Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Antiviral Director Brandon Cronenberg
Like the offspring of any revered icon, Brandon Cronenberg’s last name grabs hold of your attention. Indeed, the 33-year-old Canadian filmmaker is the son of David Cronenberg, genre cinema’s great auteur of psychodrama and body horror. And like his father, Brandon expresses a strong interest in the inextricable brain-body link, not to mention the dark crevices of society’s underbelly. Antiviral, Brandon’s feature debut as writer and director, is a sci-fi satire with a sharp conceit worthy of that unmistakable surname, and a stylistic strength that promises more compelling work from its maker. Uniquely skewering our ever-evolving (or devolving) obsessions with […]
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The Freeman Brothers on Cell Count, The Weather Outside and Indie Genre Filmmaking
Brothers Todd and Jason Freeman are a filmmaker duo who have been working together for more than 15 years. They collaborate closely during the creative process yet each writes and directs their own films. I caught them fresh off of completing two microbudget movies back-to-back. Jason’s feature, The Weather Outside, is a kind of noir drama which takes place over the Christmas holidays. Todd’s film, Cell Count, is a body horror flick about the side-effects of an experimental drug treatment. Filmmaker: How do you work as both brothers and a filmmaking team? Jason: Well, it starts early on. One of […]
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Five Questions with Arcadia Director Olivia Silver
Winner of the Crystal Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Olivia Silver’s debut feature Arcadia puts a more intimate spin on the road movie. In the film, father Tom (the always excellent John Hawkes) takes his three kids, teenager Caroline (Kendall Toole), 12-year-old Greta (Ryan Simpkins) and nine-year-old Nat (Ty Simpkins) on a 3,000-mile cross-country road trip to California, saying that their mother will join them soon in their new home. However, as the journey progresses, it is clear that the situation is much different than it seems. To coincide with Arcadia‘s opening today at the reRun Theater, Brooklyn-based […]
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Graham Meriwether on American Meat
Even in the heart of the Midwest, where driving past rural pastures dotted with cows is not uncommon, I rarely thought of where my food came from. How often as a child or young adult, chomping on a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s or slurping up Cincinnati-style chili at my mother’s dining room table, was I confronted intellectually with the fragility and inhumanity of our modern food production system, especially when it comes to the most popular proteins in the American diet, beef and chicken? I doubt a meal went by that wouldn’t cause my older self anxiety. It’s almost shameful […]
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Five Questions with Soft in the Head Director Nathan Silver
Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena was one of the surprises in the 2012 crop of American indies, a delightfully idiosyncratic lo-fi portrait of a withdrawn live-in nurse who becomes a key figure in the family household where she’s working, far beyond her professional role. The film, which featured all non-actors including Silver’s mother, girlfriend and Silver himself, premiered at Edinburgh and has played around the world since then, in the process winning fans such as director Hal Hartley and Filmmaker‘s own Brandon Harris (who recently programmed the film as part of Hammer to Nail‘s screening series). Though Exit Elena is still on […]
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Director Marten Persiel Discusses This Ain’t California
A while back I wrote about Marten Persiel’s This Ain’t California, the Berlinale-winning “punk fairytale” about skateboarding in East Germany that caused a bit of a stir overseas for its liberal use of staged reenactments. Regardless of the controversy, Persiel’s film is like nothing I’ve seen in recent years, the closest comparison probably being Grant Gee’s 2007 Joy Division (written by Jon Savage), which employs a collage of images to conjure up the Manchester atmosphere during that music scene’s heyday. In fact, Manchester and East Berlin shared a similar aesthetic in the ’70s and ’80s, composed of drab grey buildings […]
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Kathleen Hanna, Sini Anderson and Tamra Davis Talk The Punk Singer
Originally published following The Punk Singer‘s premiere at SXSW, this interview with director Sini Anderson, subject Kathleen Hanna and executive producer Tamra Davis is being rerun today as the documentary opens in New York at IFC Center. Hanna will be doing Q&A’s with Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show and signing copies of her new Julie Ruin record. Check the IFC page for times. In Greil Marcus’s punk-rock critical opus Lipstick Traces, the writer describes a kind of magic created by the sneering music of the Sex Pistols: “… the pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts […]
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Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke on Stranger Things
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke’s elegant and evocative Stranger Things, which won Slamdance’s Narrative Competition Grand Jury Prize in 2011 is a moody and clear-eyed drama from a pair of our 25 New Faces in Independent Film, as tranquil and refreshing as an autumn afternoon along the rural British coast, where much of its story is set. A young, lonely woman named Oona (Bridget Collins), coping with the recent death of her mother (with whom she was clearly not close) and hoping to sell the house the deceased woman spent her last years making art in, returns to the home’s seaside village to […]
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Antonio Campos and the Case of the Conscious Camera (A Mystery)
In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of […]
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Amy Seimetz Breaks Through
Collaboration may well be Amy Seimetz’s favorite word. Some derivation of the noun weaves its way into the multihyphenate’s emphatic speech when discussing any facet of her decade long career. It’s how she found her footing, and how she has been able to surmount an impressive and far-reaching presence in independent film, and now, television. Seimetz began making films when she was 18, at home in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, a place she frequently returns to in life and work. Following a short-lived tenure at film school, Seimetz made her way to Los Angeles, where she met the experimental filmmaker […]
