Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“This Movie Could Only Happen at This Budget in New York City”: Vuk Lungulov-Klotz on Mutt
A breakout at Sundance, Berlinale and New Directors/New Films this year, Chilean-Serbian writer-director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s debut feature Mutt is as scrappy and charming as its canine title. Following a frenzied 24 hours in the life of New York trans man Feña (Lío Mehiel, the first trans actor to win the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting at Sundance), Mutt explores the constant micro-aggressions that trans people face daily—even in a supposedly hyper-tolerant locale, especially from loved ones—and the connections and community that make these encounters sting a little bit less. Even when Feña faces his capricious ex-boyfriend, moody tween […]
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“Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
“Have you ever seen Romanian TikToks?” It’s a torrid afternoon in Locarno and Radu Jude and I are sitting in a container repurposed as an interview booth, a couple of days after the premiere of his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Social media play a prominent role in the film, an electrifying snapshot of life in the 21st century designed to both immortalize our back-to-front digital zeitgeist and dissect its textures. A collage straddling black comedy and road movie, Do Not Expect centers on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant whose company […]
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“We Didn’t Want an Audience Member To Be Able To Say, ‘Oh, That Was Just One Bad Cop’”: Stanley Nelson and Valerie Scoon on Sound of the Police
Stanley Nelson and Valerie Scoon’s Sound of the Police is an exhaustive exploration of the oppositional dynamics between African Americans and law enforcement, from slavery right up to today. Through a wealth of archival imagery, interviews with academics, authors and assorted deep thinkers of various backgrounds and colors as well as an ear-catching soundtrack (indeed the doc’s title is a nod to rapper KRS-One’s 1993 anti-police brutality anthem “Sound of da Police,” which serves as a sort of sonic exclamation point throughout the ABC News Studios doc), the veteran filmmakers make a compelling case that any relationship built on the […]
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“I Realized This Was a Film Not Necessarily About Things Seen…But Things Felt”: Elaine McMillion Sheldon on King Coal
Like many Filmmaker readers, I first encountered the work of Elaine McMillion Sheldon a decade ago, when the West Virginia native landed on our annual 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2013. She’d just completed Hollow, which began as a documentary about her home state’s struggling McDowell County, and ultimately transformed into a sprawling interactive project; and per Randy Astle’s profile, “a community portrait that includes about three hours of video — including a lot shot by members of the community — audio recordings, text, photographs and user-generated material via Instagram.” Sheldon then popped back onto my radar two […]
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Riding in Cars with Boys: Gina Gammell, Riley Keough, Franklin Sioux Bob and Willi White on War Pony
Gaining access to an underrepresented community comes with a great amount of responsibility. There are countless examples of a director visiting a site for a few days, getting what they need, then hightailing it out only to use their subsequent press tour to emphasize the “raw grittiness” they observed while filming on location. It’s crucial to question who benefits from this exchange. Does the filmmaker gain authenticity for their work merely by virtue of who they put in front of the camera? Does the portrayed community benefit from being used to confirm an outsider’s predetermined perception? Gina Gammell and Riley […]
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“There Are Not Many Places in the World Better To Live Than Dublin Right Now”: Luke McManus on His Inner-City Doc North Circular
Regular Dublin folk, and the folk songs that have preserved their histories, guide viewers along the city’s North Circular in director Luke McManus’s first documentary feature. A three-and-a-half mile long loop separating Dublin’s inner city from its first hints of suburbia, the North Circular Road was laid in 1763 concurrently with the city’s South Circular Road, which now comprises residential homes and, until the early 19th century, largely ran through countryside. Due to its longstanding urban location, the North Circular has been synonymous with working class residents, leading to a broader public consensus that much of the road ran through […]
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“Film Sets Are the Best Film School”: YouTubers-Turned-Filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou on Their A24 Horror Debut Talk To Me
Ventriloquist demons go viral in Talk To Me, the feature film debut of twin brothers and co-directors Danny and Michael Philippou. While the A24 horror venture marks their first official foray into feature filmmaking, the duo have been uploading action-packed videos onto their YouTube channel, RackaRacka, since 2013. Unlike Kyle Edward Ball, another YouTuber-turned-filmmaker whose chilling feature debut Skinamarink released earlier this year, the Philippou’s prior output wasn’t necessarily horror-focused. To date, their channel is mostly comprised of stunts, comedy sketches, satirical vlogs and prank videos. This decade-spanning commitment to making content is likely what primed the brothers to helm Talk […]
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A League of His Own: Sam Pollard on The League
Admittedly, as a white, baseball-phobic critic (I’ve never seen A League of Their Own or anything starring Kevin Costner and a bat), I’m not exactly the target demographic for The League, which takes a deep dive into America’s pastime through the parallel sports universe of the Negro League. Nevertheless, the doc was a must-catch, no pun intended, for me during Tribeca since I also happen to have a baseball-obsessed (Bronx-born/Brooklyn Dodgers-raised) father and (Mets-maniacal) sister who visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum several years back, and still speak of that trip as some sort of exotic holy pilgrimage. (For the record, the NLBM is […]
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“All Filmmakers are Struggling to Find Money”: Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown on Dalton’s Dream
Normally on shoots, veteran documentary maker Kim Longinotto films far away from her native England, often capturing the lives of women in desperate situations over the course of a few weeks. With her latest film, Dalton’s Dream, things ran rather differently. Having watched his victory on the British X Factor in 2018, Longinotto reached out to Dalton Harris, interested in documenting his life in a new country with a new record contract. An initial three-month shoot morphed into more than four years, held up by both the pandemic and the turbulence of Harris’s life as he found himself persecuted for […]
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The ’80s NYC Art Scene, DIY Doc Filmmaking and the Hustle of Self-Promotion: Director Brian Vincent and Producer Heather Spore on Make Me Famous
There’s a moment early in director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore’s documentary Make Me Famous when the ’80s downtown New York artist Edward Brezinski is described by the late artist Duncan Hannah as the guy with the flyers. Brezinski would show up at openings, drink the cheap wine and press flyers for group shows at the Magic Gallery (his own barren apartment on East 3rd Street) into as many palms as possible. In a world where the most successful artists managed to self-promote while simultaneously adopting a pose of understated remove, Brezinski’s old-school hucksterism was memorably uncool. As the […]
