her career, she executive produced Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and since then her producing credits have included Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind and the award-winning documentary Spinning Plates. Bailey’s production company Cold Iron Pictures was behind the award-winning 2015 Sundance sensation Diary of a Teenage Girl, in which she played a supporting role opposite Kristen Wiig. This summer two other films that […]
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“Enjoy the Ride”: Bang Gang Writer/Director Eva Husson on Female-Driven Stories, Teens and Social Media, and Learning How to Be a Director
“Enjoy the ride,” said Eva Husson before she screened her first feature film in January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Roughly 100 minutes later, a stumbling crowd poured out of the cinema as if collectively descending a roller coaster exit ramp, vertigo subsiding with each stabilizing step. Husson’s Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story , which opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 17 from Samuel Goldwyn, is about the sexual unleashing of French suburban teens and the boundaries that shape their relationships. An explosive score integrating electronic and classical music reverberates within the rhythm of the […]
