Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Jake Price on Unknown Spring and Documenting the Japanese Tsunami
Jake Price may primarily be known as a photojournalist, working for outlets like the BBC and the New York Times. But with his latest project, Unknown Spring, he’s strengthening a new identity as an immersive, interactive documentary filmmaker. As his thoughts below illustrate, however, he sees photojournalism, traditional film, and online interactive media all as an extension of nonfiction storytelling–different tools to explore In March 2011 he journeyed to the Tohoku region of Japan to document the devastation left in the wake of the Pacific tsunami. That project eventually became an html5 website featuring photographs, audio recordings, full-motion video, and […]
-
The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on How to Interview
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we are featuring a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature length documentary film Neurotypical is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of Oscar nominated documentary on deafness Sound and Fury. Here the two compare their different interview techniques. Click here to watch Larsen’s Neurotypical, an exploration into living with autism and how it reflects on what it means to be “normal”, […]
-
“25 New Faces” Josephine Decker and Lauren Wolkstein on Hitchcock and the Choreography of Sex Scenes
Just named as two of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Josephine Decker and Lauren Wolkstein have both produced an impressive body of work that has placed them as bold, young voices on the independent film scene. Decker’s feature Butter on the Latch premiered to strong reviews, including a New Yorker article that called her film “an utter exhilaration of cinematic imagination.” An actor in many of Joe Swanberg’s films, Decker is finishing her new feature film Thou Wast Mild and Lovely while Wolkstein, whose short Social Butterfly premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and whose The Strange Ones showed at SXSW […]
-
The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on Documenting Culture
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we are featuring a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature length documentary film Neurotypical is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of Oscar nominated documentary on deafness Sound and Fury. Here the two consider their work helps to define different cultures. Click here to watch Larsen’s Neurotypical, an exploration into living with autism and how it reflects on what it […]
-
How Lee Daniels Made The Butler His Own
When it comes to the hubbub, headlines, and advertising that predated the release of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, it’s best that you forget what you’ve heard, barring whatever thoughtful reviews or interviews you’ve come across. A decades-spanning epic primed and packaged for awards buzz, the film has been sold as a rather generic historical saga — the kind of “important” Oscar bait whose trailer comes with the requisite sweeping score. In short, the movie, a Weinstein Company release, has been Weinstein-ized to a fault. There’s even the title debate that put producer Harvey Weinstein at the forefront, and saw him […]
-
Five Questions with Cutie and the Boxer Director Zachary Heinzerling
The following interview was originally published in April 2013 to coincide with the screening of Cutie and the Boxer at the Tribeca Film Festival. Zachary Heinzerling’s film is being released theatrically through RADiUS-TWC tomorrow. Zachary Heinzerling’s debut film, Cutie and the Boxer, has been one of the documentary hits of the festival circuit this year following its world premiere at Sundance, where Heinzerling won a directing award. A narrative study of the relationship between famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife, Noriko, the film explores their creatively exorbitant marriage and all of the intimacies therein – from their quirky flirtations […]
-
The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on Getting into Documentaries
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a fascinating discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we will be following a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature length documentary film Neurotypical is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary on deafness Sound and Fury, also a POV alum. Here the two discuss how they found their way to making documentary features. Click here to watch […]
-
Rodney Evans on The Happy Sad
An exploration of two couples — one black and gay, the other white and hetero — Rodney Evans’ The Happy Sad suggests with a light, deft touch the increasingly commonplace sexual fluidity that millennials are embracing as normative sexual categories fall away. Of course, there are difficulties. Partner swapping, open relationships, explorative homosexuality are nothing new, but even in the swingin’ hipster’d Brooklyn from which Evans tells his tale, complications arise, feelings are hurt, egos are shattered, these feelings only heightened by the ever present realities of race and class. A timely meditation on all of these things, the movie […]
-
David Lowery on Editing Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
David Lowery made waves last year in the independent film world with the news that Ain’t Them Bodies Saints — the follow-up to his $12,000 feature film St Nick (2009) — had attracted the stellar cast of Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck and Ben Foster. It quickly became one of the year’s most anticipated independent films, premiering at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Critic’s Week, and set to open in the US on August 16. The contemporary Western about a young couple torn asunder by a robbery gone wrong features shootouts and other elements of an action movie, but […]
-
Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri on Off Label
The ubiquity of Big Pharma’s influence in modern medicine isn’t news and given the ever skyrocketing prices for many prescription medications, it’s ripe territory for outrage, but in their newest documentary, filmmaking team Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri aren’t out to stoke your anger, but engage your empathy and your intellect. Their new film, Off Label, follows the lives of eight Americans, most of whom exist on the margins of society, whose lives have been utterly transformed, usually for the worse, by prescription drugs. In places like Iowa City and Detroit, the duo find story after story of addiction and […]
