Directors
Interviews - Directors
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The Doors of Our Mind: Director Florian Zeller on Memory, Mystery and The Father
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 print edition. Among the techniques used to remember is one dating back to the Ancient Greeks: the Memory Palace. Facts, people, life events are “placed” within the rooms of a building, preferably a real one the remembering person is very familiar with. To summon the memories, the person mentally strolls from room to room, allowing the individual locations within the building to trigger the images placed inside. The Memory Palace’s ability to associate memories with place is given a devastating twist in French director Florian Zeller’s debut picture, The Father, […]
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The Places Left Behind
Gianfranco Rosi’s nonfiction films are unified by their (often solo shooter) director’s precise framing. With images so strongly composed, the films’ status as vérité documentation has raised, if not controversy, at least questions about judgment, overaestheticization and potentially trivializing endangered subjects. That’s especially true of Rosi’s latest, Notturno, filmed over three years across the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon. From the opening shot, capturing with geometrical precision a group of soldiers running laps, Notturno elides names, battles and geographical precision into a group portrait of grief echoing across territorial demarcations. A site for war-scarred children in therapy, a […]
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Uprooted: Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung on Minari
The following interview appears in Filmmaker‘s current Winter ’21 print edition and, a day after Minari won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, appears online for all readers for the first time. “There’s a difference between something having happened or something being true,” says writer/director Lee Isaac Chung about the interplay between memory and creation that graces his fourth dramatic feature, Minari. Based on the filmmaker’s childhood—his family moved to the South, where his father hoped to develop a farm—Minari captures a time of familial change and uncertainty with seemingly effortless poetry and wonder. It’s the early 1980s […]
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Post Empire
Empire, Nevada, “felt like a town suspended in the 1950s, as if the postwar economy had never ended,” writes Jessica Bruder in her nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. The small mining town consisted of four main roads, lined with homes populated by the workers of United States Gypsum, the manufacturer of Sheetrock. Subsidized rents were as low as $250 a month, the company covered TV and internet and, as one resident told Bruder, there were “no gangs, no sirens, no violence.” But economic forces caught up with Empire. In 2011, U.S. Gypsum, a company with a […]
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The Filmic Equivalent of a Haiku: Erick Oh on his Sundance VR Film Namoo
One of the most understated pieces at Sundance’s New Frontier this year was Namoo, an animated short by Baobab Studios and director Erick Oh. Baobab has been pushing the boundaries of top-tier animated virtual reality since its founding in 2015, with its short immersive films growing in depth, length, and complexity and leading to a slew of awards and spun-off properties including feature films and series. Erick Oh is an award-winning director and animator from South Korea and based in California who’s worked at Pixar and with Tonko House and whose work has shown at Annecy, Anima Mundi, and other festivals. […]
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“…Liz was Isolated as a Felon on the Run, Transitioning Alone”: Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker on Their HBO Docuseries The Lady and the Dale
Binge-worthy doesn’t even begin to describe The Lady and the Dale, Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker’s four-part, one-of-a-kind docuseries, premiering January 31 on HBO. Produced by the Duplass brothers, this twist-and-turning saga stars a three-wheeled car called the Dale (that may or may not have been viable) and its marketer extraordinaire, a visionary female entrepreneur (and longtime serial con artist) named Elizabeth Carmichael. With a promise of 70 miles to the gallon at a time when the 70s oil crisis was leaving Americans to linger at gas stations in Soviet-long lines, the Dale seemed to many a dream come true. And […]
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“Is There Too Much Reading on Screen?” Carey Williams on R#J, Virtual Sundance and Pre-Vis
It may still feature two households both alike in dignity, but in Carey Williams’s modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, R#J, the modes of communication look decidedly different. Set in California in the here and now, Williams’s film hones in on the title characters’ brief but intense romance via their messaging tool of choice: the smartphone. Back-and-forth texts and DMs, impromptu FaceTiming sessions, tagging each other in Instagram photos and sharing personally curated Spotify playlists add to the cumulative rise and potential fall of literature’s most infamously star-crossed lovers. Produced by Bazelevs Productions (founded by popular Russian filmmaker […]
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“Looking At Diversity Through A Different Lens”: Debbie Lum on Try Harder!
Lowell High School, whose student population is predominantly Asian American, is different from most US high schools portrayed on film. Director Debbie Lum came to the nationally ranked school to portray Lowell’s students, particularly so called “tiger cubs” in the heat of the college admissions process for her Sundance 2021 doc Try Harder!. Of course, not all of the Asian American students shown in the film have stereotypical “tiger moms,” and it’s refreshing to see an array of Asian American parents and students shown in communities where they feel comfortable, rather than shrinking in the minority. But the pressure on […]
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“We Sat Down and Considered Pushing Production to Spring of 2020”: Erin Vassilopoulos on Superior
Duplicity in all its forms lurks just below the surface in Erin Vassilopoulos’s debut feature, Superior, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival last weekend. Expanded from a short she made in film school, Vassilopoulos’s feature concerns two fraternal twin sisters (Alessandra and Ani Mesa) unexpectedly reuniting after six years apart. The film opens in October of 1987, with Marian (Alessandra), a touring musician on the run from a secretive past, returning to her hometown to spend a few days with her sister, Vivian (Ani). The two sisters haven’t spoken in six years, spending the interim leading […]
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“Complicity Comes in Many Forms”: Jay Rosenblatt on His Sundance Short About Bullying, When We Were Bullies
Jay Rosenblatt’s latest inventive short When We Were Bullies, world premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, originated with a stranger than fiction coincidence surrounding a guy named Richard and the making of Rosenblatt’s 1994 short The Smell of Burning Ants — which itself had been influenced by another Richard, who is likewise the spark for this film. Fifty years ago the director and the former Richard, fifth-grade classmates, had been on the bullying side of a bizarre incident involving the latter Richard — a moment in time subsequently frozen in both their minds in similar, yet distinctly different, ways. So to get at […]
