Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
“There Were Clearly Other Things Going On, From Klan Involvement to Pedophile Rings…”: Maro Chermayeff on the HBO Docuseries Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children
HBO’s Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children, a five-part docuseries executive produced and directed by Sam Pollard and Maro Chermayeff, along with Jeff Dupre and Joshua Bennett, is an intricate reexamination of one of the most horrific events in that southern city’s not-too-distant history — the kidnapping and murder of at least 30 (though likely more) African-American children and young adults between 1979 and 1981. Though the crimes ultimately would all be pinned on one man, a 23-year-old oddball named Wayne Williams, the case has now been reopened by current Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The case was the […]
-
“What’s Happening in the Vertical Version?” Mark Pellington on Quibi Series/Film Survive
Director Mark Pellington has spent a great deal of his career addressing the complexities of grief, memory and reconciliation, but with his new film Survive he explores these themes on a larger canvas than ever before, placing his preoccupations in the context of an adventure tale that is sweeping in its physical scale yet every bit as emotionally penetrating as more intimate Pellington character studies like Nostalgia and I Melt with You. Richard Abate and Jeremy Ungar’s script tells the story of Jane (Sophie Turner), a traumatized young woman who plans to commit suicide in the bathroom of a plane […]
-
“As a Pilot Director, You Must Load the Toolbox for All the Directors that Come After You”: Director Michael Robin on All Rise
The courtroom drama has been a staple of network television since Perry Mason and never really gone away, which makes the CBS series All Rise’s achievement of breathing new life into the genre truly impressive and exciting. An ensemble drama anchored by Simone Missick as a young judge out to challenge conventional wisdom, All Rise deftly explores complex ethical questions relating to race, class, gender and power via a sprawling examination of the lawyers, judges, clerks, cops, and defendants whose lives intersect in an LA courthouse. Following Jean Renoir’s dictum that everyone has their reasons, series creator Greg Spottiswood and […]
-
“We’re Definitely Not ‘Social Distancing’ Distance”: Zia Anger on Performing My First Film Online
After nearly two years of performing My First Film live in theaters, Zia Anger has reconfigured her piece for livestreaming. Currently being streamed to small groups in preview mode, each performance is announced on Anger’s Twitter the morning of; capacity is small and quickly filled on a first come, first served email RSVP basis. The middle core of the show—Anger’s story about her never-premiered first feature, told via a mix of video footage and select online browsing, narrated via TextEdit narration typed out in real time—has remained essentially the same. The beginning and ending have been necessarily rethought: where a key […]
-
“It Had to Show How We Rip Each Other Apart”: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia on His Vertical Class-Warfare Netflix Dystopia The Platform
Access to food serves as the most basic representation of wealth in Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform, a dystopian allegory for economic inequality in which a vertical prison pushes people to the edge of their humanity. Inside the Vertical Self-Management Center (Centro Vertical de Autogestión)—as the facility is formally known in the fiction—two individuals are housed per level, and each is allowed to bring one personal item with them. They receive sustenance once a day on a floating platform. Those on the higher floors fill their bellies with disregard for the unfortunate ones below. But once a month each pair wakes up on […]
-
“It’s a Pretty Unambiguous Condemnation of a New Age Answer to Life’s Problems”: Writer/Director Todd Haynes on Safe
With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]
-
“We Needed a Killer Concept Trailer”: Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham on Crip Camp, Battling the Health Care System and Working with the Obamas
The 1970s: an oil and energy crisis, numerous coup d’états (some failed, some successful), a massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, the rise (Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet) and falls (Richard Nixon) of world leaders, the beginning (Lebanon) and end (Vietnam) of drawn-out wars, and a New York-based serial killer who terrorized young adults because his neighbor’s dog ordered him to. Oh, to go back again! Stateside, the ’70s saw further proliferation of rock music, drugs, second-wave feminism, the Black Panther movement and general political unrest and upheaval. Titled after a since-closed Catskills camp for disabled youth that was itself something […]
-
“Flying Blind”: Writer/Director Caleb Johnson On the Production, “SXSW Screening” and Future of His Feature The Carnivores
In light of SXSW’s cancellation, a private “homespun” screening of the only local production in the festival’s narrative line up, Caleb Johnson’s The Carnivores, was arranged at its cinematographer’s (Adam J. Minnick) Austin residence on the night it was scheduled to premiere. The event hoped to encapsulate the spirit of the festival all at once. Upon entrance, invited press, programmers and audience got their photo taken on a polaroid against a classic yellow backdrop and laurels. That polaroid fit snug inside an imitation festival badge. After attendees stuffed themselves with Tacodeli they dragged over the red carpet to their seats […]
-
“…An Attempt to see Anorexia From a Perspective That Goes Beyond That of the Spectacle”: Moara Passoni on Her CPH:DOX Debut Ecstasy
Premiering in the DOX:AWARD main competition at this year’s (now digital) CPH:DOX, Ecstasy (Êxtase) is the astonishing debut of Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, a longtime collaborator of The Edge of Democracy Oscar nominee Petra Costa (who serves as the doc’s producer). It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, of historical images and staged scenes, of autobiographical diary entries obsessively developing a “geometry of hunger” even as political chaos grips ’90s Brazil (and it’s all tied together by a stunning soundtrack, including music by David Lynch and Lykke Li). It’s also a startlingly unusual coming-of-age story, one in which the director […]
-
“…A Forensic Tick-Tock of How Lies Spread”: Andrew Rossi on After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News
The information landscape has transformed with vertigo-inducing speed since 2011, when Andrew Rossi last looked under the hood of the (reality-based) news business in Page One: Inside the New York Times. And now that Edward R. Murrow is rolling in his grave (and Geraldo Rivera is most likely looking for ways to monetize that), it makes sense that Rossi would be the filmmaker to tackle today’s crisis of media faith with his latest HBO doc, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. Executive produced by CNN’s Brian Stelter, the film takes a deep dive into the post-truth world that […]
