Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler’s Flat Daddy
Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler’s Flat Daddy is released on VOD on November 6. The following was originally published on the eve of its Doc NYC premiere in 2011. In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on […]
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Five Questions with North Sea Texas Director Bavo Defurne
The most striking thing about North Sea Texas is the handsome precision of its aesthetic, which, from the windswept beaches of its coastal setting to the ’70s duds that match home décor, comes close to endowing the film with a magical-realist vibe. A native Belgian and graduate of a Brussels art school, writer/director Bavo Defurne isn’t interested in being a fly on the wall. From a portfolio of ethereal photography to a handful of short films (including Campfire, which gobbled up praise as it cruised the international festival circuit), Defurne has an affinity not for the affected, but for the […]
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Game Changers Part 2: Funding and Casting
Game Changers is an indie film currently being shot in Buffalo, New York. In this second part of the interview with filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer), they discuss funding a low-budget movie, how the budget effects the production, as well as casting and location scouting. Filmmaker: So you had a script, but then you had to fund the movie. How did you go about doing that? Imbs: Funding was always an Indiegogo thing. Just as I fell in love with Twitter, I also fell in love with the idea of Indiegogo. I really believe in supporting artists, […]
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Five Questions with Girl Walk // All Day Director Jacob Krupnick
Director and photographer Jacob Krupnick was waiting for a spark to ignite a major creative project, and it came when he was listening to All Day, the 2010 album by mashup maestro Girl Talk. Krupnick’s debut feature, Girl Walk // All Day brilliantly utilizes the entirety of the album, using it as both soundtrack and inspiration for an epic, feature-length music video, the story of a young dancer (Anne Marsen) who escapes for the day to New York City, turning the great metropolis into one big, ever-moving stage. Along the way, she regularly crosses paths with both The Creep (John Doyle), a weirdo in […]
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Game Changers Part 1: Getting Started
Filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) are currently shooting a low-budget independent feature film, Game Changers, a drama/comedy about two video-gamers who are approaching their late twenties. With an initial target budget of $30,000, Game Changers might be better described as a shoestring budget feature, given that they began shooting with only half that amount raised. Though this is their first film together, Imbs has previously made a feature-length video, Eckstein has extensive shooting experience in corporate video and documentaries, and Imbs is an experienced editor who will be doing most of the editing. Imbs, who is based […]
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Five Questions with Jack & Diane Director Bradley Rust Gray
On the surface, director Bradley Rust Gray’s Jack & Diane tells a typical tale of romance spawning from an immediate attraction. The kinetic chemistry between the title characters (played by Riley Keough and Juno Temple respectively) is reminiscent of the unnerving beat of Gray’s previous directorial effort The Exploding Girl. However, one doesn’t have to look too deep to find the dichotomy between romance and horror that Gray brings to the screen with this experimental film. It’s a pulsing story of two girls who are drawn to each other against an ambient soundtrack of modern beats and ’80s rock. Diane, a flighty […]
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Five Questions with Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Director Ben Shapiro
Ben Shapiro’s excellent Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, opens tomorrow at Film Forum through Zeitgeist Films. The following interview was originally published on the eve of its SXSW Film Festival premiere. Photographer Gregory Crewdson is renowned for his elaborately-staged photographs, huge in scope, size, and ambition. So filmmaker Benjamin Shapiro had his work cut out for him when he set out nearly a decade ago to follow Crewdson and demystify the artist’s process. But the biggest surprise of Shapiro’s long-awaited film is just how open, eloquent, and down-to-earth Crewdson is when discussing his art. Crewdson allows the audience unrestricted access to his […]
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Five Questions with F To 7th Creator Ingrid Jungermann
Ingrid Jungermann was selected by Filmmaker as part of this year’s crop of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” along with her comedic cohort from The Slope, Desiree Akhavan. After chronicling the relationship between two “superficial, homophobic lesbians” in The Slope, Jungermann is striking out on her own with a new web series, F to 7th — currently in the final stages of its fundraising campaign on Kickstarter — in which the same “Ingrid” character reappears, now looking for her place in the world. Filmmaker briefly chatted with Jungermann about her upcoming show, going solo and lessons learned from The Slope. Filmmaker: Tell us about F to […]
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Director Matthew Lillard on Fat Kid Rules the World
Matthew Lillard has been in the movie business for a long time, racking up a sizable resume as an actor in films from SLC Punk and Scream to The Descendants and Trouble with the Curve, but with this , year’s Fat Kid Rules the World, Lillard makes his directorial debut. Fat Kid Rules the World tells the story of Troy Billings, a lonely, overweight teen, and Marcus, the magnetic-yet-troubled local musician/high school dropout as they fight to save each other from their inner demons (depression/attempted suicide and drug addiciton respectively). After a serendipitous offer out of the blue and feeling […]
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“I Need to Feel When I Make a Film That I’m Not the Same Person Who Made the One Before”: Director Leos Carax on Holy Motors
“The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online,” said Sheryl Sandberg on Charlie Rose last year. “I have to be ‘me’, and you have to be ‘Charlie Rose,’” the Facebook COO told the talk show host. “It’s me” — that single line appearing late in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors unexpectedly devastated me at the film’s Cannes premiere, and perhaps its memory is what’s causing me to recall Sandberg’s statement, which is certainly in line with similar comments by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg. In an age in which online platforms offer the possibility for anyone to craft for themselves a variety […]
