Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Director Amy Scott on Her Upcoming Doc, Once I Was: The Hal Ashby Story
You know the films — Harold and Maude, Coming Home, Shampoo, The Last Detail, and Being There – but little about the man behind them. A quarter century after his death, director Hal Ashby remains one of the more mysterious figures to emerge from the New Hollywood movement. His rise as a director coincided with the brief but glorious period in American cinema when difficult, complex films were actually supported and encouraged by studios. That era came to an end with populist hits like Jaws and Star Wars, shifting the zeitgeist towards blockbusters and making it tough for uncompromising directors […]
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Underground: Sam Fleischner on Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of the Closing Doors centers on Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a remarkably intelligent, often unfocused midrange autistic 13-year-old boy who gets lost in the NYC subway’s endless subterranean tunnels. After his older sister (Azul Zorrilla) fails to pick him up from school, Ricky finds himself entranced by the dragon decal on a stranger’s jacket while trying to get home. That Sanchez-Velez, a non-actor making his screen debut, does in fact have Asperger’s syndrome adds a layer of verisimilitude to one of the year’s most fascinating performances. Ricky is a Rockaway Beach native whose mother (Andrea Suarez Paz) is […]
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IFFBoston: Freeload Director Daniel Skaggs and Editor Ryan Seitz
For 18 months Daniel Skaggs rode freight trains with a DSLR, a consumer video camera and some GoPros, documenting the lives of train riders. The resulting film, Freeload, was co-produced and co-edited by Mather McKallor and Ryan Seitz. This was the first full-length feature film project for all three. We interviewed Skaggs and Seitz at the recent Independent Film Festival Boston, where Freeload was an official selection. Filmmaker: What is Freeload about? Seitz: It’s a documentary about modern day train riders. Daniel road trains for 18 months and really got acquainted with the guys who ultimately became the characters of […]
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Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Welcome to New York Director Abel Ferrara
It’s been the most talked about film of Cannes this year, one of the most well-reviewed yet, and it’s not even part of the competition line-up. That’s just Abel Ferrara’s style: he’s still one of the few directors who consistently manages to make films his own way, outside the typical studio system. His latest is a masterstroke of filmmaking. It’s a story that puts the fun back into cinema, a film that breathes wit, heart and imagination. The New York native returns to the Croisette with Welcome to New York, a damning film inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. The film […]
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West Memphis Redux: Atom Egoyan on Devil’s Knot
The West Memphis Three case was the subject of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s much-lauded Paradise Lost trilogy (1996, 2000, 2011), as well as Amy Berg’s 2012 West of Memphis. Each documentary chronicled the ongoing evolution of a uniquely American tragedy: the wrongful convictions of three teenage outcasts in the grotesque slayings of three eight-year-olds in West Memphis, Ark on May 5th, 1993. In Devil’s Knot, Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s fictionalized retelling of the events, the teenagers who stand accused — Jason Baldwin (Seth Meriwether), Damien Echols (James Hamrick), and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (Kris Higgins) — are clearly railroaded by local law […]
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Creating Moonshine Kingdom: An Interview with Milton Horowitz and Ryan Forte
Mooshine Kingdom director Milton Horowitz says that, like a lot of Americans, he grew up watching too much television. This eventually led to film school at Cleveland State University, where he met cinematographer Ryan Forte. “Ryan’s younger than me,” says Horowitz. “He’s 21, I’m 32, and even though we’re 11 years apart we still love the same types of films and the same movie techniques.” While this is ostensibly their first feature film, Forte says he tried to make a feature film when he was younger that became “way too long. I sent it to a film festival and it […]
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Courage of Conviction: A Conversation with Ida Director Pawel Pawlikowski
Although state-side cinephiles may not be familiar with the work of filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski or the nuances of Polish history, here at Filmmaker Magazine we suspect you’re about to find both deeply compelling. In Ida, a beautifully wrought gem of a film, the writer/director brings audiences the story of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young orphan raised by Polish Catholic nuns who meets her next of kin — the hard-drinking and cynical Wanda (Agata Kulesz) — on the eve of joining the convent, and learns that her family is Jewish. Together, the women set off on a road trip seeking the truth about their family’s past. In this conversation, Pawlikowski discusses his […]
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A Conversation with Mentor Director Alix Lambert
“It’s Better in Mentor.” A shot of that roadside sign offers an early irony in director Alix Lambert’s new documentary, named after the Ohio town — and high school — where five students committed suicide between 2005 and 2010. Focusing on two families who brought lawsuits against Mentor High, alleging that its administration ignored a clear pattern of student bullying that led to the deaths of their children, Mentor is both heartbreaking and soberly resolute in its inquiry into the institutional forces and “culture of conformity” that fail young members of our communities. As she has done in her previous […]
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Director Phillip Rodriguez and Producer Jennifer Craig-Kobzik on Life, Death and Legend in Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle
For the generations who have come of age knowing the legend of slain journalist Ruben Salazar, there is as much they don’t know about him. A new documentary, Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle, takes advantage of police records and decades of hindsight to take Salazar out of myth and give him back his humanity. The film premieres as a Special Presentation of PBS’ VOCES on Tuesday, April 29 at 9:00 PM ET. Salazar’s contribution to journalism began in the ’50s with his work as a reporter with the border daily El Paso Herald-Post in the city where he had […]
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From First AD to Director: Jono Oliver on the Making and Distribution of Home
A moving, informed tale dealing with one man’s struggle with mental illness, Jono Oliver’s debut feature Home is graced with both heart and street smarts. The film tells the tale of Jack, an outpatient hoping to leave his group home, reunite with his son, and manage life on his own. Adversity comes from both his illness but also the day-to-day realities of life in New York. Indeed, Oliver’s great achievement is to make Jack’s reality an entirely palpable one while not sugarcoating the issues of his affliction. In a film with strong performances thorughout, Jack is wonderfully played by Gbenga […]
