Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Love Just Using a New Language”: Robert Rodriguez and STXSurreal’s Rick Rey and Andy Vick on the Virtual Reality Film The Limit
Since 1895 films have had at least two distinct advantages over live theater: the ability to be reproduced and watched at times and in places where the action did not actually take place, and the ability to direct the audience’s attention to precisely what the filmmakers desired. Conversely, after more than a century of cinema’s evolution, these have become precisely the reason that theater remains vibrant: it’s live and it’s present, and audiences can look wherever they want. Now virtual reality is mixing these experiences in a new way. While still prerecorded and edited (generally), it expands the audience’s range […]
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“A Lot of Stories in France are Not Told”: Claire Simon on The Competition
Claire Simon’s The Competition is a sometimes painfully funny documentary about a subject that doesn’t seem humorous at all: the rigorous admission process, heavy on interviews in front of panels, for La Fémis, one of France’s premiere film schools. Its alumni include Claire Denis and Arnaud Desplechin, and its teachers have included Simon herself. One of France’s premiere documentarians, only with The Competition is Simon finally receiving a US release for her work—it’s the first film to be put out by the newly established Metrograph Pictures. Simon follows the process from beginning to end, with students and their interviewing juries speaking in […]
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“It’s As If I Made A Suit Starting from the Buttons Instead of the Fabric”: Four Questions for Everybody Knows Writer/Director Asghar Farhadi
As in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (2009), a woman’s disappearance in Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben—this is Farhadi’s first film in Spanish) is the inciting incident. This time it is Irene, the daughter of Laura (Penelope Cruz), swept from her bed on the night of her aunt’s wedding—either by her own anarchic free spirit, or a kidnapper, stranger, or kin. Irene’s absence turns up dormant family secrets and suspicions that, perhaps, they all already knew. Bare and exposed, the festered family wounds must be dealt with until new ones emerge to be cast aside. Everybody Knows is another social realist thriller in […]
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“I Love Silence, and I Like to Be Bored”: Romina Paula on Her Rotterdam-Premiering Directorial Debut, Again Once Again
“My life is not what one would term heroic.” The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]
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“You Run the Risk of Becoming a Brand”: Co-Writer/Co-Producer/DP/Editor James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Co-Producer Paul Dallas on Berlinale 2019 “Fake Indie” The Plagiarists
Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]
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“…If They Don’t Bleed in Front of Camera, Then Usually They’re Sort Of Always Right”: Gus Van Sant On Cinematography, His Actors, and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot
Gus Van Sant won’t settle and his insatiable itch to reinvent himself hasn’t ebbed. Years working in, out, and around the studio system have offered him ample opportunity to normalize, and, occasionally, he’s adopted the opportunity, if only to do something different (as only different could be his “norm”) once more. Even his deliberate efforts to direct something “standard” tend to tinge off-kilter, with his itch to experiment crackling just under frame. His latest re-invention, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, which has its streaming premiere today on Amazon Prime, wiggles somewhere in between Van Sant’s oeuvre of […]
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“It’s Like Having a Diary Shot by Someone Else of Moments That You Don’t Remember….”: RaMell Ross on his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and airing on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning February 11th (and now on iTunes), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening lives up to its buzz and then some. The award-winning photographer’s debut feature is a low-key, highly cinematic look at the Alabama Black Belt over a period of five years. In that time Ross trained his lens mostly on two twenty-something men, Daniel and Quincy, as they navigated education, blue-collar labor, fatherhood, and just the intricacies of daily life in their culturally rich, economically impoverished Southern town. Filmmaker was fortunate enough […]
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Making an Epic Roadshow Motion Picture on a Microbudget: Daniel Kremer on Overwhelm the Sky
In January 2017, I interviewed San Francisco-based independent filmmaker Daniel Kremer for a local Bay Area publication called CineSource Magazine. In these past two years, he’s been as indefatigable and as busy as ever. On February 10 and 11, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival premieres his latest feature film, Overwhelm the Sky. In late March, he will host a local screening of the roadshow-style edition of the film, a nearly three-hour epic complete with an orchestral overture and intermission. Come springtime, he’ll be opening the film at a prominent European film festival (the name of which must be kept under […]
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“Pushing for Black Actors to Tell Black Stories”: Euzhan Palcy on A Dry White Season
In 1989, Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a major studio movie when she helmed A Dry White Season for MGM. A brutal yet inspiring anti-apartheid drama, A Dry White Season remains a model of political filmmaking, as Palcy (adapting Andre Brink’s novel with co-screenwriter Colin Welland) boldly and forcefully indicts the South African government of the period with clarity, complexity and passion. Donald Sutherland plays Ben Du Toit, a schoolteacher (a surrogate for both Brink and the movie’s white audience members) who keeps his head buried in the sand when it comes to the injustices around […]
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“Twelve Hours Later and a Few Glasses of Wine to the Good and the Sequence was Finished”: Untouchable Editor Andy Worboys
The first Harvey Weinstein documentary post-Weinsteingate, Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable examines the mogul’s fall through the fresh testimony of many of those he assaulted. Intended first and foremost as a work of journalism, Macfarlane’s film was edited by Andy Worboys, fresh off his work on the TV documentary Hillsborough, a re-examination of the death of 96 people during a 1989 soccer match. Via email, Worboys discussed his work preserving the testimonies of those who spoke on camera for Untouchable. 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 […]
