Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Interview with The Sleepwalker Director/writer Mona Fastvold
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Fastvold: I’ve always been compelled tell a story about the complex relationship between sisters (I’m one of five). It’s a unique and naturally beautiful bond; the strange way siblings so easily regress into childhood patterns and the intense love and jealousy between them… All that instinctual competitiveness and care. Filmmaker: How much of your crew was female? Was hiring women a consideration for you? Fastvold: In fact, the crew was female by majority but that was just by chance! Filmmaker: How did you go about raising funding for it? Fastvold: I had made a […]
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Interview with Mr leos caraX Director Tessa Louise Salomé
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Salomé: The movie picked me up. As I was working on Holy Motors, I started to collect bits and pieces, archives, anything that was part of Leos Carax’s universe. When I realized how much I had gathered, it became obvious that I couldn’t stop there. I dived right into his world… and without even noticing it, I started to make the film. It was exciting to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding him. Seeing all of his movies again was an extraordinary experience: they haven’t aged a bit. They may even be more […]
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Women of Sundance: Appropriate Behavior
“So, is this exciting to you, or, like, totally normal by now?” director Desiree Akhavan asked her executive producer, Katie Mustard, when we three met over coffee just two weeks after their film, Appropriate Behavior, was accepted into Sundance’s NEXT section. While this is Akhavan and her London-based producer Cecilia Frugiuelle’s first time at Sundance, Mustard has had nine films there – seven features and two shorts. Mustard had been drawn to come on board Akhavan’s film because the script was “just so good” and so “fresh.” Akhavan, who stars in the film as an Iranian-American bisexual struggling to find […]
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Interview with The Disobedient Director Mina Đukić
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Đukić: I wanted to stop asking myself “why” about things that were haunting me and instead start a journey of both finding answers and losing them on my way. I felt the urge to express my feelings about many ambiguous and tickling things. Filmmaker: How much of your crew was female? Was hiring women a consideration for you? Đukić: Less than 10. Hiring a main actress with attitude, sensibility and energy that I enjoyed was a consideration for me. Once that worked, we could unleash enough female energy to […]
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Women of Sundance: Land Ho!
When I went to meet Land Ho! co-director Martha Stephens and producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy in their color correction suite in Midtown NYC, they were in fuzzy sweaters with zigzag lines, and were laughing often – which makes sense as their film is a road trip comedy set in Iceland (about two older men who must contend with life after retirement). Just months earlier these sweaters had shielded their crew against the vibrant and freezingly unpredictable Icelandic elements during the production of their film (and kept them warm after getting out of dips in the hot springs – […]
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Women of Sundance: The Foxy Merkins
“How elaborate is the camera?” The Foxy Merkins director Madeleine Olnek texted me as I was walking to photograph her with her female laden crew at Columbus Circle. “We would like to stage ourselves being hit by a cab,” she explained simply and obviously. As it happened, a few months prior to making The Foxy Merkins, a film about lesbian hookers, Olnek was in a taxi driven by a woman named Debbie. They got to talking and Debbie threw out the “If you ever need an [insert random gender, race, or career here]” phrase filmmakers always get. In Debbie’s case it […]
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Interview with Low Down Writer Amy Albany
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Albany: The genesis of the movie was a memoir I wrote 10 years ago about growing up in 1970’s Hollywood with my dad who was a talented jazz pianist, and a diehard junkie. Albert Berger & Ron Yerxa of Bona Fide Productions came to my first ever book signing, at Book Soup. Albert said they thought Low Down should be a movie. I thought somebody had put them up to it – you know, as a joke. I checked them out, found out they were legit, to say the least! […]
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Interview with Imperial Dreams Producer Katherine Fairfax Wright
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Fairfax Wright: I guess the most apparent reason behind me producing Imperial Dreams was that the director Malik Vitthal is one of my closest friends and I was eager to help bring his vision through to fruition. When we first met a few years back at LAFF, he mentioned that he was working on a script set in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts. It piqued my interest because it’s the same housing project that I had spent quite a bit of time at during elementary school. My […]
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Interview with Fed Up Director Stephanie Soechtig
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Soechtig: The original idea for the film was actually Katie’s (Couric). She liked the way my last film (Tapped) took the issue of bottled water and tied it to so many bigger issues (chemicals in plastic, plastic pollution, the global water crisis) and she thought the childhood obesity epidemic could use the same approach. I was a bit apprehensive at first — haven’t we heard all there is to know about childhood obesity? But as I dug in to the story I discovered we have really only scratched the surface. […]
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Five Questions with Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter Directors David & Nathan Zellner
David and Nathan Zellner are longtime stalwarts of the Sundance Film Festival, and the American microbudget film scene in general, carving out a niche for themselves over the last decade-plus as purveyors of a uniquely strange brand of Americana. Their feature work (including 2012’s haunting Kid-Thing) and their idiosyncratic and unforgettable shorts (Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, don’t worry, lives up to its title) have long found the Zellners fascinated with contemporary American folklore and fairy tales, and their newest film, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, is no exception. Based on the true story of a Japanese woman who traveled from Tokyo […]
