Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Bridging Ford and Antonioni with Jack Nicholson: Monte Hellman on The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind
In July of 1964, director Monte Hellman and actor Jack Nicholson went to the Philippines to shoot two war movies back to back: Flight to Fury, which Nicholson also wrote, and Back Door to Hell. By June of 1965, Hellman and Nicholson had shot two more movies, the Westerns The Shooting (written by future Five Easy Pieces scribe Carole Eastman under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and Ride in the Whirlwind (scripted by Nicholson). Four movies in twelve months, and not one of them shows any sense of a director straining against limitations of time and money. To the contrary, The Shooting is a flat-out masterpiece, a […]
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Five Questions with Monsieur Le President Director Victoria Campbell
World premiering tonight at DOC NYC is Monsieur Le President, the sophomore feature documentary from New York-based visual artist and filmmaker Victoria Campbell. In 2010, Campbell and a friend travelled to Haiti to volunteer after that country’s devastating earthquake. There she met Gaston Jean Edy, a voodoo priest, and returned over three years to film a doc that tracks both his efforts to start a local medical clinic as well as her own complicated friendship with her subject. Below, Campbell and I talk about the complications of that relationship, filming in disaster zones and one shared favorite movie. Filmmaker: Tell […]
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Five Questions for Sex and Broadcasting Director Tim K. Smith
The title Sex and Broadcasting may be a grabber, but I doubt any listener of WFMU — and, over the years, there have undoubtedly been millions — needs the hint of salaciousness to tune in to a documentary about the country’s preeminent long-running free form radio station. Indeed, the URL of the film’s website — WFMUtheMovie — might just suffice. In a landscape of Clear Channel-produced corporate playlists, WFMU’s rambunctious, highly personal and often deeply weird deejays continue to offer not just a palette for the ears but an inspiring and enduring vision of independent media. Longtime documentary editor Tim […]
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“We Have to Make a Creepy Movie in These Woods”: Director Josephine Decker and DP Ashley Connor
Since premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild & Lovely, the remarkably assured debut feature-length films from Josephine Decker (one of the 25 New Faces of Film of 2013), have received much praise and bewilderment throughout their international festival circuit run. It speaks to Thou Wast‘s uncategorizable nature that it played at the celebrity-touted AFI Fest, the indie stalwart BAMcinemaFest, and the heavily-genre-oriented Fantasia International Film Festival. Experimental narratives with an intense focus on the frightening extremes of sexuality, the musically-inclined films feature a remarkable blend of both visual and literary poetry; everyone from Onur Tukel to […]
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“It’s Such a Weird Story”: Bennett Miller on Foxcatcher
When I wrote about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher a couple of months ago after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival, I called it “extraordinary… a subtle yet extremely unnerving examination of how family, class, and competition inform and are informed by the American dream.” There’s always a little danger in writing about a movie in the heat of film festival hysteria, as one can easily overrate (or underrate) a film under the pressure of weighing in with an immediate opinion. In the time since Telluride, however, my admiration for Foxcatcher has only grown upon reflection; the supremely confident restraint of Miller’s visual style and the psychologically and […]
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“Women Directors are One More Problem We Don’t Need”: Joan Micklin Silver on Chilly Scenes of Winter
Released in 1975, Joan Micklin Silver’s feature debut Hester Street is the story of immigrant Jews assimilating with various degrees of success to turn-of-the-century New York City. She followed with two contemporary works: 1977’s Boston alt-paper story Between the Lines and 1979’s Chilly Scenes of Winter. The latter is set to screen tomorrow at NYC’s IFC Center as part of the “Celluloid Dreams” series, whose premise would not have made sense in the very recent pre-DCP past: it aims to show repertory cinema on 35mm. Chilly Scenes is based on Ann Beattie’s first novel, which primarily concerns itself with Charles (John Heard) and his deathless, […]
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“There are No Restrictions, Except For Pornographic Material:” Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld on High Maintenance
High Maintenance, the widely reputed, gold standard of web series, began as an experiment of sorts between Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. When interviewed for our 2013 25 New Faces issue, the pair expressed the foremost need to “get out all these weird stories that have happened over the years.” Now Vimeo’s first venture into original programming, the husband and wife team are pushing the envelope in a whole new way. With episodes nearing a 20-minute runtime and tonal highs and lows as accomplished as any feature film, High Maintenance challenges the very serial format it calls home. As of today, all three episodes from […]
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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 […]
