Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of […]
-
Cap’n Crunch and the Serial Killer: John McNaughton on His Career
Currently underway at the the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park, “Portraits of Wild Things: The Films of John McNaughton” is a long overdue retrospective of the Chicago-based filmmaker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), I’ve always felt that the most exploitative aspect of McNaughton’s film was its title—it sounds like something you shouldn’t take joy in watching even if you’re even depraved enough to seek it out in the first place. Critically praised upon its (much delayed) release, Henry provided McNaughton with a path to mainstream success, even as the filmmaker […]
-
The Gotham Pages: Lulu Wang on Creating Storytelling Ecosystems Abroad
Writer/Director Lulu Wang has been shooting film and TV overseas since her debut feature Posthumous (2014). The American-German co-production tells the story of a Berlin-based artist who finally finds his audience when the media mistakenly reports him dead. Wang then shot her sophomore hit, The Farewell (2019), between New York and Changchun. The themes and plot of that film—in which the obstinate individualism of a Chinese-American writer (Awkwafina) abrades her family’s collective sense of responsibility when she reunites with them in northern China—is reflected in the film’s co-production model, for which an American and Chinese cast and crew converged. These […]
-
“Making the Invisible Visible”: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias on Pepe
There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to […]
-
“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]
-
“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]
-
“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
-
Make a $100,000 Genre Movie in 12 Days in Chicago: Writer/Director Zach Clark on The Becomers
High-concept movie formula makers will have a field day with Zach Clark’s The Becomers. Is its tender, yet often violent, saga of star-crossed – and serial human body inhabiting – lovers a hybrid of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (whose lead character is played by eight different actors) or an Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for an N95-masked America? Or … something else? Clark’s first film since his widely beloved Little Sister (2016) wasn’t one he had in the pipeline. The New York-based writer-director-editor had put a heroic effort into launching a project on […]
-
“I Always Write for Places Where They Won’t Kick Me Out”: Kazik Radwanski on Matt and Mara
Matt and Mara presents a familiar premise—two old friends with an unresolved romantic connection reconnect years after their lives have diverged—but Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski turns this potentially contrived narrative into an organic examination of interpersonal dynamics that’s tailored to the strengths of his performers and longtime creative collaborators Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. When Matt (Johnson) grabs the attention of creative writing professor Mara (Campbell) right before she’s about to start class, it’s clear both are looking to break out of their ruts. Mara is out of sync with her musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) amidst the daily […]
-
The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a […]
