Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions with The Bad Intentions Director Rosario Garcia-Montero
Cayetana de los Heros, the eight-year-old protagonist of The Bad Intentions, is precociously preoccupied with death. She idolizes her nation’s independence heroes, imagining the many exotic ways in which they have been executed for their valor. “Massacre, massacre,” she whispers into the ears of her sleeping cousin. Beautifully shot in steely gray and blue hues that look cold to the touch, The Bad Intentions moves away from the conventional pastel-hued whimsy often used to depict childhood. Death — the fear and the fact of it — quietly pervades the entire film. Cayetana’s divorced parents mean well but have too many […]
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Amy Berg on West of Memphis
Amy Berg’s West of Memphis lays out an overwhelmingly strong case for the innocence of the men known as the West Memphis Three. Charged with the 1993 killings of three boys in Arkansas, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley Jr. each spent 18 years in prison. Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley were released in August 2011, but they were forced, under an arcane statute, to accept responsibility for the murders. Now in their mid- and late 30s, Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley are technically still culpable, but Berg’s rigorous, science-based inquiry, should dispel any lingering notion that they were involved in […]
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Five Questions with Trashed Director Candida Brady
If you were to view the documentary Trashed without audio, the visuals alone would leave a strong impression: Our globe, as captured by the camera’s sweeping gaze, is loaded with staggering amounts of waste. Household rubbish, rotting animals, matted paper and plastic form mountains many yards high, towering ominously over oceans and towns. Steam drifts from the mounds, like great animals giving off heat. According to Trashed, we throw away 200 billion plastic bottles and 58 billion disposable cups every year — figures we’ve likely heard before, but easily forget for lack of visual perspective. Candida Brady’s film provides just […]
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Michael Connors, Allegiance
An intelligently written and genuinely felt Iraq War drama, Allegiance is perhaps the first film about the way the conflict shaped the lives of those who prepare to go to battle that has been written, produced, directed and mostly financed by veterans themselves. The directorial debut of Michael Connors, the picture has an unforced verisimilitude few films about military life can match. Allegiance portrays an insular community with its own moral logic, in this case an American military regiment of New York National Guardsmen being called up to active duty in Iraq on the eve of the Sadr City/Fallujah nightmare of 2004. What […]
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Director Tony Pemberton Talks Russia, Film and Devo
I first got to know Tony Pemberton when his production company Go East Productions co-produced my documentary The Mark of Cain. Tony was living in Moscow at the time and I could not have navigated Russia without him. He directed his own Film Beyond The Ocean (2000) in Russia and he knew the ins and outs of filmmaking there. No matter how insane my requests were, he never considered anything impossible. Pemberton is currently in Germany shooting his feature film Buddha’s Little Finger. He is in Berlin, which is standing in for Moscow in the ’90s. Additionally, Pemberton is in […]
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Director Nancy Buirski on The Loving Story
In the documentary The Loving Story, Richard and Mildred Loving say very little, preferring to lean in close, exchange meaningful glances, and drape an arm around the other. Hardly exhibitionist, the two seem unlikely candidates as powerful, public symbols of the fight for marriage and racial equality during the Civil Rights era. Mildred, of African American and Native American descent, met Richard, a white neighbor, in a small Virginia community where, as he says, “there’s a few white and there’s a few color” who “mixed together” without trouble. The couple married in Washington, DC in 1958 and returned to Virginia. […]
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Second-Time Director: Tze Chun and Cold Comes the Night
At Filmmaker we continuously cover the struggles of first-time directors to make their debut pictures. But the second film comes with its own set of unique challenges, issues that will be explored in this five-part series by Kishori Rajan. Below is the first installment, chronicling Filmmaker 25 New Face Tze Chun’s move from the microbudget character drama Children of Invention to a thriller with stars like Bryan Cranston. Look for further articles in the weeks ahead. — SM The late producer Laura Ziskin once remarked that movies “aren’t made, but forced into existence,” an expression never more apt than when […]
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Five Questions with Tchoupitoulas Co-Director Bill Ross
Every once in a while, a film comes along that invites the audience to transcend their theater seats and join a cast of characters on a strange journey, where initially the final destination remains a mystery to all. Over the course of 80 lean minutes, Tchoupitoulas, now playing in New York City at IFC Center, asks us to follow three brothers who, after missing the last ferry home, traverse the streets of New Orleans by night with little more on hand than their wits and a dog named Buttercup. The film weaves together the various nightlife scenes, ranging from striptease […]
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The Neverending Story of Self-Distributing The Upsetter
Indefatigable in their desire to find larger and larger audiences for their film, Adam Bhala Lough (Bomb the System, Weapons) and and his co-director Ethan Higbee have been self-distributing The Upsetter: The Life & Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry for what feels like an eternity. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in 2008 and bounced around the festival circuit for the next year and a half, picking up Benicio Del Toro as an executive producer and narrator along the way, while winning generally positive notices in most of its stops. When Lough (one of 2003’s “25 New Faces of Independent […]
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Five Questions with Only the Young Co-Director Jason Tippet
Capturing the subtle ache of youth on screen has never been an easy task – as evidenced by the long tradition of idiosyncratic, auteur-driven “coming of age” features like American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, and Dazed and Confused. So it’s quite an impressive feat that those same emotions and aesthetics are so naturally evoked in the real-life stories of three adrift youth in the new documentary Only the Young. Following the quiet travails of evangelical skate punk best friends Garrison, Kevin and Skye, this debut feature from filmmaking team Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims is one of the year’s […]
