Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Art School Hangover: Director Martine Syms on The African Desperate
LA-based digital artist and filmmaker Martine Syms makes her feature debut with The African Desperate, a deeply funny and unflinching survey of the embedded racism within what the artist classifies as “elite spaces.” Syms previously made 2017’s Incense, Sweaters & Ice, a 69-minute art installation that depicts three generations of Black women and the nature of their surveillance. With The African Desperate, Syms vies for a more personal angle by centering her film on Palace (frequent collaborator Diamond Stingily), a Black MFA student who’s finishing her degree at Bard College, where the director received her MFA in 2017. While the […]
-
The Running Woman: Writer/Director Andrew Semans on His Rebecca Hall-Starring “Resurrection”
Director Andrew Semans’s 2012 debut feature, Nancy, Please, follows Paul (Will Rogers), an unraveling Ph.D. candidate obsessed with reclaiming his dog-eared, notes-filled copy of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit from a spiteful ex-roommate (Eleonore Hendricks). Despite his increasingly desperate attempts, Paul just can’t get Nancy to relinquish the book from their formerly shared apartment. As the ex-roomie continues to live rent-free in Paul’s head, his deteriorating mental state prevents him from completing his thesis. Less interested in why Nancy won’t relinquish the book than why Paul so easily accepts his newfound submissiveness, Nancy, Please is a dark comedy about not being […]
-
“… People Bond with Marcel the Way You Bond with the Ladies in Grey Gardens“: Director Dean Fleischer-Camp on the Winning Animated Feature Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
When I interviewed Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate about their short film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, for Filmmaker‘s 2010 25 New Faces series, both remember the project resulting from a period where they were a little down. Then a couple, Fleischer-Camp described being “unfilled” at work, while Slate said, ‘I was depressed… a little bit. We were at a time in our lives when whatever we made would have a layer of gravity. And the real magic of [the movie] to me is that it has this layer of gravity, but it’s still about an adorable little shell.” […]
-
Homecoming Vibes: Olivia Peace and Jess Zeidman on Tahara
Way back when, during the last in-person Slamdance in the cursed year of 2020, I went to see Tahara, the feature debut of Northwestern University graduates director Olivia Peace and screenwriter Jess Zeidman. The feature focuses on two teenage best friends and Hebrew students, Carrie (Madeline Grey DeFreece) and Hannah (Rachel Sennott), who face a gear shift in their friendship during the funeral of one of their classmates. Carrie is timid and awkward, Hannah is self-obsessed and inconsiderate. When Carrie kisses her Hannah to find out if she’s a good kisser or not, sparkles light up her world. Throughout the day, […]
-
“Not Just a Formal Thing, But a Political Ethic”: Alice Diop on We
Alice Diop’s Nous begins with images of a white family looking through binoculars at an apparently uninhabited landscape, then cuts to a shot of the landscape itself, as if inhabiting their point of view. Immediately, then, the film suggests that the act of looking is one worth paying attention to. The question of who gets to look and how the looker reacts to what they see is inscribed, almost wordlessly, onto the film. I thought immediately of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power, which examines the artistic depiction of landscape as a politically charged one central to the formation of national […]
-
“I Can’t Afford to Let Cliches Live in the Cinema I Make”: Leilah Weinraub on Shakedown
Leilah Weinraub’s 2018 Shakedown, which began playing Metrograph on June 17th (and has been held over through June 30th due to high demand), has been touted by Variety as the “the first-ever non-adult film” to be picked up by Pornhub. Yet it could also be called the sex site’s first-ever Berlinale-premiering and Tate/ICA/MoMA PS1/Whitney Biennial-screened acquisition. And likely the smut streamer’s first-ever labor of love release as well. Indeed, Shakedown is a film that defies any easy categorization. Ostensibly a longform cinematic exploration (crafted over 15 years starting in 2002) of the titular, mid-city, Los Angeles, Black lesbian strip club, the doc […]
-
“We Shot Seven Parties in 20 Days in an Abandoned Mall”: Cooper Raiff on Cha Cha Real Smooth
Titled after the hit party song no child of the early 2000s could escape, Cooper Raiff’s second feature, Cha Cha Real Smooth, originated as a love letter to parents of disabled children. Inspired by the perserverance of his own family (Raiff’s younger sister does not possess the ability to walk nor speak), Raiff’s screenplay eventually grew to become the story of Andrew (Raiff), a 22-year-old Tulane University graduate who moves back in with his brother (Evan Assante), mom (Leslie Mann), and her lover (Brad Garrett) in Livingston, New Jersey. Working a dead-end job and with his girlfriend in Barcelona on […]
-
“Whenever Cinema is in Chaos, You Can Do a New Irma Vep“: Olivier Assayas on His New HBO Series
In the early 1990s, French director Olivier Assayas was invited to develop a remake of a classic work of French cinema for television. “I hadn’t known where to start until I remembered [Louis] Feuillade’s Vampires,” he remembered in 1996, referring to the 1915 silent serial in which Musidora played the costumed criminal Irma Vep. “I spent a few weeks considering the possibility, then I decided that, attractive as it was, I couldn’t take it any further. Somehow, my heart wasn’t in it.” A few years later, another invitation: this time to join Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan in the sort […]
-
“I Never Saw This as a ‘True Crime’ Series”: Nanfu Wang on HBO Docuseries Mind Over Murder
One of the more surprising revelations in the provocatively titled six-part docuseries Mind Over Murder has nothing to do with the sad tale presented onscreen of the “Beatrice Six,” as the three men and three women convicted (and ultimately absolved) of killing a beloved grandma in Beatrice, Nebraska back in 1985 came to be known. Instead, the surprise comes when the end credits disclose the story is being revisited by none other than critically-acclaimed director Nanfu Wang (In the Same Breath, One Child Nation), not exactly a usual suspect for the sensationalist true crime genre. Then again, Wang doesn’t seem much interested […]
-
“Cinema Doesn’t Heal or Cure You of Anything”: Dario Argento on “the Pleasure of Terrible Ceremonies” and His 20-Film Retrospective
The day before the start of his 20-film retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, Dario Argento talked with film historian Rob King in front of a small delegation at the Italian Cultural Institute. King started by pointing out that the director has now directed giallo films for 53 years, or “four years longer than John Ford made westerns.” Asked what the genre means, Argento said he’s been asked this question thousands of times and that “once more” he will answer—“I don’t know.” Asked if his approach to directing giallo has changed, he also answered as he always has—No. He simply […]
