Interviews
Interviews
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“Nothing is More Gorgeous than When Things Get Real in a Movie”: Editor Barry Alexander Brown on Three Decades Cutting for Spike Lee
As Barry Alexander Brown toiled on the editing of School Daze, he was convinced that, at any moment, he’d be found out. That someone would inform director Spike Lee he was no longer working in the indie trenches of She’s Gotta Have It. That he was now working under the auspices of Columbia Pictures and could no longer simply hire his buddies to cut his movies. Recalls Brown, “I was sure somebody was going to come into the editing room and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” That never happened and, three decades later, Barry Alexander Brown is still cutting movies […]
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“Do We Need Another Movie about Two White Kids in Brooklyn?” DP Ashley Connor on Madeline’s Madeline, Shooting Commercials and Diversity
I screened the amorphous Madeline’s Madeline twice in preparation for my interview with DP Ashley Connor; on the second go-around, I realized I’d be as nonplussed on a third or forth. I didn’t write any questions because I couldn’t. But perhaps an improvised approach was truer to the spirit of Madeline’s Madeline, which refuses to be pinned down. One of New York’s most prolific working DPs, Connor’s fervent demand for a higher standard of nuance, diversity, and inclusivity in the film industry naturally formed the backbone and throughline of our oscillating conversation which features, amongst other things, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, Grand […]
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“It’s As If I Made A Suit Starting from the Buttons Instead of the Fabric”: Four Questions for Everybody Knows Writer/Director Asghar Farhadi
As in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (2009), a woman’s disappearance in Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben—this is Farhadi’s first film in Spanish) is the inciting incident. This time it is Irene, the daughter of Laura (Penelope Cruz), swept from her bed on the night of her aunt’s wedding—either by her own anarchic free spirit, or a kidnapper, stranger, or kin. Irene’s absence turns up dormant family secrets and suspicions that, perhaps, they all already knew. Bare and exposed, the festered family wounds must be dealt with until new ones emerge to be cast aside. Everybody Knows is another social realist thriller in […]
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“I Love Silence, and I Like to Be Bored”: Romina Paula on Her Rotterdam-Premiering Directorial Debut, Again Once Again
“My life is not what one would term heroic.” The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]
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“You Run the Risk of Becoming a Brand”: Co-Writer/Co-Producer/DP/Editor James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Co-Producer Paul Dallas on Berlinale 2019 “Fake Indie” The Plagiarists
Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]
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“…If They Don’t Bleed in Front of Camera, Then Usually They’re Sort Of Always Right”: Gus Van Sant On Cinematography, His Actors, and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot
Gus Van Sant won’t settle and his insatiable itch to reinvent himself hasn’t ebbed. Years working in, out, and around the studio system have offered him ample opportunity to normalize, and, occasionally, he’s adopted the opportunity, if only to do something different (as only different could be his “norm”) once more. Even his deliberate efforts to direct something “standard” tend to tinge off-kilter, with his itch to experiment crackling just under frame. His latest re-invention, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, which has its streaming premiere today on Amazon Prime, wiggles somewhere in between Van Sant’s oeuvre of […]
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“It’s Like Having a Diary Shot by Someone Else of Moments That You Don’t Remember….”: RaMell Ross on his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and airing on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning February 11th (and now on iTunes), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening lives up to its buzz and then some. The award-winning photographer’s debut feature is a low-key, highly cinematic look at the Alabama Black Belt over a period of five years. In that time Ross trained his lens mostly on two twenty-something men, Daniel and Quincy, as they navigated education, blue-collar labor, fatherhood, and just the intricacies of daily life in their culturally rich, economically impoverished Southern town. Filmmaker was fortunate enough […]
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Making an Epic Roadshow Motion Picture on a Microbudget: Daniel Kremer on Overwhelm the Sky
In January 2017, I interviewed San Francisco-based independent filmmaker Daniel Kremer for a local Bay Area publication called CineSource Magazine. In these past two years, he’s been as indefatigable and as busy as ever. On February 10 and 11, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival premieres his latest feature film, Overwhelm the Sky. In late March, he will host a local screening of the roadshow-style edition of the film, a nearly three-hour epic complete with an orchestral overture and intermission. Come springtime, he’ll be opening the film at a prominent European film festival (the name of which must be kept under […]
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“Pushing for Black Actors to Tell Black Stories”: Euzhan Palcy on A Dry White Season
In 1989, Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a major studio movie when she helmed A Dry White Season for MGM. A brutal yet inspiring anti-apartheid drama, A Dry White Season remains a model of political filmmaking, as Palcy (adapting Andre Brink’s novel with co-screenwriter Colin Welland) boldly and forcefully indicts the South African government of the period with clarity, complexity and passion. Donald Sutherland plays Ben Du Toit, a schoolteacher (a surrogate for both Brink and the movie’s white audience members) who keeps his head buried in the sand when it comes to the injustices around […]
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“The Biggest Goal is to Keep the Story Visually Interesting”: DP Tarin Anderson on Corporate Animals
Corporate Animals gives Demi Moore a rare chance to show her comic skills. As Lucy, the awful CEO of a new company, Incredible Edibles, Moore orders her employees on a team-building exercise/retreat via a New Mexico cave. When the workers are trapped, it’s only a matter of time before they becomes the Incredible Edibles. Via email, DP Tarin Anderson addressed the challenges of making a film tracking eight characters in a closed setting. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? […]
