Interviews
Interviews
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In Memoriam, An Interview with the Late Documentary Filmmaker Joel DeMott and her partner, Jeff Kreines
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no need to recap her venturesome life and career here. Instead, my way of paying homage to the contributions of DeMott and her partner […]
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From Elitist to Egalitarian: Julian Radlmaier on Phantoms of July
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously funny one-liners (“Germany is sinking like the Titanic and we’re Leonardo DiCaprio”) make the films meme-friendly without compromising their devotion to labor politics and community. […]
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DP Larkin Seiple on Shooting his First Horror Film, Weapons
When cinematographer Larkin Seiple finished the Apple+ feature Wolfs, he was set on taking a well-deserved break. It was going to take a special project to coax him back behind the camera before he’d decompressed, especially for a project outside his home base in L.A. Then the script for Weapons arrived the day after wrap. “I read the script in like an hour and I was like, ‘Shit. It’s really good. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to shoot something like this again,’” said Seiple. Unfolding in overlapping chapters, writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian follows a […]
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“I Have to Lead with the Primal”: Americana Director Tony Tost on Beginning a Film Career at 35
After 15 years working in series television, writing shows including Longmire, Damnation, The Terror, and most recently, Pokerface, Tony Tost moves into the world of feature filmmaking with his road-trip western caper flick Americana, whose cast boasts Zahn McClarnon, Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney. Tost spoke with Filmmaker about his upbringing, his journey from academic and published poet to screenwriter, showrunner, and sage of the narrative craft — his Substack, Practical Screenwriting, is an endlessly rewarding font of experience, narrative nuts and bolts, and honest takes about the industry at large — all while musing over westerns, identity and […]
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“With a Director, I Ask Myself, Is This a Person I Would Like to Travel With?”: Realm of Satan Director Scott Cummings Interviews D.P. Gerard Kerkletz
In 2019, I began production on my debut feature Realm of Satan, only for the world to shut down as COVID-19 brought filming to a halt after just a few days. It wasn’t until 2022 that we were able to resume. Despite this catastrophic challenge, two people never wavered in their commitment and belief in me and the film: producer Caitlin Mae Burke and Austrian cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz. Because of them, we were able to resume filming in 2022, and I’m thrilled that Realm of Satan will have its NYC theatrical run next week at Nitehawk. Realm of Satan is […]
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“What Was I Going to Do, Edit Don DeLillo?”: Ben Rivers on Locarno 2025 Premiere Mare’s Nest
For a film about the end of the world, Mare’s Nest is hardly lugubrious. Then again, you could say the same about Ben Rivers’s entire oeuvre. Few directors who’ve kicked off their careers after the proverbial “end of history” have so assiduously used their cameras to imagine what that might look like; fewer still have pictured the Armageddon as existing somewhere between dystopia and utopia. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’s films are post- or pre-apocalyptic, if the solitary figures they often center on—like the old hermit riffing on Darwin’s theories from his dilapidated forest hovel in The […]
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How to Shoot Horses: Kate Beecroft on East of Wall
Kate Beecroft found East of Wall’s main character—now one of her closest friends—entirely by chance. She’s retold their origin story in so many interviews that it’s worth quoting her first iteration from the press kit: “Taking a wrong turn on a road in South Dakota led me to the deepest adventure of my life. I pulled up to a rundown ranch and found horse trainer Tabatha Zimiga and a tribe of intimidatingly bold teenage girls thronging out of their trailer, heads half-shaved like warriors, eyeing me up and down. Tabatha welcomed me into her world with one sentence: ‘Want to […]
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“The Greatest Gift We Have is Community, Which is Such an Integral Part of the Human Experience”: Ebs Burnough on Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation
Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired […]
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In Conversation with Julia Loktev About the Nuts and Bolts of Making Part 1 (5 1/2 hours) of her Monumental Vérité Documentary, My Undesirable Friends — Frederick Wiseman Weighs In, Too
Watching the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow last September in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, I knew I was experiencing a milestone in vérité documentary filmmaking. Not because My Undesirable Friends was filmed using an iPhone per se. Filming with iPhones is a commonplace now, from this summer’s Danny Boyle hit, 28 Years Later, to Aardman’s latest Wallace & Gromit animation. Last April’s NAB show delivered booths full of iPhone cages, gimbals, adapters, and power banks. Apple’s popular “Shot on iPhone” campaign has been running since 2015. […]
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“The Whole Movie is Doing an Impression of the Genre”: Akiva Schaffer on The Naked Gun
In the early 1980s, Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker pioneered a niche of slapstick- and wordplay-heavy spoof-comedies with films like Airplane! and Top Secret!, which displayed straight-faced silliness as a creative modus operandi. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (or ZAZ) also produced the short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad!, which parodied police procedurals and starred Leslie Nielsen as the inept, overconfident Detective Frank Drebin. After Police Squad!’s cancellation, ZAZ took Nielsen’s Drebin character and molded him for the big screen with The Naked Gun film franchise, where the trio’s patented mile-a-minute visual gags could flourish on a wider […]
