Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Animating 1000 Parts: Creating the Short Day Shift
Ian Timothy, 18, is about to graduate high school — applying to art schools hoping to study animation — but he already has several years of animation experience under his belt. He created his first stop motion at 12 using a DV camera, and quickly discovered he liked doing it so much that it became “pretty much a full-time thing.” Timothy won a Silver Telly Award for animation in 2013, has created animation for music videos, and is currently working on an animation for Adult Swim for the Cartoon Network. In the following interview Timothy talks about the short Day […]
-
Christine Turner on Homegoings
Just in the nick of time for Black History Month, and debuting at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, is Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a poetically crafted exploration of the history of African-American funeral traditions. Told via the Harlem neighborhood’s legendary funeral director Isaiah Owens – who found his calling as a small child, burying all deceased animals he stumbled across in his South Carolina surroundings – the doc manages to be poignant, inspirational, and unexpectedly uplifting. In other words, as one subject says about black burials themselves, a “sad good time.” Filmmaker spoke with the doc’s […]
-
10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Benh Zeitlin
Despite legions of advice to the contrary, there is no quick-fix scheme toward making a feature film. What it really comes down to is creating a universal story and surrounding yourself with people who believe in your vision enough to see it come to life. Benh Zeitlin proves that to make a powerful film today, you don’t need gimmicks, a convoluted strategy, or even connections in the business. All you really need is a story so strong that it’s impossible not to make. The 30-year-old Zeitlin’s journey from short to feature is a true fairytale in the landscape of American indie […]
-
Snitch’s Ric Roman Waugh: From Stuntman to Writer/Director
There is no one set way to progress to the role of writer/director, but now — when all it takes to make your own movie is having a DSLR and a Kickstarter account — the story of Ric Roman Waugh’s rise stands out. The son of an old school Hollywood stuntman, Waugh took a path similar to those directors who emerged in Tinseltown’s golden age: learn a craft (writer, editor, production designer, etc.), and then move up through the ranks until you’ve earned the right to have your name on the back of that canvas chair. Waugh followed in his father’s […]
-
Five Questions with Future Weather Director Jenny Deller
Jenny Deller’s Future Weather takes an unusual look at Middle America, forgoing the clichés of its demography for ecology. Introverted Laudurée (Perla Haney-Jardine) is abandoned by her mother (Marin Ireland), who flees their trailer for Hollywood, with gelatinous aspirations for a career as a make-up artist. Fiercely independent, Laudurée carries out her daily life as though nothing happened, her days consumed by experiments and the threat of global warming. Yearning to be taken under the wing of her science teacher (Lili Taylor), Laudurée is nevertheless snatched up by her alcoholic grandmother (Amy Madigan), who plans to move to Florida to […]
-
Alex Karpovsky on Red Flag and Rubberneck
While probably best known as belligerent barista Ray on the HBO show Girls (and also for his role as a lousy houseguest in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture), Alex Karpovsky started out and continues to be a prolific indie film director who makes diverse styles of micro-budget films. His fourth and fifth films, the stylistically contrasting Rubberneck and Red Flag, are being released by Tribeca Film and screen at Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 22. In Rubberneck, Karpovsky plays a scientist obsessed with a former fling, and in the road trip comedy Red Flag he plays a filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky who is […]
-
Ruba Nadda on Inescapable
In Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda’s elegant and oddly topical thriller Inescapable, Adib Abdul-Kareem (Alexander Siddig) is a computer operations manager at a Toronto bank who fled Syria some 30 years ago. Married to a Canadian with whom he’s fathered two pretty teenage girls, he’s kept his checkered past a secret from his family the whole time, but after the disappearance of the older of his two daughters (Jay Anstey) during a clandestine visit to Syria in order to find out where her father is from, Adib heads to Damascus despite the possibility of repercussions for long ago sins. With combative ex-flame […]
-
Karaoke Girl’s Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Sandi Sissel
Receiving its world premiere in the 2013 Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards Competition, San Francisco-based Visra Vichit-Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl is an evocative character study of a Bangkok working girl, a singer in a nighttime karaoke bar for whom memories of her rural past and dreams of romantic fulfillment form a pulsing lifeline away from an emotionally depleting world. A hybrid documentary/fiction film, Karaoke Girl stars newcomer Sa Sittijun as a character largely based on herself. The documentary sections of the film follow her back to her real hometown, and feature interviews with her real family, while the “fiction” sequences are […]
-
Five Questions with Big Words Writer/Director Neil Drumming
Big Words is the feature debut of writer/director Neil Drumming, former editor and music reviewer at Entertainment Weekly.The film follows the disparate storylines of James, John and Malik–three 30-something black men that used to constitute the hip-hop group D.L.P. (“Down Low Poets”). The triad has had little contact over the decade-plus since they split and each of them struggles with their sense of identity and regrets, struggling to look forward on the otherwise wildly hopeful night of Barack Obama’s inaugural election in 2008. Over the course of Big Words, we gradually learn piece-by-piece what drives James, John and Malik, what […]
-
Sam Neave, Almost in Love
Director Sam Neave and his producer/star Marjan Neshat are both Iranian-born, but the films they tend to make together — including 2003’s Sundance entry Cry Funny Happy and their terrific new two shot high-wire act Almost in Love — focus on the romantic travails of upper-middle-class Westerners in ways that are as funny as they are earnest. Their newest film, despite its intentionally schematic, downright arty structural contrivance, is a surprisingly rich meditation on friendship, the difficulty of settling down and the importance of being earnest. Performed in humorous and melancholy shades by an odd assortment of performers, most notably Ms. Neshat, Gary Wilmes, Alan Cumming and Alex Karpovsky — who […]
