Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Mary Lambert on Pet Sematary, Non-Linear Narratives and Child Actors
As haunting and macabre as when it was first released in the spring of 1989, Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is fondly remembered for being one of the more faithful and rich screen adaptations of a Stephen King novel. (A documentary on the film’s production, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary, is to be released later this year.) The story of a nuclear family who move to small-town Maine and, through a series of unfortunate events (i.e. the death of a beloved feline), discover an ancient Indian burial ground that brings the dead back to life, Pet Sematary’s playfully dark twist stems from reincarnation […]
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“This is What a Movie Feels and Breathes and Looks Like”: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow on De Palma
It’s always been a convenient avenue for critical dismissal to view Brian De Palma’s films as impersonal. As the director says himself in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s eponymous documentary opening this week, he makes films from the outside in — beginning with the visual lexicon of the narrative, then connecting that architecture with living characters and scenes. Some struggle to defend their affinity for his films. The targets are legion. One is the voyeur’s presence in most of them — almost always misconstrued by detractors and, if only in the most fleeting moments, pegged as either contrivance, obsession, or […]
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Ted Kotcheff on Making First Blood, Changing Rambo’s Suicide Mission and (Not) Working with Kirk Douglas
Most filmmakers are lucky if they can master one genre in their lifetime, but over the course of a sixty-year career Ted Kotcheff has conquered several. He helmed a grimly funny suspense classic (Wake in Fright); a literate, witty Gregory Peck Western (Billy Two-Hats); fast and funny comedies (Fun with Dick and Jane, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe); and dramedies where the laughs coexist with unsettling insights into the dark side of the human condition (North Dallas Forty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). All of his films are characterized by a vibrant pictorial sense – no one […]
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Five Questions for The View from Tall Directors Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss
Hailing from the Chicago theater community is A View from Tall, a debut independent feature telling a story of teen sexuality and its collision with institutional power dynamics. Directed by Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, and based on Parrish’s play, the film deals with a loner teen, Justine, who is ostracized from her peers because of a sexual relationship with a teacher that became public. She bonds with her therapist, a disabled man with issues of his own. Since writing The View from Tall, playwright Parrish has become a successful television writer, working on shows like Supergirl and Under the Dome. […]
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Five Questions for My First Kiss and the People Involved Writer/Director Luigi Campi
Born in Rome, based in London and with a degree from Columbia University, Luigi Campi — whose debut feature, My First Kiss and the People Involved, premieres today at the Los Angeles Film Festival — is a truly international independent filmmaker. As he explains in our interview below, his Columbia colleagues are now dispersed around the globe, and his American connections and European passport allow him to slip between filmmaking scenes — or, perhaps, create a scene of his own. Witness My First Kiss, which finds him drawing fresh acting talent from the worlds of performance and visual art, music […]
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Five Questions for Paint It Black Writer/Director Amber Tamblyn
Making her feature debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival is actress, writer, director and poet Amber Tamblyn with Paint It Black, an adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel. It tells the story of two women — a punked-out nightclubber, Josie (Alia Shawkat), and an older classical pianist, Meredith (Janet McTeer) — who share a Venn-diagrammed slice of memory. Meredith is the mother of Josie’s recently suicided boyfriend, and the film finds their grief, recollections and emotional wounds intertwined within a dreamy L.A. that’s as much a psychological landscape as a real place. Below Tamblyn answers five questions about securing the […]
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Five Questions with Tracktown Directors Alexi Pappas and Jeremy Teicher
It’s rare, if not unheard of: a first-time feature film director who is also an Olympic athlete. Such is the case with competitive long distance runner Alexi Pappis, who, along with her boyfriend Jeremy Teicher (one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2013), co-wrote and co-directed Tracktown, a new feature film which will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 4. In addition, Pappas, who will compete for Greece at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Brazil, stars as Plumb Marigold, a young Olympic hopeful trying to find balance in life. Filmed and set in the real-life “Tracktown,” […]
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Five Questions with The Witness Director James Solomon
More than 50 years ago, the murder of Kitty Genovese stunned the nation when 38 witnesses in nearby apartments witnessed her brutal stabbing and did nothing. The incident came to represent urban apathy and spawned the “bystander effect” theory. But The Witness, a gripping new documentary about Genovese’s murder, challenges our long-held beliefs about the case. The directorial debut of screenwriter James Solomon, The Witness had its world premiere at the 2015 New York Film Festival and will open theatrically at New York’s IFC Center on June 3, with a national rollout to follow. The multi-layered documentary investigates what actually happened on that fateful […]
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Brian De Palma on Directing Actors and The Boardroom Scene in Scarface
A master director gets the cinematic treatment he deserves in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, which is quite simply the greatest film about filmmaking that I’ve ever seen. That it consists almost entirely of a feature-length interview with its subject, interspersed with impeccably selected clips from his films, makes it all the more remarkable – it’s a deceptively simple piece of work that yields infinite insights. Using the intimacy gained from their years-long friendship with the auteur, Baumbach and Paltrow interrogate Brian De Palma about each of his films in chronological order, and the result is not only […]
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Remaining Gaps: Thom Andersen Discusses The Thoughts That Once We Had
The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015) takes the form of a conversation. The most recent feature by American filmmaker Thom Andersen unfolds as a running dialogue between him and the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote extensively about cinema. Throughout this new film, clips from older films are interwoven with lines of text that appear onscreen — some of which are direct quotations from Deleuze, and some of which are personal ruminations, responses, and elaborations from Andersen, who taught his two volumes on cinema for a quarter-century at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). A few of […]
