Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“There’s Political Relevance to Melodrama”: Karim Aïnouz on His Lush Tropical Tale of Sisterhood, Invisible Life
Greenery abounds in Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz’s affecting and bright-colored sisterhood saga Invisible Life. Based on Martha Batalha’s 2016 novel, it chronicles the forced disconnection between siblings Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler), whose hearts break with each passing day apart in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Victims of a male-dominated society that denies their dreams and ambitions, the sisters embody two sides of the same still resonant struggles women of the time endured. In addition to the striking work of French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, top talent was plentiful across the board. Illustrious producer Rodrigo Teixeira (Call Me By Your […]
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Jerry Schatzberg on Models, Gene Hackman’s Retirement and the Scarecrow Sequel
Jerry Schatzberg hated working in his parents’ fur business. They sold their coats to retailers wholesale and only came in finite templates. Schatzberg was frustrated by their lack of variation, and wondered why no one ever mixed and matched the furs into something new. Bored in the showroom, he read Town & Country—not out of an early attraction to fashion, but because it was the only magazine ever there. Despite that, he found himself shooting fashion photography years later. He figured he’d have to cultivate interest in it somehow, so looked to do it in a way that did. At […]
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“All These Other Misogynists Waiting to Pounce”: Sophia Takal on Black Christmas
Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]
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“Something with Your Therapist”: Noah Baumbach on Marriage Story
Marriage Story depicts the love two people can find in separation. It is not a rekindling, it is stepping back to respect the boundaries you crossed in your strangling embrace. The original love hardens. It dies and returns as something like an actual reverence. At this distance, you might actually be able to see each other again. If the separating lovers in question, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), can learn to walk away from each other with nothing more than that knowing glance—“I accept that we will not be together. It is sad, but you are great. I […]
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Commodity Fetishism
The visual exquisiteness of Peter Strickland’s films has sometimes led to them being regarded as precious bon-bons—laced with strychnine—that favor style over substance. It’s an argument that applies no more to his self-financed feature debut Katalin Varga (2009), an unsentimental neo-Gothic rape revenge drama, than to his harrowing giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio (2012) or his depiction of an inverse Domme/sub relationship in The Duke of Burgundy (2014). Each of these movies is a penetrating psychological study of a character struggling to survive victimhood and the unfair hand she or he has been dealt. If you don’t sympathize with Katalin […]
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Economy of the Arcane: Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela
Pedro Costa will not separate films from how they are made. We cannot escape that “how” from what we are seeing on screen, so we must make films the hard way. It is not enough for us to get them made: We must know our technicians closely, see that they are compensated fairly, ensure that our project is optimized for our tools and that those tools only operate at their zenith. Ease, Costa warns, is the sure sign of a “trap,” that, if succumbed to, will expose one’s work to “bullshit,” a word he does not use lightly. If we […]
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Every Day I Write the Book
Creating cinema without concern for the economic system in which you operate is a privilege few can exercise. Like most filmmakers I know, I make films not only as a form of expression but also as a means of financial subsistence. I wrestle with the impact this dependency has on my work on a daily basis. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a film that she pitched as being about “art and women and money,” examines the complex relationship between profit and power in storytelling. Gerwig’s adaptation of the century-and-a-half-old text boldly restructures the narrative and further blurs the line between author […]
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Disposessions
Mati Diop conjures films that can feel like half-remembered dreams. Blending documentary and fantasy, they are both uncannily lucid in their sensory detail and strangely hazy in their fragmented and elliptical narratives. Like most people, I first encountered Diop as an actress in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. Back in 2008, at the urging of her friend Grégoire Colin, Diop had reluctantly auditioned for the role. The experience working with Denis was transformative. She was only three months into her filmmaking studies at Le Fresnoy, but she left. That year also marked the 10-year anniversary of the death of […]
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Parlays and Teasers
I first learned of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems—a comedy/drama built around the self-delusions, self-destructions and unbridled compulsions of a midtown Manhattan diamond dealer—back in 2011. The brothers had just completed their first feature as a directing duo, Daddy Longlegs (Josh previously directed 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed), and shared a 161-page early draft. Much of the ingenious plotting of their new film was missing, but the character of that dealer, Howard Ratner, screamed out. Indelibly portrayed by Adam Sandler eight years later, Howard is a perpetual motion machine of mishap, whose schemes spiral more and more painfully […]
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“Something Seismic was Shifting in This Country”: Five Questions for The Wolf Hour Writer/Director Alistair Banks Griffin
With Alistair Banks Griffin’s recommended second feature, The Wolf Hour, containing one of Naomi Watts’s best performances, in theaters, we’re running again our interview with Griffin following the film’s Sundance premiere. — Editor “I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wave length then everybody else….” — David Berkowitz In one of the Sundance Film Festival’s real discoveries, Alistair Banks Griffins’s 1977-set The Wolf Hour, Naomi Watts plays June, a novelist and cultural critic existing somewhere in the intellectual shadow of […]
