Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Truth is Lost As Well”: Andreas Koefoed on his Art Documentary The Lost Leonardo
When I saw The Lost Leonardo at the Tribeca Film Festival, I expected a documentary about art history, restoration techniques and how paintings are authenticated. I was vaguely aware of the film’s subject—the painting “Salvator Mundi,” a portrait of Jesus discovered in a New Orleans estate sale in April 2005 and later deemed a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. What I was unaware of was the controversy over the painting’s authorship, its journey through the world of high finance and unfettered capitalism and how this made it an object of desire, a status symbol, for political actors like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed […]
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“I Try to Expose Myself to Unknown Territory”: Pablo Larraín on Ema
Ema is Pablo Larraín’s eighth feature film but has the energy of a new beginning. When I saw it at Sundance 2020, this boldly experimental narrative seemed like a new approach from the established director who had put Chilean fiction filmmaking on the international map in a new way with a rapid-fire series of films that included the Academy-nominated No (2012), Berlin Silver Bear winner The Club (2015) and Neruda (2016), as well as US projects Jackie (2016) and the recently released HBO series Lisey’s Story. A month after the festival, images from the film lingered in my mind, in […]
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“Unfortunately, I’ve Always Been Seen as Very Earnest”: Hayley Garrigus on You Can’t Kill Meme
I first saw Hayley Garrigus’s feature nonfiction debut, You Can’t Kill Meme, in 2019 as a work-in-progress cut. As I wrote last year, Meme is bookended by the unnerving image of an CG-animated Pepe the Frog cradled like a baby in a man’s arms before slowly turning his head. Meme branches out from 4Chan’s infamous r/pol board to interview subjects who include online meme warriors on the left and right, a self-described “lightworker” who hosts workshops at her home and R. Kirk Packwood, whose 2004 book, Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality, codified how memes might […]
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“A 12-Year-Old is Not Going to Know What an Existential Crisis Is”: Pascual Sisto on John and the Hole
Bluntly titled but mysterious all the same, John and the Hole marks the directorial debut of visual artist Pascual Sisto. Originally set to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, the film finally premiered (albeit virtually) at Sundance this past January. Played by lead actor Charlie Shotwell (Captain Fantastic), suburban pre-teen John appears content with his suburban life. He lives in a beautiful Massachusetts home with his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga), surrounded by nature and endless open space, complete with an underground bunker (the hole of the film’s title) built in the yard […]
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“We Called the Wide-Angle Lens ‘The Violence Lens’….”: Director Orson Oblowitz on His Hallucinatory Psychodrama, The Five Rules of Success
When we first meet X (Santiago Segura) in an extended moving camera shot that follows him exiting a state penitentiary, the length of the sentence he’s just completed is signaled by the contents of the box of vintage tech and media he carries: an outdated computer monitor with the clear plastic revealing its circuit board; tech-nerd, unfashionable over-the-ear headphones; the Trainspotting soundtrack CD. He takes the bus home — a one-room apartment minimalist in all the wrong ways (no “apartment therapy” here), which The Five Rules of Success director Orson Oblowitz, acting as his own cinematographer, captures with a kind […]
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“A World That’s Fraying at the Edges”: Braden King on The Evening Hour, Appalachia, and Collective Memory
Opening on a mountaintop, The Evening Hour pans slowly across a vast Appalachian landscape, soaking in birdsong and morning light. In the distance, a series of explosions disrupt the surrounding idyll, but only for a moment. As plumes of ash and debris hang in the still mountain air, the shot holds into a static composition, those ominous detonations newly part of the tableau. Braden King’s second feature, his first since 2011’s Here, maintains this painterly sensibility – one of observation over action, meditation over movement – throughout its patient, precise portrait of a Kentucky mining town, its inhabitants, and the […]
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“We Had to Combine Three Different Islands”: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic on Cannes Caméra d’Or-Winner Murina
The winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best debut feature at Cannes this year was the maritime Murina, a coming-of-age drama of slow-motion escape from Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic. Premiering in Directors’ Fortnight, the sun-baked film tracks teenaged Julija (Gracija Filipivoc) as she slowly but surely pushes for autonomy from her grumpy father, Ante (Leon Lucev), who runs their family like an impatient captain. A visit from a longtime friend, bekhaki’d and comfortable businessman Javier (Cliff Curtis), sets thoughts spinning for Julija and her youthful mother, Nela (Danica Curcic), as Ante frantically schemes to sell land. Kusijanovic brilliantly […]
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“Where in Europe Can We Find Some Castles?” David Lowery on The Green Knight
A 14th-century epic poem by an anonymous author serves as the basis for one of the most visually and aurally thrilling movies of 2021 in writer-director David Lowery’s The Green Knight, an adaptation of the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s made for adults but casts a spell on the audience every bit as magical as that of classic family films like E.T. and The Wizard of Oz. Dev Patel stars as Gawain, King Arthur’s brash nephew who accepts a challenge from the title character that sends him on a mythic quest which will most likely end […]
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“There’s So Much Darkness, So Much Room to Dream”: David Lynch on Lost Highway
The following interview with David Lynch appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 issue, and is being reposted online today as a newly restored Lost Highway opens at New York’s IFC Center before the release of a 4K UHD edition from Criterion in October. An audacious return to feature filmmaking after his underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway is pure Lynch. Alternately seductive, mysterious, and terrifying, the film’s narrative unfolds with the chaos of a waking nightmare. Bill Pullman plays an avant-jazz musician whose fear of intimacy with his wife, Patricia Arquette, propels him into a series of schizophrenic states. Or […]
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“If Something Gives Me the Chills, or If I Ever Think, ‘Is This Too Much?’, Then I Know I Have to Use It”: Michelle Handelman on the 25th Anniversary Rerelease of BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism
Filmmaker/video artist/photographer/performance artist/writer/professor Michelle Handelman is a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and 2019 Creative Capital awardee whose work is featured in collections from Napa, California to Paris to Moscow. But back in the early 90s Handelman was simply an explorer with a video camera, diving headlong into a San Francisco Leatherdyke scene that would pave the way for today’s gender nonconformity movement as we know it. Her resulting film, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism – just rereleased last month with bonus extras by Kino Lorber – is an artistic amalgam both of its time and surprisingly timely. Scenes from leather […]
