Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Cullen Hoback on Terms and Conditions May Apply
Every mouse-stroke you make, every search query you use, is being recorded, one way or another, usually by powerful and insidious entities who have no incentive not to sell this information to the highest bidder. Its exchange for copious storage on your web-based email service, and cloud-empowered music players that allow you to play Gil Scott-Heron records, long out of print, night and day, comes a cost that is pervasive and hidden. Your privacy. Oh, and a tremendous amount of monetary value that you likely never knew you created. Shucks. Cullen Hoback’s thoughtful and, in the age of Snowden, all […]
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The Long Shoot: 10 Questions for Calling My Children Director David Binder
For 25 years, first as still photographer and then as filmmaker, David Binder doggedly chronicled the Farrow family. The mother/wife dies … husband grieves and copes … four young sons struggle and mature … and for 25 years David Binder captures the story. Binder’s initial photo essay on the Farrow family was published by In Health magazine in 1990, and updated a decade later in Life magazine. His Farrow photographs were displayed in several major exhibitions, including at Harvard AIDS Institute and in 40 cities for the United States Centers for Disease Control. A decade later he made a short documentary […]
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Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori on Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
It’s a golden era for “forgotten musical acts of the ’60s and ’70s” docs. While Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man took home the BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year, following a wave of acclaim after its Sundance premiere, films like Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino’s A Band Called Death, Jay Bulger’s Beware of Mr. Baker and Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom have ridden the festival circuit praise to their own well-received releases in recent months. Next in line is Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, an assured, rather handsome look at the […]
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Production, Post-Production and Lessons Learned: Shooting the Low-Budget Horror Movie Dark Feed, Part Two
In part two of our interview with brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, the writers and directors of Dark Feed, they talk about the lessons learned during the production and post-production of a low-budget movie. Filmmaker: How large was the crew for the Dark Feed shoot, and how many days of shooting were there? Michael: There was Shawn and I, and we had two sound people – one to hold the boom and one to work the recorder – and a d.p. to also run camera. We had people come in and do other jobs like set building, but on a […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting the Low-Budget Horror Movie Dark Feed, Part One
Many filmmakers make a low-budget movie in the hopes of getting to L.A. and working on a big-budget movie. The Rasmussen brothers went in a different direction. Going out to L.A. they wrote and sold a script that was made into The Ward, directed by John Carpenter. But they wanted to do more than just write the script, so after completing their next screenplay they came back to Boston and made the movie Dark Feed on a shoestring. The Rasmussen brothers, Michael and Shawn, spoke to us recently about this experience, and what they have learned about making a movie […]
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Five Questions with Some Girl(s) Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer and Producer Patty West
This article was orginally published in March 2013 to coincide with the film’s premiere at SXSW. Some Girl(s) opens theatrically today in NYC and LA, it’s also now available worldwide on Vimeo On Demand. In the battle of the sexes, there has been perhaps no more controversial warrior than the playwright, screenwriter and director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men). Since the mid-90s, LaBute has made a name for himself by writing movies that are truly, madly, deeply cynical. Adapted by LaBute from his own stage play and directed by Party Girl helmer Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Some Girl(s) stars […]
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Jem Cohen on Museum Hours
Jem Cohen’s highly recommended Museum Hours — the winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored 2013 Cinema Eye Heterodox Award — opens in theaters today from Cinema Guild. Below is an excerpt (about half) of my interview with Cohen in the current print issue of Filmmaker. You can read the whole interview in the issue, and in the iPad version there’s also a 12-minute video with Cohen explicating various scenes in the film. What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the […]
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Judd Ehrlich on Magic Camp
There is a camp for everything. Dance, wrestling, Jesus — you name it, your kid can camp it. In Judd Ehrlich’s charming Magic Camp, the kids have no desire to be the next LeBron James or Sidney Crosby, however; they want to be like one of the Davids, Blaine or Copperfield. Held each summer in Bryn Mawr, PA, Tannen’s Magic Camp, a spinoff of the famed Gotham magic store, teaches teenagers, mostly boys, the fine art of making a rabbit disappear into their ear or a wand suddenly appear in their hand. You think it’s difficult to saw someone in half? Just […]
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“What Do You Think?”: Pedro Almodóvar on I’m So Excited
“What do you think?” asks an inquisitive Pedro Almodóvar, his voice hoarse from constant interviews and his white hair characteristically untamed, like he’s the Don King of foreign film. His question is in response to my own, about why he’s fascinated with sex between partners wherein one of them is asleep, a phenomenon seen in Bad Education and the director’s libidinous, screwball latest, I’m So Excited. It’s at once jarring, thrilling, and humbling to have Almodóvar request your thoughts on his creative motives. Perhaps I should have asked him something else, something less tied to the many interpretations he himself […]
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Christine Turner on Homegoings
This article was orginally published in February 2013 to coincide with the film’s premiere at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. Homegoings opens theatrically today at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem and airs tonight on POV. Just in the nick of time for Black History Month, and debuting at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, is Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a poetically crafted exploration of the history of African-American funeral traditions. Told via the Harlem neighborhood’s legendary funeral director Isaiah Owens – who found his calling as a small child, burying all deceased animals he stumbled across in his South […]
