Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Tapes were Sticking Together When I Found Them”: Asif Kapadia on Diego Maradona, Digitizing U-Matic and Mindhunter
The greatest soccer player of his time, Diego Maradona was also the sport’s highest-paid athlete until he was forced out of competition due to his criminal connections and substance abuse problems. Director Asif Kapadia built the HBO Sports release Diego Maradona from over 500 hours of archival footage, much of it never seen by the public. After a theatrical run for Oscar consideration, Diego Maradona is now screening on HBO. The documentary focuses on Maradona’s years in Naples, where he led the Società Sportiva Calcio Napoli team to its first league championship. A native of Argentina, Maradona also played in […]
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“It Doesn’t Make Sense to Explain Anything”: Angela Schanelec on I Was at Home, But… and Robert Bresson
The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&A for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to TIFF, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]
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Fantastic Fest 2019: Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen on their Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
Starring the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” (the horrifically burned, blade-adorned fictional sweater-wearing slasher, Freddy Krueger), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was itself a kind of bastard son, birthed by good intentions but several less maniacs. Released on November 1st, 1985, the sequel was rushed into theaters on the goodwill and unexpected success of its Wes Craven-directed predecessor. Reviews were less than stellar, and it would take the return of Craven in a creative role to right the ship with the third entry in 1987. Nightmare 2 was forgotten and ignored, deemed an outlier in the franchise […]
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“In a Way, It is My Most Gentle Film…”: Manfred Kirchheimer on His NYFF-Premiering Free Time
There’s poetry in the misery of a hot New York summer day. Spike Lee found it, in 1989, with Do the Right Thing: the sun-drunk torpor, the beads of sweat gliding down bare skin. Where winter tends to drive us indoors, away from the streets, summer promotes a more collective suffering. Rear Window hits a similar note of mutual, summertime malaise. The heat forces characters to sleep on their fire escapes and keep their windows open, turning the private public. Before air conditioners, where else could you escape the heat but outside, with everyone else? Manfred “Manny” Kirchheimer considered many […]
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“I Want to Make People Aware of Sound, and the Relationship We all Have to It”: Michael Tyburski on His Eerie Urban Drama, The Sound of Silence
At one point in my phone interview with The Sound of Silence director Michael Tyburski, I ask whether a film transforms and changes the filmmaker through the process of its production. His response is one that has an air of lightness even as he describes filmmaking as a grueling mental challenge as well as a physical one. “The film is with you for so long,” he says. “I lost something like 20 pounds during the course of making the movie, so I physically changed. But it’s a bit of a marathon, as I realised, and I was treating it like […]
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Béla Tarr on Sátántangó, Hollywood and Digital
Interviewing Béla Tarr is pretty much like what you might expect from religiously reading every interview he does, and the below conversation is no exception to the rule: he speaks calmly, coming off as heated when you’re reading the interview, but the copious profanity is punctuation rather than ire. 25 years out from Sátántangó, Tarr has made himself available for press in light of its 4K restoration from Arbelos Films (the reissue enters limited release at Lincoln Center on October 18). I really couldn’t pass up a chance to talk to a legend—and that’s it! Filmmaker: I was reading some […]
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How Signal Space and the VR Film Afterlife Are Moving Interactive Films Forward
Films and video games have been moving closer together for years now, including open world games that mimic cinematic storytelling and videos that include viewer input in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The mechanics of the latter have often been intrusive, however, making viewers click a link or—with the recent flowering of virtual reality—direct their gaze at an icon indicating their narrative selection. While this can result in compelling products, like the 2017 VR film Broken Night, many filmmakers in the space miss the immersion of a traditional film and want to mask the more game-like control mechanics in […]
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“I Think Everything is the Director’s Fault”: Steven Soderbergh on The Laundromat, LLCs and Systemic Corruption
Ever the productive workhorse, Steven Soderbergh has released two movies on Netflix this year. The first: High Flying Bird, a sharply scripted drama set behind the scenes at the NBA that follows a canny sport agent whose end game is to shift the financial power from white owners to black players, i.e. to seize the means (or balls) of production. The second: The Laundromat, a Big Short-style anthology film about the Panama Papers leak that explains the proliferation of offshore bank accounts and tax havens, specifically those provided by the firm Mossack Fonseca, and follows the victims of these global […]
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“It’s Not That Strange, and It’s Not That Weird!” Pablo Larraín and Mariana Di Girolamo on Ema
With Ema, Chilean director Pablo Larraín moves away from the biopic (Jackie, Neruda) and the past history of his country (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) to turn towards its future. The film centers on Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a young reggaeton dancer who sees her marriage with celebrated choreographer Gastón (Gael García Bernal) crumble after their “failed” adoption. A simple enough story, but already in the film’s earliest scene, the surprising behaviors and reactions of the characters hint at their extremely modern identities. Ema and Gaston are unspeakably cruel to each other, but in their own way, they are incredibly […]
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“It Was a Daily Process of Making Sure She was Comfortable with our Presence”: Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll on Their Doc about Family and Caregiving, América
It’s no secret that dedication and responsibility are both required when caring for the elderly. In Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside’s feature documentary América, those two traits are leaned upon heavily, as three adult grandchildren look after their 93-year-old grandmother, who gives the film its title. By resisting sentimentality, the film finds a new kind of emotional heft, burrowing into the daily grind of the specifics of looking after someone who’s always conscious but not always present. At times observational and at times detailed in its tracking of legal battles (the three men’s father is currently imprisoned for not looking […]
