Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions with Lily Director Matt Creed
The heroine of director Matt Creed’s Lily — premiering today at the Tribeca Film Festival — is the in last throes of successful breast cancer treatment, and finding that life after illness is supposed to pick back up right where it left off. We follow her as she grapples with life’s minutiae, sometimes victorious and sometimes not, in a bravely authentic portrait of an aspect of cancer survivor’s lives seldom portrayed on screen. Filmmaker asked Creed about tackling such a personal subject in his first feature film. Filmmaker: The film is semi-autobiographical, based on your co-writer Amy Grantham’s experience with breast […]
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Five Questions with The Kill Team Director Dan Krauss
The Kill Team is a new blistering offering in the ever increasing pantheon of indictments of military conduct unbecoming. It follows the trial of specialist Adam Winfield, whose platoon in Afghanistan started intentionally murdering civilians, branding themselves The Kill Team. In an ironic twist of fate, though a horrified Winfield sought to alert the military via his family and found his exhortations fell on deaf ears, Winfield was immediately indicted with premeditated murder upon his return to the U.S., along with four others in his platoon. Director Dan Krauss’s film, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival today, documents the […]
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Five Questions with Oxyana Director Sean Dunne
Between 2008 and 2011, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Sean Dunne built a burgeoning reputation for himself with a series of short films that demonstrated both his strong visual sense and his ability to skilfully capture the world of his subjects. The standout films from this period were The Archive, a portrait of the largest collection of vinyl records in the U.S. and its owner, and American Juggalo, which featured devoted Insane Clown Posse fans at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Now Dunne has broadened his focus and made his debut feature, Oxyana, which zeroes in on the town of Oceana, […]
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Five Questions with Let The Fire Burn Director Jason Osder
Founded in 1972, the Philadelphia-founded black liberation group MOVE Organization (the capitals break down into an acronym) preached a return to nature, annoying their neighbors by having bullhorns broadcast their beliefs all night and letting garbage fester in their yard. On May 13, 1985, Wilson Goode — the city’s first black mayor — approved dropping a bomb on their house as part of an eviction effort. 11 MOVE members died, including 5 children, and destroyed 61 houses. Jason Osder’s documentary feature debut Let The Fire Burn resurrects the incident almost exclusively through archival footage of TV broadcasts, home movies and […]
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“You Think I Should Die?”: François Ozon on In the House
When François Ozon first started making features some 15 years ago, with films like Sitcom, Criminal Lovers and the Fassbinder adaptation Water Drops on Burning Rocks, he showed himself to be a raw, edgy and insistent talent. His ambition and style were at the fore in those early efforts, but over the years as he has continued to make movies — at the breakneck pace of almost one per year — he has visibly matured as a filmmaker. During his career he has done everything from colorful, large-scale retro musicals (8 Women) to bleak, formally rigorous relationship dramas (5×2) to lavish […]
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Five Questions for The Genius of Marian Directors Banker White and Anna Fitch
Banker White’s first feature, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, followed the titular group of musicians from a refugee camp in Guinea to their home and back again; his second feature, The Genius of Marian, is much closer to home. After his mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, White came back home to help with caretaking. In 2009 he began shooting conversations with his mother for therapeutic purposes, eventually realizing he was working on his next project. Shot over three years, the resulting film was co-directed by White’s wife (then-girlfriend) Anna Fitch. Arriving in New York in advance of the […]
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Five Questions with Big Men Director Rachel Boynton
Oil. We can’t live with it. We can’t live without it. For some, this is the major environmental predicament of our times. For a few countries in Africa, it’s an unexpected windfall, the consequences of which are still not entirely known. While researching what was to become her second feature Big Men, Rachel Boynton traveled to Nigeria to find out what exactly was going on in the oil fields there, only to discover that the story was much bigger than just one country or even one continent. It was a story that would take her to nearby Ghana all the […]
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Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta on Midnight’s Children
“You must tell him about the greeting cards,” Deepa Mehta said to Salman Rushdie the other day. The director and the writer were sitting next to one another in a book-lined room in a midtown Manhattan hotel, and as they prepared to field a few of my questions about their new film, she urged Rushdie to share an anecdote about the movie’s source material, his famed novel Midnight’s Children. Rushdie complied. “It’s sold millions of copies,” he said, sounding less like a boastful author than a man stating a simple fact. “And in India it’s sold zillions extra because there […]
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Five Questions with Herman’s House Director Angad Singh Bhalla
Angad Singh Bhalla uses film to bring us voices we rarely hear. After spending months with Indian villagers who had been resisting an alumina project backed by the Canadian company Alcan, he produced his first independent project U.A.I.L. Go Back. It was used widely as an organizing tool and helped pressure Alcan to end its involvement in the project. Passionate about using media as a tool for social change, Bhalla has since produced videos for groups including the Service Employees International Union, Human Rights Watch, and The Center for Constitutional Rights. His award-winning short on the lives of Indian street […]
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Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington Director Sebastian Junger
One great journalist salutes another in Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, a moving combat documentary premiering Thursday, April 18 on HBO. The film is celebrated author-turned-director Sebastian Junger’s tribute to Hetherington, the British-American photojournalist who co-helmed the Oscar-nominated Restrepo with Junger, and tragically lost his life in 2011 while covering Libya’s civil war. Like Restrepo, which ditched political agendas to get at the human core of a platoon of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, Which Way is the Front Line From Here? pins its focus on the heart and unquenchable drive […]
