Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Wes Anderson on Using Throwback Ratios, Romantic Worldviews, and European Reconnaissance to Craft The Grand Budapest Hotel
For all the ways his work speaks to today’s Generation Irony, Wes Anderson is an unmistakable romantic — a man who grew up with a great love of classics, be they in the realms of cinema, literature or art. All of those things converge in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s sweeping, nostalgic, and career-topping new film, which sees him confronting history on a global scale — in his own way, of course. The movie takes place in a number of eras, most notably 1932, when, in the fictional yet familiar land of Zubrowka, wars are brewing and lives are changing […]
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The Women of SXSW: Kelly & Cal Director Jen McGowan
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of pieces highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this email interview, she talks with the director of the Narrative Spotlight film, Kelly & Cal, Jen McGowan. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? McGowan: I loved the script. I loved the script and I loved the writer. And I could see it. I could see that I could do something special with it. This project originated at a USC alumni program called USC First Team which connected […]
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The Women of SXSW: Honeymoon Writer/Director Leigh Janiak
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of pieces highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this email interview, she talks with the writer/director of Honeymoon, Leigh Janiak. Honeymoon screens today in the Midnighters section. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Janiak: My writing partner Phil and I had been writing together for years, and finishing a script is satisfying, but it’s never really a finished project… So I think it was sometime in 2010, after seeing Monsters and Tiny […]
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The Women of SXSW: I Was a Teenage Girl Director Augustine Frizzell
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of pieces highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this email interview, she talks with the director of Augustine Frizzell, whose I Was a Teenage Girl premieres in the Texas Shorts program. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Frizzell: I started with the concept of three shorts about three separate pairs of girls, all around age 15, entering a period in their lives where the issues they’re faced with rapidly change from […]
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Director James Costa on his School Lunch Nutrition Doc, Lunch Hour
For many American children, school lunch is the only full meal they receive each day. Which is one reason filmmaker James Costa was surprised to see the quality–or lack of it–going into children’s lunches in New York City. He quickly decided the subject warranted a feature-length documentary, and the result is Lunch Hour, which launched Tuesday on multiple VOD platforms. Featuring celebrities like Kirsten Gillibrand and Rachael Ray, the film looks at the systemic causes behind school lunch menus and potential solutions to nutritional deficiencies. I talked with Costas about his reasons for making the film, his release strategy, and […]
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“I Wanted to Live in That World From Morning to Evening”: Fyodor Bondarchuk on Stalingrad
Fyodor Bondarchuk’s father Sergei made the 1967 War And Peace, a famously profligate Soviet production with thousands of army soldiers as extras and the biggest budget in the USSR’s history. His son came up through music videos and advertisements, making a splash with 2005’s Afghan War drama The 9th Company. The lavish Stalingrad was shot in two parts, as much as possible in 3D; if nothing else, it’ll go down in a sub-section of film history as Russia’s first IMAX film. It’s a tremendously odd film, the kind of overtly nationalistic take on the WWII battle you’d expect from an […]
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Loving Vincent: Animation in Oil
In an age when everything has already been done, it’s a rare feat to devise a way to make a film that no one has ever tried before. But that’s what the team behind Loving Vincent did when they decided to make their film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life by animating with actual oil paintings, each one executed by a professional artist on a full-sized canvas — in the style of Van Gogh himself, of course. As anyone who remembers the Van Gogh sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams knows, the effect of the master’s artwork on […]
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Con Game: David Grovic on The Bag Man
In David Grovic’s The Bag Man, John Cusack plays the title character, a courier for an underworld figure named Dragna (a genuinely terrific Robert De Niro), who’s charged with fetching a mysterious bag and staying put in a fleabag motel until the silver-suited and -haired criminal overlord can come to pick up the goods. It’s the type of movie that has no business being good and not just because the constituent parts feel, well, worn out — the motel that the movie takes place in bears an eerily resemblance to the one Cusack spent most of the forgettable 2003 thriller […]
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Dead Dad: Keeping Ultra-Low-Budget Productions Alive
Dead Dad, out now on VOD through FilmBuff, is quite a debut, a mature and entertaining first feature from writer/director Ken J. Adachi. Financed mainly via Kickstarter and from the director’s own pocket, it was shot in 15 days on a Canon 5D Mark II and with a crew of eight or nine people, all volunteers. The film tells the story of three estranged siblings who meet at their father’s funeral and are forced to spend time together while working out what to do with his remains. Filmmaker spoke with Adachi and his co-writer Kyle Arrington (who also plays Russell […]
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The Shape of Something Squashed Director Tom Noonan on How Jennifer Lawrence Inspired His New Play
Playwright, actor, director and screenwriter Tom Noonan is currently debuting his latest play, The Shape of Something Squashed, at New York’s Paradise Factory, but it might never have been written if it weren’t for an invitation to meet with Jennifer Lawrence one day. I’ll let Noonan tell the story below, but suffice to say that the bent emotions and darkly comic introspection that near-encounter produced are the stuff Noonan has memorably mined in his writing and directing work for years. Noonan’s film roles include singular turns in Heat, Mystery Train, Manhunter, Synecdoche, New York, and House of the Devil, to […]
