Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Director James Ponsoldt on his David Foster Wallace Drama, The End of the Tour
Are you one to meet your heroes? By reading, watching, listening to their work, do you feel a connection to them? Or are they enigmas whose mysteries you need to crack? In the world of contemporary letters, few figures loom as large as David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling, wickedly funny, fiercely observant works grappled with both the necessity and near impossibility of sincere, non-ironic expression in the age of commodified mass media and a meaningless public discourse. In essays about punctuation and cruise ships, tennis stars and cooked lobsters, and in stories and novels including his protean cultural phenomenon, Infinite […]
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“I Wanted the Film to Feel Like a Christmas Tree Ornament from your Attic”: Charles Poekel on Sundance NEXT Film Christmas Again
With Charles Poekel’s charmingly melancholy debut, Christmas, Again, the independent film maxim “write what you know” gains a corollary: “write what you can learn.” For his tale of a withdrawn Christmas tree salesmen just trying to get through the season, again, Poekel gained knowledge of his protagonist’s trade by opening and operating his own stand in Greenpoint — a job he’s still doing five years later. Defiantly non-melodramatic and with the well-worn feel of a ’70s New York character study, Christmas, Again has both poetry and an unprepossessing air. In other words, it’s a perfect holiday visitor. Christmas, Again premiered […]
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Spirituality in the South: Something, Anything‘s Paul Harrill and Ashley Maynor
An alum of the 2013 IFP Filmmaker Labs (an experience he wrote about here), Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything is less saccharine than truthful. A quietly meditative, regional production, Harrill’s debut feature follows Peggy (Ashley Shelton), a young Southern woman who, after a series of tragic personal events, begins a spiritual quest to better herself as an individual with altruistic intentions. Ethereal throughout, Harrill’s film displays an assured, contemplative expressiveness behind the camera. The writer/director and his producing partner, Ashley Maynor, are as much advocates for strong storytelling in their own work as they are for encouraging it in the films of […]
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Buying a Burning Building: J.C. Chandor on A Most Violent Year
As a moviegoer, there are few things I find more satisfying than a filmmaker who not only fulfills but wildly exceeds the promise of their early work. With his third film, A Most Violent Year, writer-director J.C. Chandor has done just that, elaborating upon the themes and techniques of his previous movies (Margin Call and All is Lost) to create a work far deeper and more ambitious than anything he’s done before. It’s another portrait of men and women under extreme pressure, but this time the broader implications are simultaneously more complex and more seamlessly woven into the narrative. Ambitious immigrant Abel […]
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“A Little Person Against the Government Machine”: Andrey Zvyagintsev on Leviathan
When Andrey Zvyagintsev brought Elena — his corrosively apocalyptic attack on the Russian oligarchy— to Cannes in 2011, he was alternately direct and evasive about its pessimistic national diagnosis. One interviewer was informed Zvyagintsev had considered calling the film Invasion of the Barbarians, but was another was told that focusing on class issues was missing the larger moral point. Much has changed in three years, and in interviews Zvyagintsev has been adamant that his fourth feature isn’t exactly what it appears to be — i.e., another head-on broadside against different segments of Russia’s ruling class. Leviathan can be unreductively considered a direct continuation/extension of Elena‘s line of argument, not least in again […]
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“I Don’t Know If Camus Would Have Approved”: Five Questions for Far From Men Director David Oelhoffen
David Oelhoffen’s latest film, Far From Men, is based on Albert Camus’ short story “The Guest.” Set during the Algerian War and shot in the manner of a Western, the film features a French and Arabic-speaking Viggo Mortensen as Daru, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria required, against his will, to transport murderous prisoner Mohamed (Reda Kateb) to meet his justice. The two men must confront their own morality and each other against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. The powerful film recently played at the Marrakech International Film Festival, near where the film was shot. Mortensen received a career tribute award for the […]
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“We Know How a Solar Panel is Made”: The Dardennes on Two Days, One Night
As a parable of solidarity, Two Days is programmatic and predictable in a way that’s new to the Dardenne brothers, and not in a good way; as a streamlined narrative, it’s impeccably crafted. The straight-up chase scene dropped into 2005’s L’enfant — a potential audition for a rote action film should they ever feel so inclined — indicated Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s handheld, ever-impassioned kineticism was reaching new levels of sheer technical proficiency. Two Days, One Night presents the dilemma of Sandra (Marion Cotillard) — fired from her solar panel factory job, ostensibly so the plant can remain competitive on a playing field leveled by Chinese labor. It’s clear […]
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“Scary and Sad and Difficult and Funny and Erotic and Exciting”: Angus MacLachlan on Goodbye to All That
Goodbye to All That‘s protagonist Otto Wall is a limited man — the type of man who just goes along with the flow, who doesn’t try to ruffle feathers. He’s not stupid, but neither is he gifted with remarkable intelligence. He has a good job, an attractive if possibly overbearing wife (Melanie Lynskey) and an adorable, auburn-haired daughter who is quickly turning into a North Carolina Methodist. He’s lucky, at least until he isn’t. Played with gentle moxie by Paul Schneider, in his most memorable motion picture role since Dick Liddil in The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert […]
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“I Always Try to Find Something Better”: Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Winter Sleep
Over the course of his seven feature films – the last five of which have won prizes at Cannes – the Turkish filmmaker and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan has moved from a dramaturgy primarily based in photography (in films such as 2002’s Distant) to one based firmly in screenwriting, as in the elegant structure and dialogues of 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. This development as a screenwriter has been accomplished in tandem with his wife, Ebru Ceylan, with whom he has co-written the last three films. Nuri Bilge Ceylan was trained first as a chemical and then electrical […]
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“The Last 50 Years Destroyed Our Old World”: Five Questions for Actress/Director Mélanie Laurent
French actress Mélanie Laurent may be best known to American audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. But in addition to acting in over 35 international roles, Laurent has also directed two feature films. Based on the YA novel by Anne-Sophie Brasme, her latest film Breathe premiered at Cannes this year. Laurent expertly crafts the world of adolescent codependency. She claims she’s learned from every director she’s worked with: one tip she stole from Tarantino is to play music in between scenes to get people to be more comfortable on the set. Laurent served on the […]
