Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Even Making a Cup of Tea is Erotic: Bernardo Bertolucci on Me and You
Bernardo Bertolucci was barely out of his teens when the first feature film he directed, La Commare Secca, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, premiered in 1962. In today’s poetry-averse art house environment, his influence surfaces only sporadically — perhaps most clearly in the impulsive, unabashed aesthetics of Paolo Sorrentino — but his filmography remains strong and singular. Nothing feels quite like a Bertolucci film, with its peculiar, poetic fusion of the sensual, the political, and the spiritual. Bertolucci is 73 now, and, because of a series of botched back surgeries, confined to a wheelchair. His newest film, […]
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At the Death House Door: Steve James on the Roger Ebert Doc, Life Itself
Two heavyweights of Chicago film culture, director Steve James and the iconic late film critic Roger Ebert were fond of each other from afar for years. It wasn’t until James was charged with making a cinematic document of Ebert’s final months and his life and achievements that the two grew close. The filmmaker behind the masterful Chicagoland documentaries Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters gives us an up close and personal look at the final months of Ebert’s life, crafting both a tough-minded look at his physical decline and a warm-hearted celebration of a singular cultural figure’s life and work. James, […]
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Terms of Endearment: An Interview with Siddarth Director Richie Mehta
In young Indian-Canadian auteur Richie Mehta’s newest picture, a middle-aged New Delhi resident who can barely support his wife and two kids by fixing zippers sends son Siddarth to work in a factory in far away Ludhiana. The cat who runs the factory is related to them distantly, but — as Mahendra (Rajesh Tailing) is told by his employer Om (Amitabh Srivasta) and discovers when his son never returns for a scheduled holiday — family can mean very little to men when money stands between them. Getting the police involved in this violation of child labor law proves tricky for […]
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Adam Rifkin on Giuseppe Makes A Movie
With the maniacal film geek erudition of Quentin Tarantino and the madcap family values sensibility of John Waters, Giuseppe Andrews has made 30 independent features that you’ve most likely never heard of. And he probably couldn’t care less about that. A veteran of both Hollywood and indie film, Adam Rifkin, on the other hand, is a name familiar to any fan of the 1999 cult comedy Detroit Rock City, which Rifkin directed, and which starred Andrews alongside Edward Furlong. Now Rifkin and Andrews have teamed up again as Rifkin follows the director in his quest to shoot in two days […]
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“A Relationship is Never a Straight Line”: Joanna Hogg on Exhibition
“It’d be nice if you could come up here, maybe distract me from my work,” H (Liam Gillick) tells his wife D (Viviane Albertine) at the start of Joanna Hogg’s surprising and stunning new film Exhibition. The two speak via intercom, from separate stories of their postmodern London behemoth, and Hogg’s film is as much about communication, or lack there of, as it is about staving off our most prized objectives. D and H — both artists, only one of whom is “successful” — have decided to sell their house after living there for nearly 20 years. That decision, or rather, acquiescence on D’s part, […]
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Scam School: Andrew Rossi on Ivory Tower
Page One: Inside the New York Times director Andrew Rossi’s damning doc Ivory Tower details how the increasingly outrageous cost of a college education — spurred by the rise of administrative salaries, lack of government support and the arms race for the best and brightest (and richest) among us — is killing the American dream and heightening the divide between the haves and have nots. Rossi’s movie isn’t covering especially new ground if you’re out in the world while reading about how it’s all falling apart. The Reagan/Friedman ideology suggesting education is a private good that ought to be paid for […]
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Five Questions for Recommended by Enrique‘s Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia
Director Rania Attieh was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and her partner Daniel Garcia grew up in South Texas. Their first feature together, Okay, Enough, Goodbye crisscrossed Attieh’s hometown, canvassing 30 locations in 40 days to create a story, they say, that is a “love/hate relationship with the city itself.” So, after that feature won plaudits on the festival circuit — and landed the two on Filmmaker‘s 2011 25 New Faces list — it seems only appropriate that they head to Texas for their follow-up. Premiering tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Recommended by Enrique is described as “a tale […]
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No Clean Getaways: Amat Escalante on Heli
It starts with a slow tilt over dead bodies traveling in space, slowly revealed to be tucked into the back of a white pick-up truck. One of them will soon be hung from a bridge, the early morning light silhouetting the dangling body: its formal sleekness notwithstanding, Heli isn’t for the faint of heart. Soon we’re introduced to a small, modest family in a remote Mexican village: a father and his two children, one of whom has a child of his own from a young wife. Surrounded by desert and not too far from the auto plant which employs many […]
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“Maybe I Hate Pity:” Nathan Silver on Uncertain Terms
Nathan Silver first courted audiences in 2012 with Exit Elena, his charming, claustrophobic take on arrested development through the eyes of a live-in aide. His follow-up, Soft in the Head, also captured an outsider’s rambunctious navigation of new environs, so it should be no surprise that Uncertain Terms, premiering this Saturday at the Los Angeles Film Festival, treads the familiar territory of interloper interrupted. Silver may be a premature embodiment of Fassbinder’s creed that “Every decent director has only one subject and finally only makes the same film over and over again,” but Uncertain Terms feels more patient in execution than its predecessors, mirroring the bucolic enclave which houses a bevy of […]
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Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Wild Tales Director Damián Szifrón
Argentine director Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales opens with the ultimate revenge fantasy, one that unfolds into a firestorm before the credits finish. The film’s six stories get only more wicked, quickly descending into the depths of the human psyche on the verge of imploding. There is truly never a dull moment, a rarity for the Cannes lineup. A waitress gets help paying back the loan shark who drove her father to suicide. A quick road rage incident unfolds into a searing tale that will warn anyone against yelling at another driver. An explosives engineer fires back against his city’s criminal […]
