Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Director Matthew Akers on Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
The self-described “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic has for almost 40 years been one of the leading lights of a still-marginalized form. Born to ex-partisan parents in 1946, in the early days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, she is the fascinating subject of Matthew Akers’ new documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. Despite her international renown, the Belgrade-born, New York-based Abramovic failed to enter the public consciousness in the States until her blockbuster 2010 MoMA retrospective. Akers’ film is a sinewy tour through Abramovic’s peculiar life and working process as she embarks upon her most high profile performance yet, one […]
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Mission Accomplished: Lorrel Manning and Michael Cuomo on Happy New Year
I first met writer/director K. Lorrel Manning and actor/producer Michael Cuomo at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, where we found ourselves the fish-out-of-water New Yorkers in a sea full of Southwest cinephiles. Their SXSW 2011 (sold out) hit Happy New Year is grounded in star Cuomo’s nuanced portrayal of a fictional outsider named Cole Lewis, a sergeant who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and now finds himself battling demons both mental and physical in the psych ward of a veterans hospital. I spoke with the two about their veterans outreach effort, Indiegogo versus Kickstarter, and the best […]
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Writer/Director Todd Solondz on Dark Horse
“I want to want you,” says the cripplingly depressed Miranda (Selma Blair) to her suitor with excruciating honesty. The coddled, overweight Abe (Jordan Gelber), a compulsive collector who still lives at home with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken), will take what he can get. “That’s enough for me,” he breathes. In Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, the queasy tale of a 35-year-old man-child who decides to add a wife to his possessions, the writer-director’s dialogue is as sharp as ever, each line an arrow poisoned with sincerity. Known for colorful, stylized, cynical films including Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), […]
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Onur Tukel, Richard’s Wedding
In Richard’s Wedding, which follows a bevy of wedding guests and the soon-to-be-wedded on their way to a small Central Park wedding, director Onur Tukel has crafted a delightfully funny, seemingly real-time ensemble piece. From British blowhard Russell (Darrill Rosen) to the writer/director/editor/star’s Tuna, the characters live on the edge of likability and the film’s narrative deftly frames the torrent of just-this-side-of-racist jokes, downright delusional character asides, and a general decline of civility. The unconventional comedic approach gives proceedings a hard-won warmth and generosity that lesser films skating this kind of textual irony and cutting, ribald humor frequently fail to achieve. Co-starring a number […]
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Director Kim Nguyen on War Witch
War Witch is a film about resilience. Resilience of an individual, of a community and even of the architecture of a society. French-Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen tells a story that is set to become a benchmark in jungle films. From the painful, complex situation of the child soldiers, he weaves an intelligent movie which enables the viewer to penetrate their reality and the multi-level relationship these children create with their environment. Set in stunning natural landscapes, War Witch transports us from play to gunfire, from tenderness to abuse, from hardcore survival to ghostly magic. It also reveals the raw, powerful […]
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Panos Cosmatos, Beyond the Black Rainbow
It’s a strange paradox of today’s cinema that so many films feature lavish and eye-popping special effects yet are such ordinary viewing experiences. Sure, today’s VFX and surround sound are capable of overwhelming you, of beating you into submission, but, with a handful of exceptions, they seldom take you further. One film that does is Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow, an astonishingly ambitious debut feature that is as much an elegant art object as it is a science-fiction head trip of the highest order. Set in 1983 — and feeling as if it was actually made in 1983 too […]
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Alex Holdridge: “I’ll Never Go to Los Angeles Again”
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
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Steve Collins, You Hurt My Feelings
Steve Collins’ You Hurt My Feelings is the story of emotionally remote and unavailable people, a trio of wounded individuals who fail to connect with one another. Though Collins’ film deals with familiar subject matter, its tale is told with such clever minimalism and discernible sweetness that it goes down rather smoothly. While the characters may not be able to express themselves emotionally, Collins and his director of photography, Jeremy Saulnier (Septien, Putty Hill), find real poetry in the changing of the New England seasons, the passage of time providing an even greater window in the the failed lives on display. John […]
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Damon Russell, Snow on tha Bluff
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about. Easy to dismiss as “Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent — and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black […]
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Five Questions with Nancy, Please Director Andrew Semans
Sometimes the simplest premises can be the most devastating. Andrew Semans’ debut feature Nancy, Please follows Paul (Will Rogers), a Yale PhD student as he tries (or, kind of tries) and utterly fails to complete his dissertation. His excuse for this lack of productivity? He’s accidentally left an essential annotated copy of Dickens’ Little Dorrit at his old apartment. Worse still, the book is now in the care of his ex-roommate Nancy (Eléonore Hendricks), a woman who he views as something of a sociopath. As Paul’s attempts to get the book back grow more and more desperate, Semans plumbs the […]
