Directors
Interviews - Directors
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An On-Set Education: Graham Swon on The World is Full of Secrets
When The World is Full of Secrets showed earlier this year at a festival for debut films in remote Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia, its director, Graham Swon (a 25 New Face of Film in 2016), briefly became almost as much of interest to the public audience and critics there as did his hypnotic cinematic spectacular. That I was there as the only international journalist in attendance to witness Swon fielding eager questions from this newfound audience of intrigued Siberian spectators strikes me now as a fluke of wondrous good fortune. The movie’s long, discursive monologues, in which 15- and 16-year-old girls narrate […]
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“I Just Saw People Falling Out of the Sky”: Andrew Hevia on Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window
A stranger in a foreign land, with a camera and a penchant for cheap beer: Andrew Hevia’s hyperdigital documentary Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window follows the Miami-bred filmmaker as he visits Hong Kong for the Chinese edition of Art Basel. At first determined to make a traditional documentary accessible for public television audiences, Hevia’s plans are quickly thwarted once he discovers the elusive intricacies of the region. He’s a Cuban-American who can’t understand the language of his new surroundings. Rather than view that as a hindrance, he takes to meeting artists and art collectors, attending art shows, wooing […]
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“A Movie Where Nobody Wears Clothes and It’s PG-Rated”: Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli on So Pretty
Before Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli began the bulk of production on her second feature So Pretty, she wrote an essay for this site outlining some of the goals and background behind the production: The film is an adaptation of a 1980s German gay novel [Ronald M. Schernikau’s So Schön] that I am transposing and translating to a cast of feminine people of many genders in 2018, New York City. […] Given the explicit gender-trouble and queer elements of So Pretty, as well as the fact that it takes seriously the novella’s paraphrased subtitle “a utopian film,” my film must create an image […]
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“I Don’t Know How to Fake It, To Do Something I Don’t Believe In”: Michael Almereyda on Vampires, Mummies, Writing Hollywood Screenplays and Directing Independent Films
After more than a quarter century of publication, Filmmaker has a huge archive, and most of our print articles have never appeared online. Over the next several months we’ll be correcting that by curating some of our best articles and interviews, particularly from directors who continue to make strong and vital work today. We’ll start with this Winter, 1999 interview of Michael Almereyda by Ray Pride, published on the release of his film Trance, that is also an excellent overview of his early directing career and Hollywood screenwriting work. — Editor Filmmakers working outside the major studios often find themselves […]
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“This is the Real Narrative of Our Country”: Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas on Challenging Stereotypes and Shaping Raw Experience in Pahokee
Pahokee, the documentary feature debut of filmmakers Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas, who appeared on our 2016 25 New Faces list, is in the midst of a virtual theater release through Monument Releasing. Dozens of arthouses nationwide are partnering on the film, with the theaters receiving 50% of streaming tickets sold. Plus, the filmmakers are doing live Q&As this Wednesday, April 29, and Saturday, May 2, at 8:00 PM Eastern. For more details, and to watch the film, which is highly recommended, visit the Pahokee virtual release page. And read the below interview with the directors by Carson Lund, published […]
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A Love Story Underneath an Animal Rescue Story: Director Richard Miron, Co-Editor Jeffrey Star and Producer Holly Meehl on For the Birds
If there’s one thing we can be sure of about Kathy Murphy, the middle-aged woman at the center of the moving debut feature, For the Birds, by director Richard Miron, it’s that she loves animals. Birds in general, ducks and turkeys in particular. Kathy has been “collecting” them for years now on her small makeshift farm in Upstate New York alongside her begrudging husband, Gary. Less an obsession than an inherent need, Kathy values her birds above all else, and as crowding and cleanliness prompt local animal sanctuaries to threaten legal action of behalf of the wellbeing of Kathy’s feathered […]
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“I Still Have the Illusion of Community”: Director Dominga Sotomayor on Her Second Feature, Too Late to Die Young, and the New Santiago Coworking Space CCC
The possibility and impossibility of community lies at the heart of Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s second feature film, Too Late To Die Young, which follows a group of young people living in a community being formed by their parents on the outskirts of Santiago. While the country is undergoing its own transition to democracy from the 17-year dictatorship of General Pinochet and their parents try to build a society that reflects their own values, the teenagers, particularly Sofía (Demian Hernández), seek to find their place in the world, all the while watched by a younger generation of children looking to emulate […]
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“My First Studio, Commercially Made Film”: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi on Solaris, Asako I & II and Japanese Film School
When Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour premiered in 2015, the 317-minute film raised a lot of questions, not least of which: who precisely was Hamaguchi, and what has he been doing for the last decade? There were some unkind trade reviews of his first feature films (Passion and The Depths) but not much else in English to draw upon, and his iMDB resume (including a full feature remake of Solaris!) raised more questions than it answered. Metrograph’s recent retrospective provided some clarity. After his first two features, Hamaguchi collaborated on a trilogy of documentaries collecting testimonies from victims of 2011’s Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, […]
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“My Work Has Always Inhabited That Liminal Space Between Desire and Compulsion”: Five Questions for Michelle Handelman On Her New Installation at signs and symbols
In its final week at Manhattan gallery signs and symbols is artist and filmmaker Michelle Handelman’s installation, LOVER HATER CUNTY INTELLECTUAL, a kind of remix of last year’s large-scale SFMOMA installation Hustlers & Empire for the smaller and more intimate studio space. The previous exhibition was centered around three archetypal characters — “real and imagined hustlers” drawn from three seminal works: Iceberg Slim’s Pimp (1967), Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1984) and Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit (1968). This new exhibition focuses solely on a character inspired by Duras and the semi-autobiographical protagonist of her novel and performed by queer Latinx artist […]
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“Talking About It is One Thing, Making a Movie About It is Something Else”: Abel Ferrara and Nicola Nicolaou Share Old-School NYC Movie Memories
Arriving back in New York, a city with which he is synonymous, Abel Ferrara has been popping up everywhere the past few weeks: from the Tribeca Film Festival, where his documentary The Projectionist had its world premiere, to the Museum of Modern Art, where a near-complete retrospective unspools a half-century of unruly cinema through May 30. The victory lap comes as the Bronx-born expatriate, who now lives contentedly in Rome, ushers a cluster of new work onto screens, including the long-delayed domestic release of Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the radical Italian filmmaker and kindred spirit, as well as the […]
