Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across his filmography, resulting in new sensations, desires and ways of being in the world. In Videodrome, unusual orifices form, as stomachs become insertion points for violent VHS tapes. Real and virtual worlds blur in eXistenZ as videogame controllers jack directly into spinal cords; more recently, in Crimes of the Future, the surgical removal of surreal organs is the latest form […]
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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased. From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo. […]
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Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang
Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot […]
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“Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction
Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and painfully muted in the present, a contrast that engineers the film’s central narrative mystery. Through memory-triggered flashbacks and forwards, Satisfaction orbits around a moment of trauma, the film’s editing rhythms and narrative structure mirroring the emotional evasiveness and repression that Lola must deploy during a Greek island vacation with her musician boyfriend, Philip (Fionn Whitehead). But repression as self-preservation can only […]
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“It Felt As If She Were Actually Speaking to Me About This Film”: Rachel Mason on Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
Rachel Mason’s Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna makes its point crystal clear from the title: Halyna Hutchins, the talented DP who landed on American Cinematographer’s list of “10 up-and-coming directors of photography who are making their mark” in 2019, will not be upstaged by the celebrity who in 2021 accidentally shot and killed her (and injured director Joel Souza) during the filming of the western Rust. Which makes sense since Mason was a close friend of Hutchins, and was asked by her devastated widower to take on the project. And while the film is rightly a celebration […]
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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
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“I Wanted to Make Sure That My Version Was Additive”: Writer-Director Durga Chew-Bose on Adapting Bonjour Tristesse
“I’ve been young for so long, and so old for longer.” — Durga Chew-Bose, from Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) “Certain phrases fascinate me with their subtle implications, even though I may not altogether understand their meaning.” –-From the novel Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) In 1955, eighteen-year-old Françoise Sagan’s debut novel Bonjour Tristesse, about a teenager and her widowed playboy father vacationing on the French Riviera, enjoyed three months atop the New York Times bestseller list. Otto Preminger’s lush CinemaScope film adaptation followed in 1958. The director’s clinically cool approach was tepidly received, though Jean-Luc Godard, […]
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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
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“This is Part of Where Our Title Came From — the Amount That Women are Censored”: Annapurna Sriram On Her SXSW-Premiering Fucktoys
While sitting on a raft in the middle of a Southern swamp, AP (Annapurna Sriram) learns that her recent string of bad luck, missing tooth included, is caused by a curse. A psychic (played by New Orleans-based rapper Big Freedia) reveals that the only way for AP to free herself from the spiritual bind is to sacrifice an innocent lamb in an ancient ritual. The needed ceremony will cost AP $1,000, which she promises to raise in just a few days. This sets the plot of Fucktoys in motion, which finds AP traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown […]
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“Slime Everywhere”: Grace Glowicki and U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on Dead Lover
A lonely woman, solely referred to as Gravedigger, has never known romance due to the putrid scent she absorbs from her occupational namesake in the latest feature from director, star and co-writer Grace Glowicki following 2019’s Tito. One fateful night, Gravedigger’s lucky stars align when a handsome nobleman (co-writer Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s husband/frequent collaborator) becomes infatuated by this “fetid creature,” whose smell has the unexpected effect of turning him on. The film, however, is entitled Dead Lover, clearly alluding to the tragic conclusion of Gravedigger’s whirlwind romance. Desperate to rekindle their passion, she takes her lover’s only remains—a formidable ring […]
