Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Price Has Dropped to What Per Pound?”: Mario Furloni and Kate McLean on Their Marijuana Legalization Drama, Freeland
The Emerald Triangle—three counties in Northern California— represents the largest region to produce cannabis in the United States. Even so, it hasn’t been a free-for-all for growers and sellers. As pot farming has become legalized in select parts of the west coast, the push for governmentally regulated weed distribution has become an expensive business to invest in, with required permits and enforced rules pushing out more experienced old-timers who made a habit of keeping things affordable and independent. As their businesses are crippled by state legalization, these farmers are forced to take desperate measures or risk losing their livelihood. Mario […]
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“We Found Ways to Combine Drama Therapy with Filmmaking into Something New”: Director Robert Greene on the Netflix Documentary Procession
At the root of the word “procession” is “process” — really a fitting description for any Robert Greene film. But the title of the nonfiction veteran’s latest foray into character-collaborative doc-making has other meanings. It nods specifically to the Holy Spirit’s procession and also to the dictionary definition of people moving forward, a march that includes the risk-taking filmmaker himself. Procession (which premiered at Telluride and just hit Netflix November 19) is perhaps Greene’s boldest cinematic move yet. Once again the director (and “filmmaker-in-chief” at the University of Missouri’s Murray Center for Documentary Journalism) blurs the lines between narrative and nonfiction, […]
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“It Always Seems That the Film Comes Together When You Just Go About Doing It”: Abel Ferrara on the Ethan Hawke-Starring Zeros and Ones
“Jesus was just another soldier, another war casualty — but on who’s side?” That’s military man JJ, played by Ethan Hawke, in voiceover as he walks the COVID-deserted streets of Rome in Abel Ferrara’s new Zeros and Ones. There’s a terrorist plot to blow up the Vatican but JJ’s got a more personal (and possibly intertwined) mission as well: his twin revolutionary brother, Justin (also Hawke), has been captured, and JJ’s nocturnal journey is an attempt to rescue him and possibly find some sort of spiritual salvation along the way. But the above is just the most reductive parsing of […]
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“While I Knew the Music Inside Out There Was So Much I Didn’t Know About the Story Behind the Album”: Alison Klayman on Jagged
As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not […]
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“My Parents Supported Me Making This Art about Them”: Nira Burstein on Charm Circle
After appearing in the international competition at Sheffield DocFest 2021 (where I then worked as a programmer) and being hailed by press, juries, and audiences alike as one of the major highlights of the festival, Nira Burstein’s Charm Circle went on to international festivals around the world. I finally caught up with Burstein in Lisbon, after the film’s premiere at Doclisboa, one of Europe’s finest documentary festivals. After COVID prevented me—but not Nira!—from attending Sheffield in June, and with that incarnation of the festival now decisively a thing of the past, I was eager to catch up with her to […]
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“This Sometimes Happens, That Cameras Fall in Love”: Alexandre Koberidze on What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze’s camera is caught up in the day-to-day of the locals of Kutaisi, Georgia, before the meet-cute of main characters Giorgi (Georgi Bochorishvili) and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) draws its attention. The camera watches their shoes as they first stumble into each other, recollect their fallen books and dart off in the wrong directions before realizing the mistake, turning around and bumping into each other all over again. When the camera finally pans up to reveal their faces, it places the curse of the “evil eye” on the would-be lovers, who just scheduled their first date together. As a personified […]
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“97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]
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“It’s Really the Act of Saying the Words Out Loud, Bringing Darkness into Light, Negotiating the Past for Yourself”: Matthew Fifer on His Autobiographical NYC Drama, Cicada
Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]
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“It’s Also a Story of the Power of the Media to Shape a Narrative in Ways That Do Disservice to the Truth”: Traci A. Curry on Attica
Attica (releasing in theaters on October 29 and on Showtime November 6) is the latest from nonfiction national treasure Stanley Nelson. Along with his co-director and producer Traci A. Curry, a longtime MSNBC producer, the Firelight Media co-founder and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, who has previously chronicled organizations from The Peoples Temple to The Black Panthers, has now chosen to tackle a very different kind of institution: The prison industrial complex that was captured in one word and broadcast round the globe on September 9, 1971. The titular uprising that occurred at that correctional facility in Attica, NY a half century […]
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“I Started to Think of the Film as a Kind of Ethnography of Fear and Violence In and Around Schools in America”: Todd Chandler on His Gun Violence Doc Bulletproof
There’s a truly startling sequence beginning about a half hour into Todd Chandler’s unsettling, formally assured documentary on school violence, Bulletproof. Until this point Chandler, with cool, distanced precision, depicts the “capitalist spectacle” that has grown around the issue of violence in schools. Active shooter drills, teachers given firearms training, a first-generation immigrant starting a business producing Kevlar hoodies, and a Las Vegas trade show where high-tech surveillance equipment and classroom accessories like bulletproof whiteboards are hawked to school board purchasers — the parallels between this education/security industrial complex and our post 9/11 security state, where weaponry and advanced surveillance co-mingle, […]
