Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Feel Totally OK with Being an Eternal Slave to Love and Cinema”: Yann Gonzalez on Obsession, Porn and Knife + Heart
Near the end of Yann Gonzalez’s queer neo-giallo intoxicant Knife + Heart, gay porn producer and director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) finds herself in a delapidated porno theatre in 1970s Paris, watching her own work from the past projected onto the screen. The elusive murderer terrorizing the set of her newest film is also transfixed by the porn being projected. Anne’s history as creator of fantasies and the traumatic history of the masked killer who’s been knocking off her cast and crew converge, film and reality melt into one another. They’re both frozen in their tracks in the cat and mouse […]
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Locked in Rage: Writer/Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on The Mustang
A wild horse is captured, transported to a prison facility where he will be “broken,” or trained, in a program that doubles as a form of therapy for the inmates inside. A broken man is released from solitary confinement into the main population, where his ability to banish his anger is dependent on the relationship he forges with that horse, a brilliant brown mustang. The Mustang, the first feature from Paris-born, LA-based filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is an artfully restrained, quietly moving film built around the most elemental of oppositions: freedom vs. imprisonment, man vs. animal, violence vs. self-control. And […]
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Moonshot: Todd Douglas Miller on Apollo 11
Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]
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Elementary Force: Claire Denis on High Life
No one expected Claire Denis to soften with age. At 72, the French auteur has been a daring and unpredictable force in cinema for three decades now. After delivering last year’s talky romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In, which offered the unexpected sight of Gérard Depardieu as a lovesick psychic, Denis has returned with a certified leap into the unknown. High Life is the filmmaker’s first English-language film, her first science fiction foray, and her first featuring eye-popping CGI. Boasting an international cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth and André Benjamin, and set to be released by […]
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A Dream Within A Dream: Bi Gan on Long Day’s Journey Into Night
After his road movie Kaili Blues became an international success, writer and director Bi Gan turned to the film noir genre for his follow up, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The layered, dreamlike plot follows Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) as he returns to his hometown, looking into the past for clues about what happened to Wildcat (Lee Hong), a lost love he last saw more than a decade ago. Set in the bars, alleys and seedy hotels of Gan’s home province, the film is divided into two parts. Elliptical scenes and a fractured timeline give the first half […]
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Jia Zhangke on Ash is Purest White, Deconstructing Genre and Learning Masculinity from John Woo Movies
The latest film from writer and director Jia Zhangke adds new insights to his previous titles like Still Life and A Touch of Sin. Again starring his wife Zhao Tao, Ash Is Purest White follows two outsiders for some twenty years as their fortunes flow and ebb in China’s new economy. Set partly in a gritty coal-mining town and partly on the Yangtze River at the moment when the then-under-contruction Three Gorges Dam was about to forever change the landscape, the film resembles the structure of Mountains May Depart in its use of three time periods and chapters. But, as Jia explains, what starts […]
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“… The Smallest Budget I Have Worked With, and Yet It Felt the Most Ample”: Five Questions for Hilary Brougher About Her SXSW-Premiering South Mountain
A welcome sight on the SXSW feature list is a new film from Hilary Brougher, who has been making inventive, emotionally acute independent film across three decades now, always working in some degree of low to ultra-low budget. Her debut, Sticky Fingers of Time, was lo-fi sci-fi with a time-travel hook that might remind you of Looper but with a feminist slant. Stephanie Daley, starring Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, followed in 2006, a mystery both legal and existential about an unwanted pregnancy. And now there’s South Mountain, which finds Brougher working with her smallest budget yet but with a […]
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“Spontaneity is Very Much a Part of My Process”: Five Questions for Margarita Jimeno About Her Cinequest-Premiering Grind Reset Shine
Following her vibrant and raucous concert doc, Gogol Bordello Nonstop, Colombia-born, New York-based filmmaker Margarita Jimeno makes her dramatic feature debut with the Cinequest-premiering Grind Reset Shine, another story about an art and artmaking but one that unfolds in a very different way. From the press release: When the worlds of a struggling artist and a nun entangle, how will they break free? Peter is a struggling artist who moves from New York to Berlin to explore his luck and join an art collaborative. Alicia, preparing for nunhood in a remote Polish village, tries to decipher the existence of Satan […]
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“I’m Really Interested in Expanding What We Call ‘Political Cinema'”: Brett Story on The Hottest August
Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]
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“It Felt Like Climbing Mount Everest”: Debuting Filmmakers at Sundance on How They Made Their First Features
You’re making another short? Why not just make your first feature? You’re already making your feature? Maybe you should make some shorts first. Oh, you’re making a feature? Good luck funding it; good luck casting it; you should be sure it’s genius before embarking on that next three years of your life…. If you suffer from these neuroses-inducing comments, as well as doubts around stamina, sustainability and creativity, you might be a first-time feature filmmaker. Anyone who’s making movies, or trying to, knows there are mountains worth of judgements, opinions and advice that come with the craft. I’ve found a […]
