Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Meet the Latest SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant Finalists (Part 2)
Last year on the Filmmaker website, we ran a series of pieces in which we profiled a group of finalists for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant, run through the organization’s Filmmaker360 program. Now there’s a new set of finalists, and we are once again putting the spotlight on all those shortlisted for the grant. You can read Part 1 of this current series here. IAN HENDRIE AND JYSON MCLEAN, MERCY ROAD Synopsis: Based on true events, Mercy Road traces the political and spiritual odyssey of a small town housewife as she turns from a peaceful pro-life […]
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Remembering Jamaa Fanaka
Jamaa Fanaka, the eclectic and kind-hearted film director, the most commercially minded of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers and perhaps the most prolific student filmmaker of all time (all three of the features he made as a grad student found distribution), died one year ago today. Although word leaked out about his death a short time after he passed away, likely from complications of diabetes, I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t hear of it until several weeks later, when his obituary finally appeared in the New York Times. Ashamed because in the intervening year since I […]
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Hero Punk: A Cyberpunk Superhero Film Shot on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera in Green Screen
Kanen Flowers describes himself as a “former technology guy” who got into filmmaking around 2001 with the goal of writing and directing his own material. In 2007, he started work on Jack Forgotten, a project that he says is still in postproduction. Other projects have met with greater success; he started the That Post Show podcast, and a show called That Media Show, and has produced a variety of shorts and web-based content through his production company, Scruffy.tv. At the moment he’s working on Hero Punk, a full-length feature which was shot using the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Hero Punk is […]
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Director Bob Byington on Somebody Up There Likes Me
It’s rare to come across a film that genuinely feels “different,” but Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me is one of those films. Byington is an Austin-based writer/director and has worked (on both sides of the camera) with a number of mumblecore and post-mumblecore figures, directing Justin Rice and Alex Karpovsky in his 2009 feature Harmony and Me while also cameoing in Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. His recent films, the gleefully edgy RSO [Registered Sex Offender] and the charming, sweet Harmony, were quirky indie comedies but definitely felt like they fit within a […]
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Director Pablo Berger on Blancanieves
If two recent adaptations of the “Snow White” tale offer any indication, the film industry takes the modern revisionist’s pleasure in applying its cutting-edge tools to the creaky joints of bedtime stories. But Spanish director Pablo Berger swerves away from the familiar path taken by the likes of Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror Mirror. His latest, Blancanieves, is a silent black-and-white film that appropriates more of the old than the new — and yet it feels fresher than the rest. The binary palette is no limitation, rendering the velvety texture of shadows and the film’s gothic sensibility. Berger […]
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Five Questions with Night Train to Lisbon director Bille August
Danish film director Bille August has consistently brought a strong vision to international stories. He is best known for Pelle the Conqueror, the 1987 film about Swedish immigrants in Denmark, which received the Palme d’Or, the Academy Award and the Golden Globe. He is one of the few directors who have won the Palme d’Or twice, putting him in the ranks of Francis Ford Coppola, Emir Kusturica, and the Dardenne brothers. His second came with the 1992 film The Best Intentions, a semi-autobiographical family story written by Ingmar Bergman. Twenty years ago August explored love and revolution in The House […]
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Rodney Ascher on Room 237 and the Haunting of The Shining
A must-see for not just fans of The Shining but anyone who has been obsessed by a movie, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, opening today, is a documentary about a group of online fans, scholars and theorists who have dedicated their lives — or at least their leisure hours — to unpacking bizarre, alternative interpretations about Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. Above, recorded last year at the Cannes Film Festival, I discuss with Ascher the origins of his film, why you never see the faces of his interview subjects, and Fair Use. Ascher is interviewed in the latest issue of Filmmaker by […]
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Rebecca Richman Cohen on Code of the West
In Code of the West, director Rebecca Richman Cohen chronicles the legislative machinations surrounding Montana’s endangered medical marijuana law. The debate, which was colored by outrageous, scaremongering claims about increased teen use and demonic possession, revolved around the possibility of an outright repeal of the initial 2004 law, which spawned an industry that became the ire of conservative politicians and family groups. During the vote on a proposed repeal, DEA agents raided 26 ostensibly legal cannabis growing sights across the state and put the state’s biggest caregivers out of operation, including one owned by Tom Daubert, the protagonist of Cohen’s […]
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Hands on a Hard Body Director S.R. Bindler On His Documentary’s Unlikely Broadway Adaptation
An odd, homemade blend of Garrison Keillor and Jackass, as filtered through an early Errol Morris-like lens, S.R. Bindler’s 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body is now having one of the most unexpected independent film second lives ever. Hands on a Hard Body the film has led to Hands on a Hardbody the Broadway musical, starring Keith Carradine, directed by Neil Pepe, with a book by Pulitzer-Prize winner Doug Wright and a score by Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green. It opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theater last week, and Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times, “…this […]
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Quentin Dupieux on Wrong and Wrong Cops
Many musicians have dabbled with movies, but few have stuck it out and become as well known separately for their film work as director/d.p./editor Quentin Dupieux. Formerly best known as electronica artist Mr. Oizo, Dupieux began making short films at age 15. His first two features — 2002’s Nonfilm and Steak — didn’t attract attention outside of France, but 2010’s Rubber introduced him to a wider audience. The film follows killer tire Robert’s deadly road trip across California, beginning with a direct-to-the-audience monologue from actor Stephen Spinella explaining Dupieux’s philosophy of narrative and his bizarre sense of humor. “In the […]
