Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Angela Davis on Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners
“When the doors slid open, furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That’s why they had cuffed by hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers were crowded into the lobby. Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back and between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.” These lines from Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, written at the age of 28 and edited by Toni Morrison, describe the way she remembers a humiliating perp walk four […]
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Five Questions with Easton’s Article Director Tim Connery
Start out with a seed of Back to the Future and end up with the atmospheric uneasiness of Memento or Pi. Perhaps it’s not a trajectory that one would normally project, but Easton’s Article fits the bill. Sub the Internet in for the Delorean and information rather than Marty McFly as the passenger, and you begin to pick up the path left by writer/director/producer Tim Connery. He states, “Think if you received an email from a ‘future you’. You could alter a lot of things by just reading one sentence. And in 1997 websites weren’t slick and efficient; the web was still weird and buggy […]
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Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
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Five Questions with Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy Director Marieke Wegener
In the years since his death in 2000, the work of artist Mark Lombardi has seemed even more prescient and relevant than it had during his lifetime. Lombardi’s finely-etched drawings, filled with annotated lines, circles and squiggles, traced the flow of capital and political power between various government, private and underworld actors. His subjects were American foreign policy, crime, corruption and conspiracy, and his artwork consisted of not only his drawings but the investigative work required to create them. Lombardi’s drawings reference the drug wars, the BCCI scandal, Charles Keating and the savings and loan scandal, and Iran contra, but […]
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Director Maiko Endo on Kuichisan
Easily the most out-there film I saw at last year’s CPH:DOX was one touted by the programmers as “the discovery of the festival”: Maiko Endo’s Kuichisan, receiving its New York debut tomorrow as part of the LaDiDa Festival. Previously, Endo was a vocalist in the band Battles and co-produced Jessica Oreck’s documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Now, Oreck has produced Endo’s debut picture, with Beetle Queen d.p. Sean Price Williams behind the camera. Stunningly shot in both black-and-white and color, Kuichisan is a tumbling collection of images, organized as much by feeling, sensation and the rhythms of its experimental soundtrack […]
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Director Leslye Headland on Bachelorette
Tall and part blonde/part brunette, Leslye Headland darted into our interview and gave me a warm greeting and an intense gaze. She explained that she had just run across town in Manhattan to walk her dog in between interviews while promoting her debut film, Bachelorette. The film is based on her stage play of the same name, about a gang of attractive girls (Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Kaplan and Isla Fisher) behaving badly before their friend’s wedding. I ask what her dog’s name is. “His name is Ramius. Which is Sean Connery’s name in The Hunt For Red October,” she says, […]
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Golden State Granddaughters Discuss California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown
While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
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Sophia Takal, Green
In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in […]
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Damon Russell & Curtis Snow on Snow on Tha Bluff
After debuting at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2011, Damon Russell’s Snow on Tha Bluff had a small theatrical release earlier this year. Writing about it then, Filmmaker’s own Brandon Harris described the film as “An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, [which] discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about.” Since becoming available through such platforms as iTunes and Netflix Watch Instantly, Snow on Tha Bluff has found a new and highly engaged audience which has discovered and been electrified […]
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Directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing on Detropia
In Detropia, the new documentary from directing partners Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a gleaming sun rises over a handsome stretch of metal and glass, yet much of the landscape it kisses is neglected, overgrown, and decaying. This is the dichotomous portrait of Detroit delivered by the filmmakers, whose breakthrough film, Jesus Camp, likely rattled your core. With similar attention paid to stirring emotional heft, Grady and Ewing’s latest uncovers the splendor and squalor of a very American metropolis, whose all-time-low state of disrepair is punctuated by glimmers of its former — and, perhaps, future — glory. Painstakingly researching their […]
