Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“This Sometimes Happens, That Cameras Fall in Love”: Alexandre Koberidze on What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze’s camera is caught up in the day-to-day of the locals of Kutaisi, Georgia, before the meet-cute of main characters Giorgi (Georgi Bochorishvili) and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) draws its attention. The camera watches their shoes as they first stumble into each other, recollect their fallen books and dart off in the wrong directions before realizing the mistake, turning around and bumping into each other all over again. When the camera finally pans up to reveal their faces, it places the curse of the “evil eye” on the would-be lovers, who just scheduled their first date together. As a personified […]
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“97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]
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“It’s Really the Act of Saying the Words Out Loud, Bringing Darkness into Light, Negotiating the Past for Yourself”: Matthew Fifer on His Autobiographical NYC Drama, Cicada
Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]
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“It’s Also a Story of the Power of the Media to Shape a Narrative in Ways That Do Disservice to the Truth”: Traci A. Curry on Attica
Attica (releasing in theaters on October 29 and on Showtime November 6) is the latest from nonfiction national treasure Stanley Nelson. Along with his co-director and producer Traci A. Curry, a longtime MSNBC producer, the Firelight Media co-founder and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, who has previously chronicled organizations from The Peoples Temple to The Black Panthers, has now chosen to tackle a very different kind of institution: The prison industrial complex that was captured in one word and broadcast round the globe on September 9, 1971. The titular uprising that occurred at that correctional facility in Attica, NY a half century […]
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“I Started to Think of the Film as a Kind of Ethnography of Fear and Violence In and Around Schools in America”: Todd Chandler on His Gun Violence Doc Bulletproof
There’s a truly startling sequence beginning about a half hour into Todd Chandler’s unsettling, formally assured documentary on school violence, Bulletproof. Until this point Chandler, with cool, distanced precision, depicts the “capitalist spectacle” that has grown around the issue of violence in schools. Active shooter drills, teachers given firearms training, a first-generation immigrant starting a business producing Kevlar hoodies, and a Las Vegas trade show where high-tech surveillance equipment and classroom accessories like bulletproof whiteboards are hawked to school board purchasers — the parallels between this education/security industrial complex and our post 9/11 security state, where weaponry and advanced surveillance co-mingle, […]
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“I’m an Only Child, I’m Jewish and I Use Wide-Angle Lenses”: Barry Sonnenfeld on The Addams Family
Barry Sonnenfeld was less than ten years into a successful career as a cinematographer—with credits including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and When Harry Met Sally on his resume—when he sat down in the director’s chair for the first time on 1991’s The Addams Family. It followed what turned out to be his last job (Misery) as director of photography; from that point on Sonnenfeld would work exclusively as a director, and occasional producer, on visually inventive and conceptually ambitious comedies like the Men in Black trilogy and Pushing Daisies, continuing to hone the dynamic style he had established as a DP. […]
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Brighton Beach and the East Village in the ’80s: Eric Steel on Minyan
Although primarily known as a documentary filmmaker (his 2006 feature, The Bridge, considered the countless suicides committed each year from the Golden Gate Bridge), director Eric Steel makes his narrative feature debut with Minyan, a faithful yet surprising adaptation of a coming-of-age short story by David Bezmozgis. Set in the Russian Jewish community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the 1980s, Minyan tells the story of David (Samuel H. Levine) who, while helping his grandfather (Ron Rifkin) transition into a retirement home, befriends two closeted gay men. As David begins to identify and expand on his own desires, his sense of self begins […]
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“That Particular Phrase, ‘Arthouse,’ Has Hung Over My Head Like a Cloud of Contagion”: Wendell B. Harris Jr. on Chameleon Street
William Douglas Street Jr. needed more money and less of a dead-end job. Working for his dad’s alarm installation company, he’d hit a wall. The only lucrative alternative was to deal drugs, but he refused to get wrapped up in that—instead, he became a conman and created his own opportunities after perceiving how arbitrary the barriers to higher-paying jobs and luxuries of high society are. Through his schemes, Street got to live the life of a Time sports journalist, a Chicago surgeon, a Martiniquan exchange student at Yale and many other personas—if only temporarily. Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street dramatizes […]
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Socks, Scope and 35mm Projection: Mia Hansen-Løve on Bergman Island
Filmmaking couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) arrive at Fårö Island to begin a real-life residency for artists who wish to work in Ingmar Bergman’s former home. “All this calm and perfection, I find it oppressive,” she says; “soothing,” he counters. Mia Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature, Bergman Island, sets up a number of binaries, most directly in the film’s bifurcated structure: the first half is a third-person POV of Chris and Tony’s time on the island, the second a film-within-a-film of the project Chris is writing and recapitulating for Tony. (For schedule availability reasons, the second half was shot first, while […]
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Suspense in 8K: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Wife of a Spy
Despite his association with horror films, few contemporary filmmakers have covered as much ground as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has shifted back and forth across genres countless times in his prolific 30+ year career. Nevertheless, his latest film, Wife of a Spy, marks his first period piece. It takes place in 1940-41, telling the story of Yūsaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) and his attempts to expose his government’s atrocities in Manchuria, as well as that of his wife Satoko (Yû Aoi), torn between her husband and her country. With a script co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Wife of a Spy unsurprisingly features intricate […]
