Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Mikkel Norgaard, Klown
Long considered one of the funniest shows in Scandinavia, the television series Klown features Danish comedians Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam playing Curb Your Enthusiasm-style variations on themselves, getting into hysterically awkward encounters with friends and strangers, loved ones and frenemies, including other Danish celebrities such as actress Iben Hjejle (High Fidelity, The Boss of It All) and Jørgen Leth (the co-director, with Lars von Trier, of The Five Obstructions). Running for six seasons, it propelled the comic duo to the heights of Danish celebrity and mainstream popularity. Now there is a film version of Klown directed by Mikkel Nørgaard, who conceived and directed much of […]
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Storm Song: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tchoupitoulas
After the recent BAMcinemaFest screening that marked the first time Benh Zeitlin’s magical-realist Beasts of the Southern Wild screened alongside Bill and Turner Ross’s immersive New Orleans documentary Tchoupitoulas—both South Louisiana-shot pictures produced by members of the film collective Court 13—there were two celebrations on either side of BAM. At the beautiful dive-bar Frank’s, the Ross brothers and various doc and indie film bros were watching the NBA championships with loud exuberance and strong opinions. There was a rumor that there was a dance party across the street at the Fox Searchlight-hosted party for Beasts, which was flowing with delicious […]
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The Work is the Reward: Chris Eyre on Hide Away
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 15 years since filmmaker Chris Eyre burst onto the indie scene with 1998’s Smoke Signals, based on a short story by fellow Native American Sherman Alexie, who also wrote the screenplay, and starring Native Canadian Gary Farmer (probably best known for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man). Since then the Portland homeboy has seamlessly shifted from the big screen, to PBS fare, to franchise TV and back again, most recently with Hide Away, an existential drama featuring Josh Lucas and James Cromwell. Earlier this year, Chris was tapped for an entirely different gig, chairing the […]
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Five Questions with Tiger Tail in Blue Director Frank V. Ross
Right now on Kentucker Audley’s No Budge website, it’s Frank V. Ross week. If that name elicits a blank response, it’s not an uncommon reaction. Though Chicago-based Ross is one of the original class of mumblecore directors, he never received the attention that was given to so many of his DIY peers, such as Andrew Bujalski, the Duplass brothers or Joe Swanberg (a fellow Chicagoan with whom Ross has collaborated numerous times). Nevertheless, his recent films Present Company (2008) and Audrey the Trainwreck (2010) have gained him a number of champions within the indie community, and those two films have […]
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Benoit Jacquot, Farewell, My Queen
The court intrigue that animates Benoit Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen — set during the final days of Marie Antoinette’s reign — could be the stuff of so many costume dramas. To his great credit, however, the 65-year-old Parisian director, best known on this side of the pond for his 1995 hotel chamber drama A Single Girl, offers an elliptical, accumulative account of the events, keeping them tightly focused on the experience of the Queen’s private reader Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) as the storm clouds of revolution gather from outside the corridors of Versailles and the regime’s demise very quickly becomes inevitable, even […]
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Writer/Director Martin Donovan on Collaborator
Martin Donovan is destined to be forever remembered for his remarkable actor-director partnership with Hal Hartley during indie film’s halcyon days of the early to mid 1990s. In era-defining movies such as Trust, Simple Men and Amateur, Donovan was Hartley’s on-screen simulacrum, a smart, softly spoken man who was simultaneously familiar and enigmatic. While Hartley’s work is sadly not nearly as popular or present as it once was, it’s fitting that Donovan has made his debut feature as a writer and director with Collaborator, a knowing and witty cinematic chamber piece that feels nostalgic for the more culturally sophisticated times […]
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Jonathan Paley, Ballplayer: Pelotero
Although its population is just 2% the size of the US’, the tiny, impoverished Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic accounts for a fifth of all the young men who go on to become Major League Baseball players. How such an astounding share of pro baseball players come from the DR was what Jonathan Paley and his co-directors Ross Finkel and Trevor Martin set out to explore in Ballplayer: Pelotero. However, what they discovered was that, in addition to being a country ripe with baseball talent — one that the MLB has spent considerable resources mining for the past 50 […]
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All in the Family: Jonathan Caouette on Walk Away Renee
I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor for the very special, not to mention most unusual, connection between director Jonathan Caouette and Renee Leblanc, his mentally ill and frequently institutionalized mother and the subject of his most recent film, Walk Away Renee. The closest I could come is really a parallel, and it lies within Caouette’s body of work. In his 2010 surreal short All Flowers in Time, a beautiful young woman, played by Chloe Sevigny, has an indefinable relationship with an adolescent boy. In a bizarre world where young people’s eyes can turn glowing red, the two seem to […]
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Alma Har’El on her Shia LaBeouf-Starring Sigur Ros Video
Containing the same truthful fusion of fantasy and reality as found in her documentary Bombay Beach, filmmaker Alma Har’el’s latest work is a provocative and dramatically compelling short film for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, made as part of the group’s Mystery Film Eeperiment. For the Project, the band invited a dozen filmmakers to select a track from their new album, Valtari, gave them the same modest budget, and told them to do what they saw in their heads. “The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom,” they wrote on their site. […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Women in Film
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season today — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox was […]
