Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Was Watching Midcentury Hollywood Biblical Epics, Anti-Communist Propaganda Films, and 1970s B-Movies about Devil Worshippers”: Penny Lane on Hail Satan?
“Blasphemy is not free speech” reads a protest banner on the Little Rock statehouse lawn in a scene from Hail Satan?, the latest from Sundance vet Penny Lane (Our Nixon, Nuts!). The sign is emblematic of the ludicrous (and too often unchallenged) falsehoods that The Satanic Temple — fighting to place an elaborate statue of goat-headed god Baphomet alongside a local legislator’s equally ostentatious Ten Commandments monument — is up against. Luckily Lane, never one to shy away from provocative subjects, is right there on the ground, providing an intimate look into the group’s wild rise. By seamlessly alternating interviews […]
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“Lights are Your Friends, but Sometimes They Don’t Need to Come Around to the Party”: Cinematographer Robbie Ryan on Shooting Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, two determined women — Rachel Weisz’s refined but ruthless Duchess of Marlborough and Emma Stone’s desperate and cunning chambermaid Abigail — vie for the titular preferential position alongside the ill and melancholy Queen Anne. Anyone expecting a beautifully mounted but stuffy 18th century period piece has not seen a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. Employing the same absurdist sense of humor as Lanthimos’s The Lobster, The Favourite also imposes the director’s preferred set of aesthetic restrictions — namely, wide angle lenses and shooting almost entirely with available light. Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan (American Honey, Fish Tank), who […]
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Grappling with “Insider” and “Outsider” Documentary Filmmaking: Sally Rubin on hillbilly
From The Beverly Hillbillies to Buckwild, and from Coal Miner’s Daughter to Deliverance, the face of Appalachia has long been defined (and stereotyped and exploited) by the Hollywood eye. And in the wake of the 2016 presidential election the caricaturing continued, this time at the hands (and pens) of the press corps on the other coastal liberal side. Enter native Appalachian documentarians Sally Rubin (Deep Down) and Ashley York (Tig) to remedy historical wrongs. In their LA Film Festival Best Documentary Feature winner hillbilly the duo systematically take a wrecking ball to every highly offensive yet socially acceptable white trash […]
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“It’s Always Very Troubling to See How Evil Can Seem So Convincing by the Good Manners of Who’s Explaining It to You”: Barbet Schroeder on his “Trilogy of Evil”
Four feature documentaries directed by Barbet Schroeder form the centerpiece of this year’s To Save and Project series at the Museum of Modern Art. Schroeder’s documentaries, some screened here in newly restored versions, have been difficult to see, especially three short ethnographic films scheduled for January 4 and 9. The Venerable W, his latest feature, will receive a week-long run from January 4–10. An actor and producer as well as director, Schroeder was an influential figure in the French New Wave, particularly as a producer for Eric Rohmer. He has directed several fiction features, including the Oscar-winning Reversal of Fortune […]
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“It’s Not Purification, It’s Something Else”: Sophia Takal Scorches Social Media Self-Care Celebrities in her Blumhouse Horror Feature, New Year, New You
In Blumhouse’s first female-directed feature film, New Year, New You, Sophia Takal (Always Shine, Green) sticks four friends from high school (played by an all-female cast toplined by Suki Waterhouse, Carly Chaikin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Melissa Bergland) and their hidden grievances into one of the women’s sealed residence for a New Year’s reunion. The four are connected, molded and torn by a tragedy in their past that Takal reveals through sharp cuts of glass shattering and blood inking through a pool. Danielle (Carly Chaikin), now a social media self-care icon who claims to mix amongst the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio […]
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“I’m Just Not Interested in Polite Entertainment”: Destroyer Director Karyn Kusama on Damaged Characters, Genre and the Challenge of Studio Filmmaking
“I’m just not interested in polite entertainment. I’m just not interested in pleasing the most number of people by checking of a bunch of boxes and being, frankly, highly, highly attuned to some concept of cultural correctness.” Director Karyn Kusama sat down with Filmmaker in New York City ahead of the release of her latest crime thriller Destroyer, written by Kusama’s husband Phil Hay and writing partner Matt Mandfredi. When asked about how we can build audiences for genre and indie films, she was passionate about the importance of carving one’s own path as both a creator and as an […]
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“Since It’s About the Death of a Body, We Wanted the Language of the Film to Be Sensuality”: Mazen Khaled on Martyr
Men touch each other tenderly in Mazen Khaled’s formally eclectic second feature Martyr, about the death of a young adult whose self-perpetuated despair drowns him on the shores of the Mediterranean. In this ethereal Lebanese mood piece, the religious interpretation of martyrdom is counteracted with tangible flesh. Rather than glorifying the loss of life as a divine honor, Khaled subtly revels in the presence of desire and the body as constant reminders that being alive is precious. Unemployed and adrift, Hassane (Hamza Mekdad) only finds respite from his restless mind when tanning by the water with his cherished friends, brothers […]
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Zika, GMO Mosquitos and the Brazilian Far Right: Artist and Filmmaker Pedro Neves Marques on A Mordida (The Bite)
Two years ago, the Miami Herald was worried: “Will Zika, election spoil Art Basel in Miami Beach 2016?” With South Beach’s art deco district smack in the middle of one of the Department of Health-designated “transmission zones,” it seemed like the deadly virus spread by mosquitoes and Trump’s recent presidential win might put a damper on the party. Now this year, Pedro Neves Marques’s A Mordida (The Bite) — the filmmaker, writer and visual artist’s first U.S. museum solo show, which opened December 4 at Pérez Art Museum Miami — puts Zika and rising Far Right sentiment in conversation, suggesting […]
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“What Moonlight Gave Us Was the Confidence to Execute Our Ideas Without Fear”: Writer/Director Barry Jenkins on If Beale Street Could Talk
Writer-director Barry Jenkins solidifies his position as one of the current cinema’s most empathetic and visually (and aurally) expressive filmmakers with his third feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. Adapted from a 1974 novel by James Baldwin, the film tells the story of Tish and Fonny, a young couple whose dreams are cut short by Fonny’s wrongful imprisonment; moving back and forth between the early days of their love story and the brutal reality of their present, Jenkins crafts a masterpiece that is simultaneously achingly, hopefully romantic and unblinking in its portrait of social injustice. While Moonlight drew upon cinematic […]
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“Comedy is Hard to Create, but It’s Easy to Evaluate”: Director David Leitch on Blending Action and Laughs in Deadpool 2
Long ago, in the dark ages of my childhood, we watched movies on broadcast television and non-premium cable like savages. In this primordial time, bereft of binging and Blu-rays, TV was where movies went to have their aspect ratios cruelly chopped and all the good bits edited out. The only joy came from seeing how censors would creatively shoehorn nonsensical profanity substitutes into everything from Back to the Future to Scarface. “This town is like a great big chicken waiting to be plucked.” Basically the same thing. “You caused 300 bucks damage to my car you son of a butthead.” […]
