Interviews
Interviews
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“It Was Too Dangerous To Make This Film in America”: Eugene Jarecki on The Six Billion Dollar Man
Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, much like its main character Julian Assange, is a doc destined to spark controversy. Jam-packed with gripping never before seen footage (much of it captured by Ecuadorian embassy CCTV) and an eclectic roster of interviewees (from Edward Snowden to Pamela Anderson), the film offers a sort of vertigo-inducing alternative history of the WikiLeaks founder and his tabloid-sensationalized troubles; and in doing so asks us to reconsider the media narrative that’s long been built by unseen hands around him. For how much of what we know about the information freedom fighter is actually “true,” […]
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Director as Dinner Party Host: Dan Trachtenberg on “Predator: Badlands”
Architect of the three last films in the Predator franchise (the previous two being the 1719-set Prey and animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers), Dan Trachtenberg would be the first to tell you that many of Predator: Badlands’s gorgeous landscape shots are inspired by Terrence Malick or Sergio Leone. In the same breath, he’d also be quick to mention how composer Sarah Schachner’s score for the video game Anthem served as a launching pad for the this film’s music—Trachtenberg creates something new by unifying artforms most people don’t group together. With Predator: Badlands, for the first time the franchise […]
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“There Were Many Fragmented Aspects to Sara Jane’s Testimony”: Robinson Devor on “Suburban Fury”
Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, made in collaboration with writer Charles Mudede (who also co-wrote Devor’s 2005 acclaimed narrative feature Police Beat and 2007’s provocatively disturbing Zoo), is as counterintuitively intense as its title might imply. The unconventionally riveting doc takes us on a wild and winding (car) ride back in time, via the backseat reminisces of its enigmatic star Sara Jane Moore, who in September 1975 tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Eschewing recreations for cinematically staged interviews with the infamous nonagenarian (who passed away in September at age 95), along with evocative archival […]
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Composer and Musician Michael Brook on “Heat,” U2 and Hans Zimmer
Michael Brook has collaborated with some of the most influential filmmakers and musicians of the last 40 years without ever threatening to become a household name. When I spoke to the inventor and composer last month at the Warsaw Film Festival, I asked if he valued the recognition of awards bodies, to which he explained with typical candor that “almost everything I do is not the kind of thing that the Academy is interested in, and that’s fine.” Brook got his first break in 1984 when he convinced Brian Eno, then a customer in the Toronto video lab where he […]
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Music as Nourishment: Max Richter on Scoring “Hamnet”
With Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Chloé Zhao constructed tender epics out of prolonged time spent at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Much like her Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020), these films are born out of geography, setting characters yearning for freedom and belonging against vast American landscapes.. Zhao’s fifth feature, Hamnet, likewise finds a synthesis between the natural world and the interiority of her characters in telling a story of creation in every sense of the word — the genesis of new life and the mysterious place within where creativity and artistic processes emerge. […]
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Inner Landscapes: Tenzin Phuntsog on “Next Life”
An image of the Dalai Lama gives diasporic texture to an otherwise anonymous suburban American house; the camera tracks to the next room, where a father, mother, and son sit like statues. A Tibetan doctor arrives, and father Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) tells him that Western medicine cannot seem to explain the pain he feels in his heart. The doctor takes his pulse, not to know his heart rate, but to listen to something deeper and more intangible hiding in the inner self. The blood rushing through his veins rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling […]
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From Mail-Order to Online: Tom Davenport on Founding Folkstreams, the Pioneering Online Streaming Site
When I first discovered the works of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch—academic anthropologists who opted to make films rather than books about their research subjects—my appreciation of their work was hampered by some lingering questions: “How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?” Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower? […]
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Steel Blue World: DP Dan Laustsen on “Frankenstein”
Though Guillermo del Toro’s 1997 American studio debut Mimic was a notoriously unpleasant experience, the silver lining of that giant cockroach creature feature was the filmmaker crossing paths with Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen. It took 18 years for them to work together again, but they’ve made up for lost time since by teaming on Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley—the latter two brining Laustsen Oscar nominations. Their latest collaboration fulfills del Toro’s lifelong ambition to mount a version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror masterpiece Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac as the titular creator and Jacob Elordi as the […]
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“It was Extremely Brutal”: Max Keegan on “The Shepherd and the Bear”
High in the Pyrenees, a centuries-old way of life approaches its twilight amid a controversial rewilding scheme. France’s government has for decades airlifted brown bears from Slovenia to repopulate those hunted out of existence by the region’s hunters. But the bears are apex predators who threaten the flocks of a community of shepherds, whose earth-bound traditions don’t readily coexist with state-mandated policy. Within this context, British filmmaker Max Keegan illuminates richly human connections with stirring observational portraiture in The Shepherd and the Bear, whose Academy Award-qualifying run begins Friday Nov. 21 at New York City’s Cinema Village. Much more about […]
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“You Learn to Let Yourself Go Completely”: June Squibb, Back To One, Episode 367
June Squibb has only been acting for about seven decades, so forgive her if she hasn’t figured this whole acting thing out yet. Luckily she isn’t stopping or even slowing down. In fact, at 96 years old, she is more busy than ever before. Since her Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Squibb has been in high demand. Her first leading role in a film, Thelma, led to another, Eleanor The Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson. And now she’s about to take the stage in the exciting new Broadway production of Marjorie Prime. On this episode, […]
