Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“These Girls Say So Much with their Faces”: Director/Editor Parker Hill on Cusp
Parker Hill and Isabel Bettencourt’s Cusp embeds itself with a trio of teenage girls, all sustaining best friends, over the course of a long, alcohol-sodden rural Texas summer. Relationships come and go, but cycles of systemic sexual abuse and misogyny structure the lives of its indefatigable protagonists. Hill, who also served as Cusp’s editor, discusses the project’s winnowing down, working with a consulting editor and learning to let go of footage. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hill: Impatience, stubbornness, and […]
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“I Wanted the Film to Feel Like an Online Dating Hall of Mirrors”: Pacho Velez on his Sundance-Debuting Searchers
As someone who came of age at a time when looking for a potential partner(s), be it for a lifetime or one night, was less a neat calculated exercise and more a messy spontaneous surprise, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of online dating. Seeking love and/or sex via swipe just always seemed creepily clinical and controlled, cold and robotic — about as sexy as in vitro fertilization to my mind. And yet watching Pacho Velez’s Searchers, an exploration of online connecting through the eyes (literally, as Velez’s Interrotron-style setup allows his characters to look directly at us as they […]
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“God Bless Dwayne Johnson”: Richard Kelly on Southland Tales, 15 Years Later
Some films are not meant for the era in which they’re made. Such was the case with Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, a sci-fi epic from the provocative filmmaker whose first feature, Donnie Darko, premiered in 2001. Arriving five years into President Bush’s presidency, Kelly’s second feature debuted in Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received much like Bush’s tumultuous War on Terror. “More film maudit than the basis for a midnight cult,” film critic J. Hoberman observed in the Village Voice, his review being one of the few positive notices to follow the film’s disastrous world […]
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“I Wanted to Infuse the Film with a Musical Storyline”: Writer/Director Haroula Rose on the Original Soundtrack to Her Once Upon a River
Putting together the perfect soundtrack for a film is its own art form. It’s a task that most often makes use of existing tunes and can achieve an almost magical symbiosis with the images onscreen. Think of Leonard Cohen’s ballads floating over the snowbound romantic folly of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller or the way Simon & Garfunkel’s songs offer a suite-like metanarrative in The Graduate as two legendary examples. Filmmaker Haroula Rose mentions both in a recent conversation, which also touched on the way Paul Thomas Anderson drew on bespoke material in Magnolia, commissioning an original song cycle […]
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Braking and Entering: Director David Cronenberg on His Austere and Unnerving J.G. Ballard Adaptation, Crash
The following interview with David Cronenberg about his film Crash originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 edition. With Crash having just been rereleased in a new restoration by Criterion, it is being republished online for the first time. Also regarding Crash: Joanne McNeil’s essay on the relation of the work to the source material, J.G. Ballard’s novel. Blood, semen and gasoline are the liquids that course through David Cronenberg’s compelling study of sexual fetishism, Crash. But far from being a, well, messy affair, Crash is startling for its cool precision and astute manner of intellectual provocation. […]
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“What Does It Mean When We’re Working in 360?”: Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber on Pieces of a Woman
While the arrival of a newborn child can strengthen a couple’s relationship, the loss of one can accentuate fissures that were already there. Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman is an emotionally high-pitched study of the PTSD that results from a home birth gone fatally wrong. Based on a stage play by Mundruczó’s partner, Kata Wéber, this film adaptation moves the action to Boston and casts as its two leads Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. Following its world premiere at last fall’s Venice International Film Festival (where Kirby was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress), press coverage for […]
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“Nobody Knew About the Vinegar Syndrome at That Time”: Mike De Leon On His Newly Restored Kisapmata
Mike De Leon made his Cannes debut in ‘82 when he premiered two films at Directors’ Fortnight in the same year—Kisapmata and Batch 81—becoming only the second filmmaker to do so at the time. Wim Wenders asked De Leon and certain filmmakers present at the festival that year to answer pre-written questions about the future of cinema in the span of a 16mm reel (around 11 minutes) for his documentary Room 666. Godard and Antonioni filled the time and could probably go on; the others, like Spielberg, Siedelman and Fassbinder, talked for several minutes. But De Leon’s segment lasted under […]
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“Almost the Entire Movie is Shot on Steadicam but You’d Never Know It”: John Patrick Shanley on Wild Mountain Thyme
As a writer (Moonstruck) and director (Joe Versus the Volcano), John Patrick Shanley has created some of the funniest, most compassionate, and original romantic comedies of the past 35 years, which makes his return to the genre with Wild Mountain Thyme cause for major celebration. Adapting his play Outside Mullingar, Shanley has created his most lyrical and complex film to date, and his most moving. Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt play Anthony and Rosemary, would-be lovers who have grown up together on neighboring Irish farms without acknowledging their mutual attraction—mostly due to introvert Anthony’s hopeless awkwardness. Anthony’s father (Christopher Walken) […]
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“We Could Have Made A True Crime Film, But Decided Not To”: Jiayan “Jenny” Shi on Finding Yingying
Yingying Zhang came to the US in April 2017 to conduct a year of research on photosynthesis and crop productivity at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was considering a doctoral program at the university and planned to marry her boyfriend, Xiaolin Hu, later that year. In her diary, she wrote, “Life is too short to be ordinary” and was anxious to fulfill as many ambitions as she could—but disappeared June that year. It was later confirmed her life had been taken. Jiayan “Jenny” Shi, the director of Finding Yingying, accompanies Yingying’s parents, Ronggao Zhang and Lifeng Ye, her brother […]
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“Palestine May Be the Last Bastion of American Ignorance”: David Osit on Mayor
Conflicts keep Mayor Musa Hadid, mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah since 2012, on the move. A modest man who delights in meeting his fellow citizens and problem-solving ways to make their daily existence easier, he’s a walking, talking human “customer service department.” Hadid is less the head of municipality than a crisis manager, listening patiently to every complaint and request that comes his way. Consistently reminded that his power is limited by the unwanted presence of Israeli military and government interference, Hadid’s running of a city in occupation is often frustratingly restricted. In director David Osit’s new documentary, […]
