Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Acting Their Age: Dustin Guy Defa on The Adults
“It was a highly anticipated scene for me,” Hannah Gross told me with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd. For anyone who has a complicated relationship, spoken or unspoken, with a sibling, it’s the ideal scenario: to get to express your grievances through the safety of these voices.” I’d asked her about a memorable moment near the end of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2017). Gross, Michael Cera and Sophia Lillis star as estranged siblings still reckoning with the death of their mother and still adjusting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to the disappointments of […]
-
“The Nature of Global Capitalism is Such that [Stories About] Gay Sexuality Are More and More Difficult to Finance”: Passages Director Ira Sachs in Conversation with Stephen Winter
The following interview with director Ira Sachs by director Stephen Winter was published in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Sachs’s film Passages arrives in theaters from MUBI. There are acclaimed films about filmmakers set during production—Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Day for Night and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, to name three. But there are far fewer set during what might be an even more psychologically fraught time: post-production. For some directors, it’s when a film wraps that things become unstable. The ersatz family of cast and crew retreat, the militarized schedule lessens somewhat and […]
-
Decisive Moments: Earth Mama Director Savanah Leaf in Conversation with Derek Cianfrance
There are two long back-and-forth tracking shots in Savanah Leaf’s wise, emotionally full debut feature, Earth Mama. In the first, the pregnant Gia—a 24-year-old Oakland single mother fighting for custody of the two young children she already has lost to state-sponsored foster care—purposefully strides across a playground, the camera focused on her as she passes expensive strollers and children playing in the background in soft focus. Moments before, she has asked the owner of the photo studio she works at for a cash advance: “I don’t want my baby coming out with no clothes or nothing,” she says. (Leaf cuts […]
-
“A Call to Action for Everybody To Preserve Their History Before It’s Gone”: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on The Stroll
Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities—starving artists and sex workers—that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from […]
-
“How Do You Evoke the History of Violence in a Space Without Showing It?”: Hannah Peterson on The Graduates
“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]
-
“I Absolutely Cannot Stand the Present”: Ted Geoghegan on Period Horror Film Brooklyn 45
Post-WWII national anxieties offer a glimpse into our current tolerance for totalitarianism in Brooklyn 45, writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s latest horror effort. Presented as a real-time film in a bottle setting, the film takes place during the immediate aftermath of the war as a group of veterans meet at one of their Brooklyn (by way of Chicago) abodes to reconnect and (attempt to) mend fresh wounds. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) hosts the group, who assemble in part to support their old friend after his wife’s recent suicide. Rounding out the guest list is Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who worked as […]
-
Let Me Be Your Shelley Duvall: Stewart Thorndike on Bad Things
The haunted halls of a defunct Catskills hotel wreak psychological violence on a group of young, queer city slickers in Bad Things, the long-awaited sophomore feature from writer-director Stewart Thorndike. Arriving nearly a decade after Lyle, Thorndike’s sapphic take on Rosemary’s Baby starring Gabby Hoffmann, Bad Things similarly tackles plot points and thematic fixations of another scary movie staple—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—through a thoroughly queer and feminist perspective. Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is debating whether or not to sell the now-derelict hotel her mother used to run years prior. With a decisive real estate meeting only days away, Ruthie assembles a […]
-
“The Result of On-Camera Conversations Spanning 15 Years”: Christian Einshøj on The Mountains
Shockingly (as the films I adore usually fly under the radar) but deservedly, this year’s winner of the Best International Feature Documentary Award at Hot Docs, first-time feature director Christian Einshøj’s The Mountains, proved to be a prime example of my mantra that the smaller and more specific the story, the more universal the reach. Influenced by Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (it thrills me just to type that), and also Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, the doc is equal parts oddball charming and emotionally devastating. As the (very specific) logline puts it: “Armed with 30 years of home video, 75,000 family photos […]
-
“Authenticity is More Important than Anything Else”: Maria Fredriksson on Tribeca 2023 Premiere The Gullspång Miracle
Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction—it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), […]
-
“This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Apolonia, Apolonia
[Editor’s note: Apolonia, Apolonia opens Friday, Jan. 12, at DCTV Firehouse.] Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an […]
