Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Made It Clear That I Wasn’t Just Going to Repeat How Evil He Was, That This Wasn’t a Rosenberg Revenge Film”: Ivy Meeropol on her HBO Doc Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
I suppose it should come as no surprise that since the election of Donald Trump, Roy Cohn’s seemingly inexhaustible 15 minutes of fame have been extended yet again. Before his death from AIDS (or what he termed “liver cancer”) over three decades ago, Trump’s longtime mentor/lawyer/power broker/enforcer had spent his entire life reincarnating himself. Somehow the closeted homosexual and chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the infamous Red Scare transformed what should have been an existence defined by shame into one of pure shamelessness — living the Studio 54 highlife with his mobster and celebrity friends, and never missing […]
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“This Whole Movement is about Performance”: Daniel Lombroso on his Alt-Right Doc White Noise
White Noise, the first feature-length documentary from The Atlantic, often plays more like it was sprung from the mind of Christopher Guest. Director Daniel Lombroso, who’s traveled throughout the world to shoot award-winning shorts for the magazine’s website, exploring everything from Russian espionage to Israeli settlements, now trains his lens on the alt-right — specifically on three of its biggest stars. There’s Lauren Southern, who seems to be crafting herself into a sort of Ann Coulter for the YouTube generation. Also conspiracy theorist and sex blogger Mike Cernovich, who eventually dispenses with fascist ideology in favor of the more lucrative […]
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“It’s Not Mumblecore Sex”: Boaz Yakin and Bobbi Jene Smith on Dance-Driven Psychodrama Aviva
Meta on top of meta, the choreographic psychodrama Aviva is a romance in which the primary characters—star-crossed Israeli lovers-in-New-York Aviva and Eden—are each played by two performers, one of each gender, pairing and tripling and quadrupling off as the ecstasies and heartbreak of a relationship turn into a sometimes dizzying hall of mirrors. The film, which has its virtual world premiere today (June 12), is a collaboration between writer-director Boaz Yakin (Fresh, Remember the Titans) and dancer-choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, formerly of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, and the irrepressible subject of the 2017 documentary Bobbi Jene. The masculine/feminine divide, embodied […]
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How a War Never Ends: Spike Lee Fights the Old New Fight in Da 5 Bloods
In the opening montage of the new Spike Lee Joint, Da 5 Bloods, Neil Armstrong—sporting his white A7-L spacesuit, Old Glory patch on the left shoulder—descends from Apollo 11’s lunar module, cast into relief by the black shadow of the spacecraft on the moon. From there, Lee cuts to a black-and-white photo of Reverend Ralph Abernathy protesting the Apollo 11 launch on the steps of a lunar module mockup with a sign that reads: “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.” Not shown in the film: the 500 or so predominantly Black […]
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“Muslim American Stories Can be Messy, Complicated and Beautiful All at the Same Time”: Zeshawn Ali on his Hot Docs Debut Two Gods
Making its world premiere at this year’s virtual Hot Docs on May 28 and running through June 6, Two Gods (which had also been selected for the canceled Full Frame fest) follows one unlikely trio. Hanif is a devout Muslim, and an African-American man fully committed to his work as a casket maker and ritual body washer in his Newark, New Jersey community. He’s also unwaveringly dedicated to the two neighborhood kids he’s taken under his wing, 12-year-old Furquan and 17-year-old Naz, the former dealing with an unsafe home life, the latter with unsafe streets. But as the story unfolds […]
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“I Believe That Post-María Puerto Rico Functions Like a Handbook For Our Times”: Director Cecilia Aldarondo on Her Hurricane María Doc, Landfall
2017’s Hurricane María was an undeniable disaster, borne most brutally by the thousands who died in Puerto Rico during the storm and those who were left to mourn them. But as Cecilia Aldarondo’s new documentary Landfall makes clear, there is nothing ‘natural’ about the devastation — before, during, and after the hurricane — that the people of Puerto Rico have had to endure. A haunting meditation on the aftershocks of crisis and the trauma of state failure, Landfall is an exquisite film, by turns tender and compassionate, cinematically adventurous and self-assured, and politically unflinching in its indictment of those moneyed interests […]
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“The Most Important Thing in an Image is the Feeling That What You’re Seeing is Completely True — Like an Accident….”: Bruno Santamaría on his Hot Docs Digital-Debuting Things We Dare Not Do
Executive produced by Charlotte Cook, and making its debut at this year’s (virtual) Hot Docs, Bruno Santamaría’s Things We Dare Not Do is a stunning look at the small Mexican town of Roblito through the eyes of its deeply impoverished, yet happy-go-lucky, youngsters. Serving as mother hen to the carefree kids, for whom random violence seems no more noteworthy than water delivery day or a taco snack, is 16-year-old Ñoño. Though the vivacious teen’s exploration of his own gender identity forms the basis of the film’s title, Things We Dare Not Do is no mere coming out saga. It’s a […]
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“Stay Open to the Moose Head on the Table”: Director Lesli Linka Glatter on Homeland, Learning from Lynch and Spielberg, and Resuming Production
Lesli Linka Glatter began her career in the arts as a choreographer and dancer, and this early experience clearly informs her work as a director. On shows as varied in genre and style as Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, True Blood and Mad Men, one thing remains consistent when Glatter is at the helm: an astute attention to the dramatic rhythms that are created by finding the precise visual corollary for whatever is going on emotionally in a scene. Hers is a cinema of extreme precision, defined by clear, bold choices when it comes to her compositions and rigorous control over […]
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“Should You Give the Person a Hug, or Should You Continue Filming?”: Benjamin Ree on His Art World Crime Doc The Painter and the Thief
The following interview with director Benjamin Ree about his documentary The Painter and the Thief was published during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It’s being rerun now to coincide with the virtual cinema and VOD release of the film from NEON. Spectacularly cinematic and employing a risk-taking structure that keeps the viewer as off-balance as the film’s emotionally fragile protagonists, The Painter and the Thief is the second feature-length doc from Norwegian director Benjamin Ree. (Ree’s prior film Magnus, a coming-of-age tale about the chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.) The film follows the stranger-than-fiction story of […]
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Director Michael Jacobs on Making the Basketball Doc Blackballed for Quibi’s Mobile, Dual Aspect-Ratio Platform
Long regarded as the worst-run franchise in the National Basketball Association, the Los Angeles Clippers have (after brief stints in Buffalo and San Diego) called the “City of Angels” their home since the summer of 1984. Purchased for a cool $12.5 million in 1981 by real estate tycoon Donald Sterling, the Clippers’ relocation to LA was seen as a move that would hopefully rival its “big brother” franchise led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Los Angeles Lakers. That ultimately wasn’t meant to be: the Lakers, long a shining example of the league, continued its successful run atop the […]
