Interviews
Interviews
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On the Journey: The Power of the Dog Producer Tanya Seghatchian
As a young woman, Tanya Seghatchian remembers laughing, crying and suffocating through Jane Campion’s early work, a cinematic compass she had internalized by the time she began her first job for the BBC—researching a two-part TV documentary about John Ford, pioneer of the American western. Over the years, Seghatchian’s trajectory expanded across genres and scales, from coproducing the first two Harry Potter films and executive producing more than 20 episodes of The Crown to producing Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love and Cold War, the latter of which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, in […]
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Particular Fabrics: Belfast Costume Designer Charlotte Walter
Belfast offers a poignant look at a working class childhood in an era of increasing political tumult. Set in 1969, during the early days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s deeply personal film is shot in black and white and centers on a family doing its best to get by. The protagonist, Buddy (played by Jude Hill in his debut feature role) is a charming 9-year-old Branagh surrogate with a toothy smile and rough-and-tumble costumes of collared shirts, shorts, and high socks. The ’60s has long been one of the most frequently referenced decades in fashion, and while […]
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Western Promises: The Power of the Dog Composer Jonny Greenwood
Wailing French horns, recorded in the vastness of an Oxford cathedral; the mechanized sputtering of a player piano; the anxious propulsion of an ascending and descending cello, defamiliarized by being plucked like a banjo—these are some of the seemingly counterintuitive approaches composer Jonny Greenwood took to scoring Jane Campion’s brooding and suspenseful Western, The Power of the Dog. But just as Campion’s film, set in the early 20th century, tacks away from genre signifiers to tell an unexpectedly intimate tale of fraternal rivalry and stifled desire, so too does Greenwood’s score subvert the expectations of a “big sky” Western soundtrack […]
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Speed of Life: The Worst Person in the World Director Joachim Trier Interviewed by Mike Mills
“With the passing of the years, each neighborhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life,” said French novelist Patrick Modiano in his 2014 Nobel Prize speech. Modiano was speaking of Paris, the setting of most of his novels, but his words resonate with the work of Norwegian director Joachim Trier—specifically, his loose “Oslo trilogy,” which culminates with the […]
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Interior Spaces: Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Lost Daughter
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
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In the Quiet Moments: The Memoria Sound Team of Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Richard Hocks and Javier Umpierrez
“When I work on sound for Joe’s films, it’s very similar to meditation,” says Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for all of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work since Tropical Malady (2004), including his latest picture, Memoria. “I need to be super focused on every detail. Because it’s like meditating when you watch them, we need to mix the film in a kind of line”— here, on a Zoom call, he makes a slow, horizontal motion with his right hand—“so it’s not too much.” Despite the fact that sections of Memoria, which is about a Scottish woman in Colombia attempting to understand mysterious explosions […]
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Hard Light and Shadows: Passing Cinematographer Edu Grau
Five weeks is not an unusually truncated preproduction period for a cinematographer on a modestly budgeted independent film like Passing. However, the interval between landing the gig and starting that work is typically longer than the time needed to pack a suitcase. That’s the extent of the notice Spanish DP Edu Grau had before hopping aboard the project—and a flight to New York—after a last-minute crew change left Passing director Rebecca Hall without a cinematographer on the eve of prep. “Rebecca called me on a Saturday, and I jumped on a plane the next day to start prepping the movie,” […]
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Deep Cuts: Licorice Pizza Editor Andy Jurgensen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films can all be described as “episodic” in various ways—some more explicitly than others. Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are divided into subplots and adventures, but even more austere character portraits (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread) have a “and that’s when this happened…” bent. But Licorice Pizza, which follows the tumultuous flirtation between 15-year-old actor/entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and wayward 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim) against the backdrop of early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is the first to adopt a memory-based style, in which various sequences flow into each other like a series […]
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Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
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Back to One, Episode 186: Eric Roberts
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Eric Roberts will soon have more credits as an actor than anyone else who has ever lived anywhere in the world. An intensity matched only by raw talent on display in films like Star 80, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and Runaway Train established him as a respectable actor’s actor in Hollywood. And, as he talks about in this episode, once video replaced film, and more people began shooting, they wanted Eric Roberts in their movies. And once he became privy to how many offers were coming in, he started saying yes. Work begot work fairly […]
