Directors
Interviews - Directors
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On Being a Cult Filmmaker: An Interview with Trent Harris
Trent Harris has paid his dues. The Salt Lake City-based filmmaker has made more films than he can count, mostly shorts, documentaries, and experimental films. But his narrative feature films are among the best examples of underground cult films, including three that will show tonight, tomorrow, and Friday at the 92 Street Y’s Tribeca location. Harris will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion every night. The Beaver Trilogy (Wednesday), his best-known work, is broken into three parts, each filmed years apart. The first is a documentary about Groovin’ Gary (Richard LaVon Griffith), a young man from the small town […]
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Five Questions for Unmade in China Directors Gil Kofman and Tanner King Barklow
Screenwriter George Richards wrote Case Sensitive as “an American thriller with American actors for an American audience.” Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) brought the script to producer Seth Scher, who had connections to a Chinese investor who was making films for the Chinese market. The film was greenlit and Kofman, who does not speak Chinese, traveled to Xiamen, China, to direct his second narrative feature. Soon afterward his friend, documentary filmmaker Tanner King Barklow, joined him and began documenting Kofman’s travails as he tried to navigate a colossal language barrier, bureaucracy, corruption, and cultural differences. Early in the documentary […]
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Phie Ambo on Free the Mind
Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind was one of my favorite flicks at this past International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, so I was thrilled to learn it would finally reach these American shores via a premiere at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC on May 3rd. (And hopefully roll out nationwide if the filmmakers’ Indiegogo financing effort – which includes a photo op with the Dalai Lama as a reward – goes according to plan.) And I was even more excited to have the chance to speak with the Danish documentarian herself, whose film about University of Wisconsin professor Richard […]
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“I’ve Never Understood a Traditional Screenplay:” Carlos Reygadas on Post Tenebras Lux
Born in Mexico City, Carlos Reygadas was a lawyer specializing in armed-conflict resolution in Brussels when he decided to try his hand at making films at the age of 30. He quickly became a unique voice in cinema with his first feature, Japón (2001), which received a special mention for the Camera d’Or at Cannes that year. In his three films since, Reygadas has developed his cinematic language and abilities, as well as his reputation for making aesthetically uncompromising and provocative films. If his second film, Battle in Heaven (2005), cemented his reputation as a provocateur, his following Silent Light […]
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Cult Classic: Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos on The Source Family
If you had an inside connection to a true-life tale in which sex, drugs, and rock & roll were part of the path to spiritual salvation for a ‘70s L.A. hippie cult group, wouldn’t you want to make a movie about it? Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos’s documentary, The Source Family, offers up an intimate history of the group led by Father Yod, A.K.A. Jim Baker. A successful, charismatic businessman, Baker had a late-1960s spiritual awakening leading to his establishment of a religious commune whose initial hub was his popular Sunset Strip health-food restaurant, The Source. After adopting his newly […]
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20 Years On, Pennebaker and Hegedus Return to The War Room
Twenty years ago another recession was gripping America, documentarians were shooting on film, and D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus were immortalizing the election campaign of Bill Clinton. The renowned duo behind Kings of Pastry, Jimi Plays Monterey and many other films, is presenting The War Room at a 20th anniversary screening at Toronto’s Hot Docs Documentary Festival this week. “It was an idea we always wanted to do,” Hegedus told Filmmaker, “to see a man become President.” In 1960, Pennebaker gained valuable experience by co-editing and doing sound on the very first campaign doc, Primary by Robert Drew. Shot in […]
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The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
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Five Questions with John Lurie
John Lurie has never allowed himself to be pinned down, let alone pigeon-holed. The multi-talented Lurie — this month the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn — has been for many years a highly respected musician and composer, putting out records both as a solo artist and with his band the Lounge Lizards. In film, he has directed short films and music videos, composed numerous soundtracks, and been an actor in films by Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law), Wim Wenders (Paris Texas), Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) and David Lynch (Wild […]
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Five Questions with Trash Dance Director Andrew Garrison
Since its world premiere at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival, Andrew Garrison’s documentary Trash Dance has been a festival favorite, picking up audience awards at both Full Frame and Silverdocs. The film chronicles innovative choreographer Allison Orr’s attempts to wrangle a group of garbage men and turn them, and their trucks, into the participants in her latest project. Filmmaker spoke with the Austin, Texas-based Garrison, an experienced non-fiction director known for such films as Third Ward TX and The Wilgus Stories, about the process of making Trash Dance, which opens at the reRun Theater in Brooklyn today. Filmmaker: Why did […]
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Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
