Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Film Brings Audiences Both The Joys And Pains Of Our Political System Via High School”: Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman On Their DOC NYC-Premiering The Candidates
If you spent the 2016 election season trying to wrap your head around the surreal circus that passed for political campaigning, just imagine actually participating in it while studying for exams. Such was the situation for the students of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, which since 1996 has included in its curriculum an as-close-to-real-life-as-possible Election Simulation. Fortunately, filmmakers Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman were there to capture it all. On one side is Russian-American Daniel, aka Trump, trying to focus on making America great again instead of grabbing women by the pussy. On the other, there’s Pakistani-American Misbah, aka […]
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Twilight Hours: Shevaun Mizrahi on Her Elegiac Documentary, Distant Constellation
With Shevaun Mizrahi’s documentary Distant Constellation opening at NYC’s Metrograph today from Grasshopper Film, we’re unlocking from our print issue this feature with the director. It’s not news that nonfiction editing can be an attenuated process. Still, with footage so fully formed, I didn’t expect that Mizrahi would keep returning to Istanbul for three more years, logging more hours on the way to showing a nearly-locked cut at 2017’s True/False Film Festival, with her world premiere following later that year at Locarno. The additional time she took turned out to be crucial for capturing two additional strands that give the […]
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“This Was Not a Crime Story, This Was a Love Story”: Harold Becker on the Great Al Pacino/Ellen Barkin Noir, Sea of Love
In 1989, Al Pacino returned to the screen after a four-year hiatus to appear in Sea of Love, a thriller that reinstated him as a major star and cemented novelist Richard Price’s status as one of the great American screenwriters of his era. Price’s script, which follows a detective (Pacino) who falls in love with a suspect (Ellen Barkin) in a string of murders of men placing personal ads, has a rock solid construction that allows for a multitude of tonal shifts and digressions, all of which are orchestrated to perfection by the film’s director, Harold Becker. In Becker’s hands, […]
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“‘We’re Seeing Fire Behavior We’ve Never Seen Before'”: Five Questions for Wildland Director Alex Jablonski
A world premiere at this year’s Camden International Film Festival, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski’s Wildland (formerly titled Young Men and Fire) is a movie for this moment. As wildfires race with wearying regularity through our nation’s wooded areas, and as climate change exacerbates the triggering factors for these fires, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski take us to the frontlines of the current battle. Following one particular squad over two years, the two directors, who previously collaborated on Hudson’s Low & Clear, manage to tell a story that’s both expansive in subject matter while being intimate in focus, finding in […]
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“It’s Impossible to Predict [an Audience’s] Reactions, and I Make No Effort to Do It”: Frederick Wiseman on Monrovia, Indiana and His 51-Year Career
In the last 51 years, Frederick Wiseman has made 42 non-fiction films, plus two fiction features. In a sense, each film is the same: The filmmaker, a sprightly and sharp 88, goes to an institution — or, in a handful of cases, a confined area — with a small crew. (Currently it’s his longtime cameraman John Davey and Davey’s assistant Jim Bishop.) Wiseman doesn’t do research; as he’s said countless times, “The shooting is the research.” He does no interviews. There is no onscreen text describing who is who, or even where is where. He rarely shows any person more than once. […]
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“Sometimes You Abandon a Wrong Idea and It Comes Back to You in the Right Form”: Patrick Wang on His Four-Hour Double Feature A Bread Factory
Patrick Wang (a 25 New Face alum) takes a painstakingly nuanced, intimate approach to delicate subjects, specifically the ways in which we deal with — and don’t deal with — loss and the rippling effects in life after a death. His first feature, the breathtaking, Independent Spirit Award-nominated In the Family, and 2015’s Cannes and SXSW-screening The Grief of Others, which will finally be hitting theaters November 2nd, would make for a great marathon viewing alone. (Provided it came with a big box of Kleenex.) And now Wang has created a work that is simultaneously lighter in tone, and his […]
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“There’s Something Clearly Wrong, But We Just Can’t See It, Though It’s Part of Everyday Life”: Lee Chang-dong on his Haruki Murakami Adaptation, Burning
In Lee Chang-dong’s latest masterwork Burning, mystery is everything. The two-and-a-half hour epic lives and breathes the tiniest ambiguities of every waking moment, refusing to come to anything resembling true clarity, but in its way offering as clear a depiction of the stresses and concerns of modern life. The film, Lee’s first as director since 2010’s Poetry, is based on the short story “Barn Burning,” by Haruki Murakami, and tells the story of Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young man living without much means close to the border with North Korea. On a visit to Seoul he bumps into a childhood […]
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Five Questions for Shirkers Director Sandi Tan
With Sandi Tan’s beautifully cinephilic autobiographical documentary Shirkers arriving in theaters and on Netflix this Friday, October 26, we’re reposting our interview with Tan out of Sundance, 2018. As I wrote earlier in the festival, “Sandi Tan’s debut feature Shirkers is the 26-years-later compromise-of-necessity incarnation of a film that almost was. Shot in 1992, when Tan was in college, from a proudly illogical script of her own devising, Shirkers was meant to be a rare, hopefully transformative Singaporean independent film in a country without much history of those. Directed by Tan’s ambivalently-motivated mentor Georges Cardona — who subsequently absconded with […]
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A MAGA Nightmare Scene, Marketing to Incels and Reacting Against “Performative Wokeness”: Eugene Kotlyarenko and Dasha Nekrasova on Their Reverse Romantic Comedy, Wobble Palace
Wobble Palace is a reverse romantic comedy set in relationship hell tinged by the toxicity of Tinder hookups and Trump’s political rise. “One of the early ideas was to make a movie about a happy break up,” explains director Eugene Kotlyarenko. “The formula for a rom com is whatever happens for the first 90 minutes, by the end, the couple gets together.” Flipping this arc, the film climaxes (spoiler alert!) in the couple splitting up instead. “In a relationship that’s really toxic, staying together is really horrible and breaking up is really liberating,” Kotlyarenko continues. The film follows a millennial […]
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“Imagine How Angels Would Look at Us”: Wim Wenders on Restoring Wings of Desire
As a longtime Wim Wenders fan and devoted admirer of his masterpiece Wings of Desire, I would never have thought it possible that the movie could look better than it did when it was released in 1987. Gorgeous in every sense of the word, from the shimmering black-and-white photography of Henri Alekan (the maestro behind Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast who Wenders prodded out of retirement to shoot the film) to the profoundly romantic story of an angel who wants to fall to earth and experience the human condition, Wings of Desire was a stunner when it came out […]
