Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Life’s Lessons: Patrick Wang Discusses In the Family
Joey Williams almost always seems calm. He maintains a consistent position when standing, slouched slightly forward with his hands in his pockets. He looks comfortable, but also concentrated. His eyes never break focus from the person he’s addressing, and when he speaks the Tennessee-accented words drift measuredly out of one side of his mouth. Joey doesn’t command attention so much as he gradually, patiently draws it his way. Joey is the main character of Patrick Wang’s directorial debut feature, the American independent film In the Family (2011), which will be released on Blu-ray and DVD this Tuesday. The general contractor, […]
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Bad Trip: A Conversation with Sebastián Silva on Crystal Fairy and Magic Magic
Sebastián Silva is that rare filmmaker who manages to be both independent and prolific. With five features and a Digital HBO series under his belt, plus three new projects in the works, the 34-year-old writer/director shows little sign of slowing down. At Sundance this year, Silva premiered not one but two new films, the improvisational road trip comedy Crystal Fairy and the Magic Cactus and 2012, and the dark psychological thriller Magic Magic. Both films, made in quick succession, were shot in the director’s native Chile, center on the erratic adventures of displaced Americans, and feature effectively off-kilter performances by […]
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Antoni Stutz on Rushlights
In Antoni Stutz’s 90’s throwback neo-noir Rushlights, the casual flirtation between a very young, low-rent con-man, Billy (Josh Henderson), and ex-junkie turned lunch-counter waitress Sarah (Haley Webb) quickly grows into a torrid love affair in a tiny Texas hamlet, the type found in thrillers where money and guns often find themselves coming together in dangerous confluence, that bespeaks trouble. When Sarah’s roommate, with whom she has a remarkable resemblance, OD’s on heroin, she’s convinced by her cunning new lover to assume the dead woman’s identity after learning that she’s due to receive a hefty inheritance after the death of a wealthy […]
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Five Questions with The Cold Lands Director Tom Gilroy
In 2000, IFC Films released Spring Forward, the first feature directed by actor Tom Gilroy. Starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, it’s a quiet, unassuming film full of carefully observed interpersonal intricacies, focusing on the growth of the two men’s relationship over the course of a year while they work for the Parks Department in a small Connecticut town. One of the smartest, subtlest indie films of its era, Spring Forward won awards and an impressive array of rave reviews. Nevertheless, it took Gilroy nearly a decade to get going on his second feature, The Cold Lands, which is only […]
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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his first directorial feature in 23 years at Cannes this year with the fictionalized autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. The man behind cult favorites El Topo and The Holy Mountain delighted audiences with his magic-realist account of growing up in Tocopilla, Chile. It was met with a standing ovation, and the director called the film’s reception in France one of the proudest moments of his life. The Dance of Reality is marked by fantastic, surreal characters, from an opera-singing mother to an overzealous anarchist to a painted religious guru. It is easy to see how Jodorowsky’s […]
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Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Call Me Kuchu
In 2009, a bill was proposed in the Ugandan parliament that would outlaw homosexuality, making the offense punishable by death. In response, the newspaper The Rolling Stone began outing members of the LGBT community with the headline “Hang Them.” The LGBT activist David Kato, the first openly gay man in the rapidly anti-gay nation of Uganda, took the publication to court to prevent them from further printing the names and pictures of gay people — and won. Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral’s remarkable documentary Call Me Kuchu chronicles the brave battles of Kato and his comrades, as they very publicly seek to protect […]
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Five Questions with The Great Beauty Director Paolo Sorrentino
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, The Great Beauty, premiered in competition in Cannes this year, wowing fans with its over-the-top depiction of modern Rome. Seen through the sad eyes of an aging journalist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), the film uncovers a series of unsettling scenes where everyone in Rome aims to be an actor on his or her own stage. And Jep is at the center of it all, a man who squandered his writing talents in exchange for a hard-partying lifestyle. He is surrounded by characters too distracted by their urban surroundings to make anything meaningful. Yet behind every image of decadence […]
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Morgan Neville on Twenty Feet From Stardom
Backup singers, the ones who provide delicate harmony, who fill out so many of American popular music’s most famous songs, rarely if ever get their due. With Twenty Feet From Stardom, director Morgan Neville sought to change that. A big-hearted, engrossing, pleasurably watchable tribute to the underheralded work of dozens of key performers from the golden age of Blues, Rock, Soul and RnB, the film is a delightful recognition of artists who have long toiled in the shadows of some of American music’s most legendary performers. Emmy award winner Neville, whose past films have included well-received profiles of a gallery […]
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“I Would Never Do This to a Friend”: Tobias Lindholm on A Hijacking
A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]
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“The Studios are Dead:” Chen Kaige on China’s New Filmmaking Machine
It’s fitting that Chen Kaige kicked off TIFF’s Century of Chinese Cinema program last week in Toronto where he introduced screenings of his films and spoke about his career in two public talks. The movies of the Fifth Generation filmmaker cover several eras of Chinese society, ranging from pre-World War Two in Farewell My Concubine (1993) to today’s social media of Caught in the Web (2012). More importantly, Chen is a key figure in elevating Chinese cinema to the world stage, starting in 1984 — when his first film, Yellow Earth, shattered the tyranny of state-sponsored propaganda films — then […]
