Interviews
Interviews
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Wuhan, Different Everyday: Shengze Zhu on Berlinale 2021 Premiere A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Despite relocating to Chicago in 2015, Shengze Zhu has focused on her hometown of Wuhan throughout her career. Her first feature, Out of Focus (2014), is a creative portrait of the school-life of children from low-income families and the troubles they face. Her second, Another Year (2016), uses long takes to document the mealtimes of migrant worker families. Both are set in Wuhan but were made after she first left China in 2010 to study filmmaking in Columbia, Missouri. For Present.Perfect (2019), she widened her lens, creating a montage of live-streamers living across China entirely from desktop recordings of their broadcasts. […]
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Phase Zero: Felipe Cazals on His 1979 Gabriel García Márquez Collaboration, El año de la peste (Year of the Plague)
It has been a good day for everyone, even for God. No sign of rain. No evidence of disease or blood. — Henry Miller, quoted at the beginning of El año de la peste Around this time a year ago, many of us were suddenly sent home and forced to become film programmers. I asked people: after Contagion or, from a far distance, Outbreak, what was the ultimate Coronavirus movie? The Last Days of Planet Earth? Prophecies of Nostradamus? 28 Weeks Later? The Host? Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole? The South Korean apocalypse thriller The Flu? Logan’s Run? The Seed of Man? Soylent Green? 12 Monkeys? Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus? […]
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“The Flash Frames are Like Magic — You Can Almost Smell Them in the Film”: DP Andrew Dunn on Shooting Lee Daniels’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Musician Billie Holiday’s troubled life has been the inspiration for many films, including the biopic Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, director Lee Daniels takes a different tact, tying the singer’s troubles to a Federal vendetta against her song “Strange Fruit.” Anchored by Andra Day’s remarkable performance as Holiday, the movie offers a vivid account of Black culture from WWII to the singer’s death in 1959. Holiday’s brutal childhood, the pervasive discrimination she experienced, and a milieu that romanticized drugs all contributed to an addiction that landed her in prison. This is […]
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“… Once a Person’s Voice is Captured, They are Expendable”: Director George C. Wolfe on the Musical Histories of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Black music. White privilege. Chicago. 1927. What could possibly go wrong? Indeed, nearly everything, and it’s chronicled with artful intensity in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the second in a cycle of ten plays that compassionately detail the 20th-century experiences of African Americans. Ma Rainey’s was brought to the screen this season in a stellar production directed by George Wolfe that stars Viola Davis in the title role and, in his final role, Chadwick Boseman as the upstart young trumpeter and rake in her band. Wolfe, a Tony Award-winning theater director and writer, is gradually building a formidable resume […]
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“I Had to Use Nine Credit Cards”: Shatara Michelle Ford on Test Pattern
Shatara Michelle Ford’s debut feature Test Pattern addresses sensitive material with clinically painstaking detail. The narrative begins in 2017 at an Austin bar as Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) meets Evan (Will Brill), a thirtysomething white guy whose liquid courage prompts him to ask for Renesha’s phone number. Somewhat surprisingly, the two hit it off and grow to become a loving couple.One evening, Renesha begrudgingly (she has work in the morning) meets up with a friend for drinks at a local bar, where they meet two flirtatious men who proceed to drug them. Nearing unconsciousness, Renesha is taken to an unfamiliar location […]
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“How Do You Connect with Someone with a Camera? It’s a Hard Thing to Talk About”: DP Joshua James Richards on Shooting Nomadland
A compelling portrait of one woman’s survival in the new economy, Nomadland won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Adapted from a book by Jessica Bruder, it was written, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao. This is the third collaboration between Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards, following Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017). Richards won the Best Debut Cinematography at the EnergaCamerimage Festival for Songs My Brother Taught Me. This year Camerimage awarded its Golden Frog to Richards for Nomadland. Frances McDormand, […]
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“Am I Going to Have to Reshoot Half of This Movie?” Howard Deutch on Some Kind of Wonderful
Writer-director John Hughes had just begun to make a name for himself with three films he made for Universal (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science) when Ned Tanen lured him over to Paramount with an overall deal designed to turn the filmmaker into a mogul. In less than three years, Hughes wrote, produced, and/or directed five movies for the studio (Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes Trains and Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby), all of which have now been reissued on Paramount’s “John Hughes 5-Movie Collection” Blu-ray with a generous supply of extra […]
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“We Weren’t Trying to Go for an Exact Imitation”: Dialect Coach Audrey LeCrone on Judas and the Black Messiah
Deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party Fred Hampton was a stirring orator, firing hearts and minds out of slumber and into action against US capitalism. So clear and infectious was Hampton’s guidance against the country’s racist and classist economic system that the FBI and Chicago police department assassinated the 21-year-old as he slept. In documentaries like The Murder of Fred Hampton, which don’t circulate enough, Hampton is seen delivering his famous speeches at rallies, casually moving fellow Panthers with his warmth in a mock trial at the headquarters, mingling at the Free Breakfast for School Children Program and […]
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The Feeling of a “Doomed, Endless Scroll on Your Phone”: Marnie Ellen Hertzler on Crestone
Deep in the desert of Crestone, Colorado live a group of Soundcloud rappers who live carefree off the land, growing marijuana, recording music, and posting goofy videos to Instagram? Crestone, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s debut feature, journeys deep into the isolated, sandy abyss, placing her camera amongst an eccentric group of lost boys who have no use for the outside world, even as it steadily burns around them. If influential TikTokers can erect a California-based Hype House to stock up on “content creators,” Crestone is as appropriate a place as any to discover where these wild things are. Hertzler, a 25 […]
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“This Writing Really Calls To Me. It’s Huge in My Life. It Also Just Repels Me.”: Bill Irwin On His Irish Rep Virtual Theater Piece, On Beckett / In Screen
Bill Irwin premiered On Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2018. In the piece he explored Samuel Beckett’s writing by performing selections and offering commentary about the impact the Irish author has had on his life. When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theaters, the Irish Rep turned to the internet to stream productions online. Recently the Irish Rep repeated its 2020 season in the Theatre @ Home Winter Festival, which is now streaming and extended through March 7, 2021. For the festival, Irwin and his collaborators, including co-director M. Florian Staab and cameraman Brian Petchers, rethought the piece, which is […]
