Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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Transmedia is Still So Young: Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta on Last Hijack Interactive
Access is always an issue with documentary, creating unique challenges in war zones or similar areas where filmmakers would be in physical danger or simply cannot go. The documentary Last Hijack, produced by Submarine Channel and directed by Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta, doesn’t just deal with these issues but makes them one of the film’s greatest strengths. In documenting piracy in Somalia, the filmmakers turned to techniques like animation — Pallotta produced both Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly — to show what could not be filmed, and then went one step further by creating an interactive documentary to accompany the traditional linear film. […]
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Creatures and Class Politics: Travis Knight, Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable on The Boxtrolls
The latest animated feature from Laika, the Portland-based studio that delivered Coraline and ParaNorman, is a surprisingly idiosyncratic blend of children’s adventure and political satire. Based on Alan Snow’s novel, Here Be Monsters, Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable’s The Boxtrolls is set in the steampunk-inspired British town of Cheesebridge, a ruthlessly classist society where, you guessed it, cheese is the unifying luxury good. The boxtrolls — little creatures who live in cardboard boxes — are the literal lower class. (They live underground.) The story kicks into gear as a human boy, Eggs, raised by the boxtrolls ventures above ground, meets […]
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Film as Sushi: :: kogonada on Chris Marker, Criterion and the Art of the Film Essay
As part of our screening of short films by the 2014 25 New Faces at the IFC Center tonight will be two works by :: kogonada, the somewhat mysterious, Nashville-based film essayist whose works have scored hundreds of thousands of views on Vimeo and other platforms. Whether he’s assessing hand gestures in the work of Robert Bresson, one-point perspective in the films of Stanley Kubrick or pinpointing the salient characteristics of neorealism, :: kogonada brings a precision, delicacy and poetry to film studies. At the IFC Center tonight he’ll be screening his essay on narrative in the work of Steven […]
