Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Michael Kleiman on Web, Connectivity, and Social Documentary
Only 32% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That figure, coming from the organization A Human Right, means that 4.6 billion people are effectively left out of the Information Age that most of us take for granted. Individuals and organizations across the world are working to ameliorate that and spread online connectivity into underdeveloped and rural areas from the U.S. to Kazakhstan. And films like Tiffany Shlain’s Connected (2011) are starting to probe what can happen to global consciousness when the collective wisdom of the world, not just our meager social networks, are finally truly linked together. […]
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Five Questions for I Learn America‘s Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
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Co-Directing and the Exhaustion of the Indie Filmmaker: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 3)
In parts I & II of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we covered finding the story, script development, and the difficulties of finding locations and cast. In this final part of the interview, Medinger talks about co-directing a feature, offers some advice for first time filmmakers, and attempts to explain what it’s really like to make your first movie. The film is currently in post-production, and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker: You and Robin Schmidt are co-directors on the movie. How does that work? Medinger: Robin and I have both directed […]
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Political Zoo: AJ Schnack on Caucus
The 2012 candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination — in other words the people who vied to be the standard bearer for those responsible for the government shutdown spurred by opposition to the Affordable Care Act — were photogenic, prone to gaffes: a documentarian’s wet dream of a cast. The GOP primaries offered us ambitious charlatans and lunatics eager to put themselves of display, finding room after room of deluded or poorly informed or simply mean-spirited white people to entertain and cajole. The entire primary season, while not as entertaining as it could have been (how can people with such depressing […]
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Script Development, Casting and Locations: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 2)
In this second part of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we cover script development, locations and the difficulty of casting a small ensemble feature. AfterDeath is a psychological thriller/horror movie currently in post-production and was co-directed by Medinger and Robin Schmidt. While Medinger and Schmidt have both been working in video and film for the past decade, this is their first feature film. The first part of the interview, which covers the journey to find the story for the movie, can be read here: Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1) AfterDeath […]
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Deb Shoval Interviews Stacie Passon About Concussion and the IFP Narrative Labs
The following is a guest post by writer/director Deb Shoval, whose debut feature AWOL participated in the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs. Nine months ago, I sat down with the endlessly generous Stacie Passon, the writer/director of Concussion, for some words of wisdom on making the low budget, indie first feature. Her biggest piece of advice? Get AWOL into the IFP Narrative Labs. Fast forward to Part 2 of 3 of the yearlong lab fellowship: IFP Week. Stacie, now an IFP Narrative Lab mentor, gets into more detail. Passon: Now if my son comes in during this interview and starts whining, […]
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Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1)
The psychological thriller/horror movie AfterDeath is the first feature film of directors Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt. Shot on a tight budget and a tight schedule, the development and shooting of AfterDeath offers a lesson to anyone looking to make their first feature. AfterDeath is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker spoke to Medinger about the project shortly after shooting wrapped. Medinger and Schmidt met at Oxford University in the late ’90s. Schmidt was studying English and Medinger was studying engineering. After leaving university, Schmidt became interested in film and video and learned […]
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The Subject as Auteur: Jonathan Demme on Enzo Avitabile Music Life
Italian jazz saxophonist and composer Enzo Avitabile might not be a household name in the States, but in the annals of world music he’s quite a fixture. In his native Naples he is so famous that when he visits the neighborhood of his youth, folks bustle into the streets and onto rooftops and balconies to lay eyes on him. A scholar of jazz, he can hold court on the evolution of the form as long as you’d like him to, although as Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme discovers in his newest concert film, Enzo Avitabile Music Life, that may not […]
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Seduced and Abandoned‘s James Toback on Movies, Mortality, Shooting in Cannes, and Literally Shooting his Enemies
James Toback has to be one of the most candid individuals in the movie business. Sitting down for a chat about his new genre-defying documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which borrows its title from 1964’s Pietro Germi satire, and premieres on HBO on Monday, Oct. 28, the 68-year-old filmmaker practically blows my mind with his willingness to talk about anything and everything, from late mogul David Begelman’s psychosis and Alec Baldwin’s divorce troubles to mega-producer delusions and his own personal hit list, whose names he has every intention of crossing off before he croaks. Yes, you heard right. Utterly filterless, Toback […]
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Shooting with 18 Cameras: The Making of The Short Game
With a background in comedy shorts, you’d be forgiven if you thought Josh Greenbaum’s first feature, a documentary that follows the 7 and 8-year old competitors in the World Championships of Junior Golf, would be a dark look at another group of driven parents. But that’s not what Greenbaum was interested in doing. Instead, he focuses on the children, these pre-teens who can, at turns, appear tremendously adult, or just like any other 7-year old. The Short Game follows eight competitors through last year’s championships, though production actually started a year before at the previous championships. That was where they […]
