Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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Profiling the SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant Finalists (Part 3)
Following on from the Bay Area Boom article about the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program, we are profiling the 13 finalists for the SFFS’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant. The winners of this award will be announced on December 8. SUSAN YOUSSEF AND MAN KIT LAM, MARJOUN AND THE FLYING HEADSCARF Synopsis: With her father imprisoned on dubious terrorism related charges, a Lebanese-American teenager in Arkansas searches for identity in the headscarf and a motorcycle. This feature is an extension of the short by the same name that screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf is the first […]
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Director John Henry Summerour on Sahkanaga
The following Q&A is an excerpt from a conversation between filmmaker John Henry Summerour and John DeVore, a writer for The Pulse, Chattanooga’s weekly alternative. (DeVore’s Pulse feature on Summerour can be found here.) Summerour discusses the importance of his personal relationship with the South in making his newest film Sahkanaga (“Great Blue Hills of God” in Cherokee), which is inspired by the Tri-State Crematory scandal. In 2002, it was discovered that over 300 bodies that had been committed to the crematory in Georgia for proper disposal were never cremated and instead buried or left in a shed and the […]
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Five Questions with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Director Edward Burns
Fifteen years after winning the 1995 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for The Brothers McMullen, Edward Burns proves with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas that you can always return home. In his newest feature film, the Long Island native revisits the joys and trials of an Irish-American working-class family — fertile ground that helped him to stand out as a director and writer of independent film all those years ago. At first, Burns was hesitant to dip again into the well, but The Fitzgerald Family Christmas stands on its own. Two generations of actors with ties to Burns over his 15 years in film reunite […]
