Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Set was a Circle with the Floor and Mirrors Rotating”: Jan de Bont on The Haunting
Before he became a director, Jan de Bont was the cinematographer on some of the most visually intricate, elegantly lit movies of the 1980s and early ’90s, including Paul Verhoeven’s The 4th Man and Basic Instinct, John McTiernan’s Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October and Ridley Scott’s Black Rain. When de Bont made his directorial debut in 1994 with Speed, the film’s kinetic energy and precise attention to light and composition were no surprise; what made the picture a classic was how finely attuned the visual choices were to the nuances of performance. Speed made Sandra Bullock a star, […]
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“I Don’t Have the Prosthetics Team Sacha Baron Cohen Does”: John Wilson on his HBO Show How To with John Wilson
In his short films, compulsive shooter John Wilson combines a nervous voiceover with impossible amounts of nonfiction footage; the joke often alternates between the unexpected metaphorical/pun juxtaposition of dialogue with shots selected from his vast archives and sometimes nerve-wracking encounters with assorted eccentrics. That seemingly free-form structure, in which Wilson’s voice ties many disparate elements together, was established in shorts with titles like How to Walk to Manhattan and How to Keep Smoking. Now it’s been expanded in the six episodes of the first season of his HBO series, How to With John Wilson. Nathan For You’s Nathan Fielder is an executive producer, and the […]
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“Everyone Should Take an Editing Class, Even Actors”: Rich Newey on Killing Eleanor
I first became aware of director Rich Newey’s work a few years ago when I caught his “Dreamland” episode of the sci-fi series Stitchers; working from an audacious script by Lynne E. Litt, Newey deftly juggled styles and tones with an inventiveness and confidence that led me to seek out his other episodic work on shows like Blindspot and The Fosters. I was consistently impressed by both his precise, expressive visual style and his sensitivity to dialogue and performance, skills on prominent display in his terrific new feature Killing Eleanor. The film tells the story of Natalie (Annika Marks), an […]
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“The Camera Gives Me Permission to Feel the Things I’m Always Pushing Down”: Writer, Director and Actor Cooper Raiff on Shithouse
Shithouse, Cooper Raiff’s profanely-titled first feature, chronicles an inspired romance between two young souls on disparate higher education voyages. Told with real insight about college-age characters and their flawed relationships, the picture earned 23-year-old Raiff—a softhearted wunderkind who wrote, directed and starred in the film—the Grand Jury Award at this year’s pandemic-impacted SXSW. Life between dorms and parties doesn’t exactly suit shy freshman Alex Malmquist (Raifff), who’s most comfortable seeking advice from an adorable childhood plush animal he’s brought from home. Though he puts in some effort to adapt to dorm life, he still yearns for the comforting embrace of his protective family. […]
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“One Thing I Learned From Michael Mann, You’ve Got to Have Rules”: Brooke Kennedy on The Good Fight
In the first episode of The Good Fight, a spinoff from and sequel to the acclaimed legal drama The Good Wife, liberal attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) watches Donald Trump’s inauguration in horror. In the premiere episode of the series’ most recent season (season four), Diane wakes up to find herself in an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency. Both episodes – and the 38 others that have aired to date – exhibit a satirical sense as sophisticated as it is original; series creators Robert and Michelle King consistently engage with issues related to race, sex, gender, […]
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Pietro Marcello on Martin Eden, Influencer Culture and the Relationship between Art History and Shot Composition
Italian director Pietro Marcello has been making films since 2003, but his turn toward fiction films—first with 2015’s Lost & Beautiful and now with Martin Eden, an adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel—has gained him new admirers outside his home country and on the festival circuit. It is fitting, then, that just as his star is rising, he has crafted a cautionary tale about the perils of individualism and the ease with which it can swallow even the most idealistic artists. But Marcello’s adaptation is anything but straightforward. His Martin Eden takes place at an indeterminate moment in Naples, and […]
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“No Talking Heads on Camera”: Sam Pollard on MLK/FBI
In 1963, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. with the goal of undermining his authority as a civil rights leader. Utilizing a wealth of newly discovered and declassified files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as newly restored footage from the period, MLK/FBI delves into the Bureau’s deeply questionable methods and motives for surveillance, while painting a portrait of King that does not shy away from uncomfortable truths. Directed by Sam Pollard, best known as Spike Lee’s editor on films like Clockers and Bamboozled, MLK/FBI builds upon a lifetime of work […]
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“I Have Not Seen My Film with Anyone Other than Two People”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on Beginning
Dea Kulumbegashvili should have had the year of her life. At any other moment, the Tbilisi-based writer/director would have already travelled to Cannes, Toronto and San Sebastián to screen her new film for festival audiences. A remarkable accomplishment for anyone, let alone a young director with a first feature, the success of Beginning has instead been a strange, bittersweet ride. In the absence of sold-out screenings and sponsored afterparties, the festival experience in 2020 has given way to far less glamorous rituals: Zoom Q&As, geo-locked streaming links and the solitary act of viewing from home. For Kulumbegashvili, 34, the process […]
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“The Interior Lives of People That Aren’t Typically Represented in Cinema”: Andrew Cohn on The Last Shift
Fascinated with the unseen men and women of forgotten America, Andrew Cohn, proud Midwestern and versatile filmmaker, has created a body of documentary work that witnesses modest, real lives without condescension or pity. Features like Medora or Night School engage with their subjects—a teenage basketball team in small-town Indiana or adult students juggling economic and personal struggles—in a compassionate and collaborative manner. Translating that honesty to fiction now with The Last Shift, his first scripted film, Cohn continues to give voice to the working poor, in this case two fast food employees in Michigan, where he’s from, whose relationship exemplifies […]
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Shining a Light on the Politics of Public Lands: David Garrett Byars on his Documentary Public Trust
David Garrett Byars made his feature documentary debut with No Man’s Land in 2017, a riveting chronicle of the the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (I spoke with him about it during its Tribeca premiere). In the largely verité film he manages to not only paint empathetic portraits of both the occupiers and their government opponents, but communicate the larger social and political movements that caused his characters to behave as they did. This eye for explaining complex topics comes to the fore in his sophomore film Public Trust, out September 25 from Patagonia Films. This new […]
