Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Director Marc Simon on Unraveled
Putting a human face on the criminality of the financial crisis, Unraveled explores the downfall of Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney who was arrested in 2009 for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from hedge funds. The documentary places us in the “guilded prison” of Dreier’s upper East Side apartment during his 60-day house arrest. In that time, he is interviewed by none other than one of his victims, Marc Simon, who, in addition to being an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, formerly worked as a lawyer at Dreier’s law firm, Dreier L.L.P. You wouldn’t know that from the film, however, as […]
-
Gorman Bechard on Color Me Obsessed
Gorman Bechard’s Color Me Obsessed is the rare music documentary that lavishes admiration not only onto its subject, rowdy Minneapolis cult rock band The Replacements, but on the band’s fans as well. The doc doesn’t feature a single song by The Replacements, nor does it feature interviews with any of the three surviving members. Instead, Bechard lets the fans tell the story. Over the course of the film, he interviews dozens of subjects: the musicians, misfits, and devotees whose formative years were sound-tracked by The Replacements. We hear conflicting opinions about nearly everything – favorite songs, band dynamics, the point […]
-
Werner Herzog on Into the Abyss
In his films, Werner Herzog has traveled the Amazon, journeyed to Antarctica and, most recently, descended through time into the caves of France to uncover centuries-old cave paintings. So, his trip to a small town in Texas awaiting the capital punishment of a young murderer might have been less epic were it not for the moral dilemmas, lingering anguish and genuine strangeness he finds there. Eschewing the tropes of typical capital punishment documentaries, Herzog, with his German-accented voice jutting from behind the camera, lends an empathetic ear to the words of not only the killer but his accomplice, the victims’ […]
-
Karen Mintz and Simon Egleton on Their Frank Bender Doc
Karen Mintz has just finished shooting her documentary, The Recomposer of The Decomposed, about the forensic artist Frank Bender, who died recently. She is about to move into the post-production phase. I had the opportunity to meet with her and her producer Simon Egleton and talk about her film, the pros and cons of no-budget filmmaking, and the friend that she made, and also lost, during the process. Filmmaker: Can you start by telling me a little about how you became a filmmaker and what your background is? Mintz: I started working in production 15 years ago. I just kind […]
-
Director Matt Osterman on Ghost From the Machine
When Matt Osterman attended the IFP Narrative Lab a few years ago, his $25,000, science fiction/supernatural thriller, about a grief-stricken man who builds a machine to communicate with the dead, was titled Phasma ex Machina. But when the film was finished and released this summer on DVD and, later, iTunes and Netflix by Screen Media, it went under the less obscure title of Ghost from the Machine. Now, however, another name change is in the works. This August Universal Pictures acquired the remake rights, attaching Gary Shore and Nathan Parker to write and direct. The new film will be called […]
-
Director Jarred Alterman on Convento
Since I spend part of my year in Amsterdam I’m always on the lookout for interesting Dutch folks to write about. Kinetic artist Christiaan Zwanikken fit the bill and then some. Zwanikken lives most months at his family’s retreat in Portugal, which was once a monastery but now serves as the laboratory for his Frankenstein creations, robots crafted from servomotors and the remains of wildlife he finds on the ancient grounds. American filmmaker Jarred Alterman is also fascinated by Zwanikken’s work – so much so that he crafted Convento, an “art/doc” that follows not just the Dutch artist and his […]
-
Director Jesse Baget on Cellmates
Jesse Baget’s Cellmates (originally titled White Knight) was one of my top picks at this year’s Arizona Underground Film Festival – and the biggest surprise of the fest simply because when I read the feature’s synopsis in the program my first thought was there’s no way this film would work. When one sees the phrase “buddy comedy” the names Tom Sizemore and Stacy Keach just don’t come to mind. Add in Héctor Jiménez of Nacho Libre and we might be getting closer…but still. Sizemore as a former Klansman meets Keach as a potato-obsessed warden meets Jiménez as an activist immigrant […]
-
DOC NYC: Directors Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler on Flat Daddy
In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy, premiering at DOC NYC this Sunday at 4PM and screening again on Nov. 8th at 1:30, sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on hold or torn apart by the absence of their […]
-
Director Jeremiah Zagar on Starved For Attention
It’s been awhile since I sat down to chat with director Jeremiah Zagar, one half of Brooklyn-based Herzliya Films, which he runs with his producer Jeremy Yaches, so I was pretty excited to hear about their latest venture, Starved For Attention. A short film series created at the behest of Doctors Without Borders and VII Photo designed to highlight childhood malnutrition around the world Starved For Attention also seems to be the rarest of public service announcements, doubling as works of cinematic art. I spoke briefly with Zagar as he was preparing for the release of the eighth doc in […]
-
Director Tiffany Shlain on Connected
“Some films go deep,” filmmaker Tiffany Shlain said at the Sundance premiere of her documentary, Connected. “Mine goes wide.” Indeed, Shlain’s film does go wide — it’s like a rubber band stretching in multiple directions while not breaking. Examining the ways in which technology can productively unite our global citizenry, Connected details nothing less than the history of consciousness and its arrival within today’s always-on, hyper-wired mind. Through voiceover narration and breezy montage, Connected explores the right brain/left brain split and its effect on social and economic organization, and it highlights the transformative potential of today’s communication tools. As a […]
