Interviews
Interviews
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Back to One, Episode 79: Tim Heidecker
I didn’t know if Tim Heidecker was going to show up for this interview, or if I was going to get his boorish, abusive, dim alter ego, Tim Heidecker. Luckily Tim Heidecker leaves Tim Heidecker in the On Cinema universe. That project he started with Gregg Turkington is comprised of an ongoing series called On Cinema at the Cinema, various spin-off series including The Trial of Tim Heidecker, special episodes, segments, tweets, songs, and now the feature film Mister America. In this half hour, I ask Heidecker to lift the hood on his performance style and the evolution of his […]
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Back to One, Episode 78: Cassidy Freeman
The wise and talented Cassidy Freeman plays Amber, wife of Danny McBride’s character Jesse, on the hilarious new HBO comedy series The Righteous Gemstones. She talks about the wonderful troupe mentality on that show, what acting in 60+ episodes of Smallville did to build her craft early in her career, the importance of creativity for the actor, plus much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And if you’re enjoying what you are hearing, please subscribe and rate us! Photo credit: Catie Lafoon
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“Here I Am, a Stranger, Texting Children”: Michael Beach Nichols on Wrinkles the Clown
It’s tempting to sum up this weekend’s pop culture focus as rooted in chronic coulrophobia. As Todd Phillips’s Joker, the latest big screen incarnation of the DC Comics ubervillan, opens across 4,000 theaters, a fear of clowns (coupled with a pathetic lack of common sense gun laws) has collectively stricken the country. Temporary bans have been put in place that discourage moviegoers from adorning clown makeup, security amped up for extensive bag checks, and theater chains encouraged to emphasize Joker’s well-earned, hard R-rating. Has the mere thought of clowning (that is, the obscuring of identity under facepaint) brought about an […]
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“We Didn’t Try to Colonize the Boy in Making the Film”: The Dardenne Brothers on Young Ahmed
For 20 years running, the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have confronted a single fundamental facet of modern life: class. From their breakout La Promesse (1996) to The Unknown Girl (2016), the messy tangle of money, employment, and morality has defined their work. The brothers take a hard turn, in subject if not style, with Young Ahmed. The film debuted at Cannes, like their previous seven features, where it won the Best Director prize earlier this year. Despite that honor–which they won over Almodóvar, Tarantino, and Malick among other heavyweights–the film has earned the harshest reviews of the Dardennes’ career. […]
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“The Tapes were Sticking Together When I Found Them”: Asif Kapadia on Diego Maradona, Digitizing U-Matic and Mindhunter
The greatest soccer player of his time, Diego Maradona was also the sport’s highest-paid athlete until he was forced out of competition due to his criminal connections and substance abuse problems. Director Asif Kapadia built the HBO Sports release Diego Maradona from over 500 hours of archival footage, much of it never seen by the public. After a theatrical run for Oscar consideration, Diego Maradona is now screening on HBO. The documentary focuses on Maradona’s years in Naples, where he led the Società Sportiva Calcio Napoli team to its first league championship. A native of Argentina, Maradona also played in […]
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“We Have to Start Making the World that We Want to Live In”: Gordon Quinn and Julia Reichert in Conversation
[The following conversation was provided by Kartemquin Films.] This October 29 at the 2019 Empowering Truth Benefit Luncheon, Kartemquin will honor documentary trailblazer Julia Reichert with the inaugural Empowering Truth Award. The Empowering Truth Award recognizes the extraordinary accomplishments of an individual or organization whose work has made a significant contribution to social issue storytelling or has strengthened the landscape of the field in ways that foster diversity and empower marginalized perspectives. For nearly 50 years—since the release of her groundbreaking debut Growing Up Female in 1971 —Julia Reichert has consistently championed the unsung, fought racial and gender discrimination, and laid […]
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“It Doesn’t Make Sense to Explain Anything”: Angela Schanelec on I Was at Home, But… and Robert Bresson
The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&A for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to TIFF, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]
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Fantastic Fest 2019: Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen on their Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
Starring the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” (the horrifically burned, blade-adorned fictional sweater-wearing slasher, Freddy Krueger), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was itself a kind of bastard son, birthed by good intentions but several less maniacs. Released on November 1st, 1985, the sequel was rushed into theaters on the goodwill and unexpected success of its Wes Craven-directed predecessor. Reviews were less than stellar, and it would take the return of Craven in a creative role to right the ship with the third entry in 1987. Nightmare 2 was forgotten and ignored, deemed an outlier in the franchise […]
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“In a Way, It is My Most Gentle Film…”: Manfred Kirchheimer on His NYFF-Premiering Free Time
There’s poetry in the misery of a hot New York summer day. Spike Lee found it, in 1989, with Do the Right Thing: the sun-drunk torpor, the beads of sweat gliding down bare skin. Where winter tends to drive us indoors, away from the streets, summer promotes a more collective suffering. Rear Window hits a similar note of mutual, summertime malaise. The heat forces characters to sleep on their fire escapes and keep their windows open, turning the private public. Before air conditioners, where else could you escape the heat but outside, with everyone else? Manfred “Manny” Kirchheimer considered many […]
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“I Want to Make People Aware of Sound, and the Relationship We all Have to It”: Michael Tyburski on His Eerie Urban Drama, The Sound of Silence
At one point in my phone interview with The Sound of Silence director Michael Tyburski, I ask whether a film transforms and changes the filmmaker through the process of its production. His response is one that has an air of lightness even as he describes filmmaking as a grueling mental challenge as well as a physical one. “The film is with you for so long,” he says. “I lost something like 20 pounds during the course of making the movie, so I physically changed. But it’s a bit of a marathon, as I realised, and I was treating it like […]
