Interviews
Interviews
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“The Weather Doesn’t Care What Your Budget Is”: Captain Marvel Colorist Doug Delaney on the Marvel Cinematic Universe
When Avengers: Endgame hits theaters in a few weeks, it will conclude a chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that encompasses 22 films over more than a decade. Considering the disparate tones, settings and filmmakers involved in the “Infinity Saga,” the fact that the movies fit so seamlessly together and have been so consistently entertaining is a remarkable achievement. Part of the magic trick of integrating the superhero adventures into a cohesive whole comes from the work of colorists, who have been entrusted with ensuring the Tesseract glows the same shade of blue whether it appears in Thor, Infinity War or the […]
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“This Will Be the Final Version If the Authorities Have No Objections”: Qiu Sheng on Suburban Birds, New Chinese Censorship Laws and Filming with Children
While trying to explain a reality that is shifting in front of him, a surveyor looks into the past in Qiu Sheng’s feature debut Suburban Birds. A moody, seductive drama that stubbornly refuses explication, the story takes place in Qiu’s hometown of Hangzhou. Loosely based on a real-life 2009 building collapse, Suburban Birds is also a coming-of-age story about school friends whose lives are disrupted by urban renewal. Filmmaker spoke with Qiu Sheng during this year’s annual New Directors/New Films series. Suburban Birds screened without incident at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival, but when Qiu was faced with new regulations, […]
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“Sex-Positive and Non-Exploitative, with a Big Piece of Questioning who is getting Representation”: Lisa Vandever on Celebrating CineKink NYC’s Sweet Sixteen
For the past 16 years CineKink NYC co-founder and director Lisa Vandever has been on a mission to not only showcase the best in sex-positive films — from narrative to nonfiction, features to shorts, high camp to deep drama — but also support their brave indie creators (who are very rarely straight white males). To that end, the upcoming edition (April 3-7) will see its first CineKink Artist Spotlight award bestowed on feminist pornographer Jennifer Lyon Bell, whose erotic work Vandever has been continuously championing since 2006. Filmmaker was fortunate that Vandever found time for a brief chat in the […]
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“No One’s Going to Knock at Your Door and Say ‘I Want to Hire You to Be a Filmmaker'”: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell on MS Slavic 7
As codirector Sofia Bohdanowicz has delightedly noted, MS Slavic 7 has caused a minor flutter of interest among the Extremely Online Librarian community, amazed that anyone would make a film titled after a call number at Harvard’s Houghton Library. That collection, from the papers of the Nobel-nominated poet Józef Wittlin, includes two dozen-odd letters sent to him by his fellow poet and fellow Polish exile Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother and namesake. Within the world of MS Slavic 7, though, Bohdanowiczowa is the grandmother of Audrey, the character played by Deragh Campbell. Audrey is a recurring character in what now must […]
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“The Whole Mission of this Film was About Holding Bannon Accountable for His Actions…I Didn’t Ever Want Him to Succeed”: Alison Klayman on The Brink
If there’s one defining trait of Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist to Trump before he was given the boot from both, it’s his ability to disconnect, to casually dismiss inconvenient truths. And director Alison Klayman (Ai Wewei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show) captures this aspect right from the start of her compelling globetrotting doc The Brink. Embedding fly-on-the-wall style with Bannon on his unite-the-far-right/self-promotion tour across Europe and through the mid-term elections of 2018, Klayman opens with a scene in which the Soros-demonizing champion of Charlottesville waxes rhapsodic about one […]
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“Doing a Shot List is One Thing, Bringing It Alive is Something Else”: Kent Jones on Diane, Understanding Costume Design and Tax Incentives
Best known as a critic and programmer, Kent Jones has also made documentaries for years, but Diane is his first narrative feature. Written specifically for Mary Kay Place, Diane begins as a seemingly modest, naturalistic, one-day-at-a-time portrait of a woman grounded in her family life. Volunteering gives her days structure, while trying to take care of her drug addict son undermines that structure; walking that fine line is a challenge. The centerpiece of this hard-earned naturalism is a scene with Diane, friends and family in a kitchen—a long exchange that feels intensely lived in. In its last third, Diane goes in a different, […]
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Back To One, Episode 51: Lorraine Toussaint
She’s perhaps best known for playing one of modern television’s baddest villains, “Vee” on Orange Is The New Black. And now with NBC’s The Village premiering last week, both Fast Color and the new season of Into The Badlands premiering this week, plus Julie Taymor’s The Glorias wrapping this month, all featuring the incredible Lorraine Toussaint, we might as well call this period “The Lorrainaissance.” In this half hour she takes a break from the hubbub and takes us deep into her process, her “almost schizo” embodiment of characters, what she needs on set, and what it means to live […]
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“We Make the Films We Can Make, Not the Ones We Want to Make”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Qumra Masterclass
An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world and master filmmakers who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. The 5thedition took place between March 15thand 20th, 2019. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is known best as a horror filmmaker but the prolific director has effortlessly moved between different genres—his latest, To the Ends of the Earth, a drama expected to play Cannes, is about a young woman shooting a travel show in […]
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“I Wanted Men to Engage with the Subject of Sexual Violence….”: Nancy Schwartzman on Roll Red Roll
Since Nancy Schwartzman’s filmography includes the short docs The Line, which explores sexual boundaries and consent, and xoxosms, a love story revolving around teens and tech, it’s obvious that the rape of a teenage girl by members of Ohio’s celebrated Steubenville High School football team back in 2012 would grab this director-producer-media-strategist’s attention. After all, the assault had been documented through Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and even cell phone recordings by the assailants, and it was subsequently brought to the world’s attention by a female crime blogger. Now, nearly seven years after the crime, Schwartzman takes a deeper look, revisiting […]
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“I Had To Tell a Story About Five Guys Working Behind Computer Screens”: Hans Pool on Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World
Hans Pool’s Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the diehard band of brothers (yes, there are no citizen journo sisters featured) behind the online investigative outfit Bellingcat, founded by a shy Brit determined to unmask some of the media’s most notorious blockbuster stories. Whether that be through geo-location mapping, voice analysis, drone imagery, or even fact-checking legacy organizations like the NY Times (one of several outlets to report a staged car bombing as real), the international collective takes tools once the province of law enforcement and other paid “professionals” to separate fact from fiction in a very 21st century way. Filmmaker spoke with the […]
