Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“False Optimism is as Destructive as Pessimism”: Travis Wilkerson on His Essay Film About Racism, Family Legacy and the American South, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? — set to hit home video on September 18 — is the director’s latest essayistic foray into the political landscape of America. Often focused on buried histories of social movements, here Wilkerson hones in on race and its legacy within his own family and the American South. It is a film about complicity, about being born into and perpetuating power, about the fabric of the American South and the way its own buried history is not just emblematic of the region’s sordid past but of the entire country’s. As in his groundbreaking […]
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Into the Spotlight: Bradley Cooper on A Star is Born, Consulting with Terrence Malick and Shooting his First Feature in 42 Days
Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, A Star is Born, is the kind of movie that feels as though it contains decades’ worth of saved-up ideas and feelings, yet never strains under the weight of its ambition. It’s simultaneously sweeping in its scope and razor-sharp in its clarity, passionate and exuberant but restrained and confident. Although the tale has been told several times before, most memorably in George Cukor’s 1954 CinemaScope extravaganza, Cooper (who collaborated on the screenplay with Eric Roth and Will Fetters) makes it his own by using the basic premise as a springboard for a sophisticated meditation on fame […]
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Love is Colder Than Death: Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria
I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
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What Can Happen in the Frame: Sasha Waters Freyer on Her Doc, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
Photography was all over the New York City art world of the late 1980s. There was the Pictures Generation—artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons, who began in the mid ’70s and whose conceptual use of appropriated or staged photographs cast a critical and sometimes seductive eye at the way mass media imagery shaped consciousness. Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and, later, Gregory Crewdson were bringing the staging techniques of film and theater to photographs charged with emotional and narrative possibility. And the work of photographers of an earlier generation, like Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, was still highly […]
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Moment of Conception
“All it takes is one good egg.” This refrain is uttered more than a few times throughout the course of Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, her first feature since 2007’s The Savages. A meditation on marriage, middle age and the haves and have-not’s of fertility, the film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artist couple—she’s a writer, and he runs both a theater group and an artisanal pickle company—desperate to conceive in their 40s. While the pair loads up on IVF hormones and diminishing hopes, they must also make room in their realistically cozy East Village apartment for their […]
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“I Wanted to Create Something Like a Heavy Metal Album Cover from the ’70s”: Panos Cosmatos on His Thrilling Nicolas Cage-Starring Revenge Drama, Mandy
Set in a dimension with certain details resembling the Pacific Northwest of the early 1980s, Mandy tells the story of a quiet, reserved lumberjack named Red Miller (Nicolas Cage), who shares a secluded cabin in the woods with the sensitive but hard-tempered Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). These two outsiders live a simple, contented life — they work, they play, they dream — until a gang of demonic bikers called the Black Skulls kidnap Mandy at the behest of deranged cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache). Sand wishes Mandy to become the latest in his line of young brides and lovers, […]
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“Silent Solidarity” and Portraying Sexual Violence on Screen: Jayisha Patel on Her TIFF Short Circle
London-based director Jayisha Patel has amassed an impressive resume in a remarkably short period of time. Since 2014 Patel’s documentary shorts have screened LAFF, SXSW, NYFF, the Berlin International Film Festival and beyond, racking up numerous awards along the way. Her latest VR project — Notes to My Father, the world’s first live-action 360-degree documentary on sex trafficking, commissioned by Oculus — premiered at Sundance. Her most recent short, the Berlinale-premiering Circle, a sensitive portrait of an adolescent rape survivor caught in the endless loop of India’s gender-based violence, made its Toronto debut this week. Currently an artist in residence […]
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“Capitalism and Democracy are on a Collision Course”: Astra Taylor on her TIFF-Premiering What is Democracy?
I went down yesterday to the port of Piraeus. …I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants. –Plato, The Republic, Book 1 In her third feature, What is Democracy?, premiering this year at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Astra Taylor takes on the role of ombudswoman to talk to a plethora of individuals about the concept and idea of democracy. As she did in her previous feature, the philosophy doc Examined Life, Taylor poses open-ended questions to her subjects, generously giving them a free rein to not only tell their personal stories but to grapple with big ideas […]
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“We Need to Strive for a Better, More Inclusive, Emerging Tech Landscape”: Paisley Smith on her VR Project Homestay and Advocating for Women in VR/AR
For the past eight years London’s Open City Documentary Festival has been dedicated to “celebrating the art of non-fiction,” and the upcoming 2018 edition (September 4-9) looks to be doing so in a creatively cutting edge way when it comes to immersive media. In addition to a wide-ranging Expanded Realities exhibition (divided into three themed sections, A New Lens, Motion and Sonic), OCDF will present a full day (September 7) Expanded Realities symposium featuring deep-thinking speakers tackling some of the most pressing issues affecting new media-makers today. One discussion I’m especially looking forward to is the “Barrier to Entry: Accessibility […]
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Shooting 16mm, Loading in by Helicopter and Sex Scenes as Performance: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani on Let the Corpses Tan
French directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani burst onto the genre scene with their mesmerizing, impeccably crafted 2009 giallo film Amer. The married couple followed it up with the even more daring spiritual sequel The Strange Colour of Your Bodies Tears. Now, Cattet and Forzani are back and bringing their talent for precision filmmaking into other genres. In Let the Corpses Tan, based on the book Laissez bronzer les cadavres by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid, thieves steal a pile of gold and getaway to a coastal village, the home of Luce, an enigmatic artist involved in a seedy, […]
