Directors
Interviews - Directors
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The Subject as Auteur: Jonathan Demme on Enzo Avitabile Music Life
Italian jazz saxophonist and composer Enzo Avitabile might not be a household name in the States, but in the annals of world music he’s quite a fixture. In his native Naples he is so famous that when he visits the neighborhood of his youth, folks bustle into the streets and onto rooftops and balconies to lay eyes on him. A scholar of jazz, he can hold court on the evolution of the form as long as you’d like him to, although as Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme discovers in his newest concert film, Enzo Avitabile Music Life, that may not […]
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Seduced and Abandoned‘s James Toback on Movies, Mortality, Shooting in Cannes, and Literally Shooting his Enemies
James Toback has to be one of the most candid individuals in the movie business. Sitting down for a chat about his new genre-defying documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which borrows its title from 1964’s Pietro Germi satire, and premieres on HBO on Monday, Oct. 28, the 68-year-old filmmaker practically blows my mind with his willingness to talk about anything and everything, from late mogul David Begelman’s psychosis and Alec Baldwin’s divorce troubles to mega-producer delusions and his own personal hit list, whose names he has every intention of crossing off before he croaks. Yes, you heard right. Utterly filterless, Toback […]
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Shooting with 18 Cameras: The Making of The Short Game
With a background in comedy shorts, you’d be forgiven if you thought Josh Greenbaum’s first feature, a documentary that follows the 7 and 8-year old competitors in the World Championships of Junior Golf, would be a dark look at another group of driven parents. But that’s not what Greenbaum was interested in doing. Instead, he focuses on the children, these pre-teens who can, at turns, appear tremendously adult, or just like any other 7-year old. The Short Game follows eight competitors through last year’s championships, though production actually started a year before at the previous championships. That was where they […]
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Five Questions with I Am Divine Director Jeffrey Schwarz
Before there was RuPaul’s Drag Race, hell, before there was RuPaul, there was the divinely dangerous Divine, actor, singer, drag queen, provocateur extraordinaire. Willing to do not almost anything but anything on screen (including eating dog feces for Pink Flamingos, one of the many films he made with the legendary shocksploitation director, John Waters), all in the name of art. Starting its theatrical run this week at the Cinema Village in NYC and the Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane in Austin, I Am Divine tells the behind-the-scenes story of this force of nature that left no taboo unturned. Filmmaker interviewed the doc’s director, Jeffrey Schwarz, over email. […]
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Peaches Does Herself, Naturally
Peaches – government name Merill Nisker – solemnly swears that her career is built upon natural progressions. Yes, the move from one-third of a folk lounge act to electronica’s most preeminent provocateur was not so much calculated as an aligning of experimentation and tastes. And so, when the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin approached Peaches about directing a show in 2010, the answer was not a “yes” or “no,” but simply, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Following the success of the performance, in which Peaches single-handedly played all of the roles to the piano accompaniment of her longtime collaborator Gonzales, the HAU […]
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“Only At the End You Can See the Origin of Tragedy…. So I Used a Small Camera”: Claire Denis on Bastards
Over 25 years of directing films, Claire Denis has explored the silent rhythms of men and women as they move through spaces of romance and violence, attraction and solitude in stories that range from the love affairs of cannibals (Trouble Every Day), to the exercises of the French Foreign legion (Beau Travail), to the every day spaces of domesticity (35 Shots of Rum). A filmmaker who prefers monologue to dialogue, and silence to any speech at all, her intimate spaces, impressionistic photography, and oblique scenarios can divide audiences, but provide untold riches for those willing to forgo plot devices and […]
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Matt Herron Talks Audition
Usually the term “a cast of hundreds” isn’t applied to a film with just two characters. But that’s exactly how to describe Matt Herron’s new feature Audition, an innovative film in which 100 actors — 50 men, 50 women — portray one couple over the course of a torrid romance. The concept is for this narrative story to be told through the documentary process of different actors interpreting the fictional roles (or, conversely, it could be seen as a documentary about acting that conveys a narrative storyline): the original 100 actors are winnowed down as the film progresses until the […]
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A More Perfect Union: Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson on American Promise
In the increasingly tony Fort Greene neighborhood just east of downtown Brooklyn, filmmakers Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster raised a son named Idris. Very early on in his youth, just as their son was about to become one of the few young black males to enroll in The Dalton School, a vaunted Upper East Side prep school that either trains young masters of the universe in the ways of maintaining their hegemony or educates a diverse set of the city’s best students in a humane and liberal environment (all depends on your outlook), the couple decided to make a documentary. […]
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Spook Country: Spencer McCall on The Institute
Just what the hell was the Jejune Institute? After watching Spencer McCall’s fascinating and intentionally puzzling documentary The Institute, I’m still not quite sure. An interactive, multimedia, experiential game, based in a nondescript building in San Francisco’s central business district that thrives of]n the memory of a woman who disappeared into the Bay Area night a quarter century ago and never returned? Perhaps, I guess. A scripted experience surely, an alternate-reality game involving participants in events both spooky and merely bizarre, including scavenger hunts to fairly ominous locales, mock public protests and sundry hijinks that would feel right at home […]
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DIY Multiplatform Storytelling: Kal on the Tokyo Sally Film and App
Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]
