Interviews
Interviews
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Curator La Frances Hui and Martial Artist Jeanne Lau on Pioneering Hong Kong Director Lau Kar-leung
Over a sixty-year career, Lau Kar-leung wrote, directed, choreographed, and appeared in over 100 movies, including martial-arts classics like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. The Museum of Modern Art celebrates his work in a 10-movie series, “The Grandmaster: Lau Kar-leung,” running July 5–17. Born in 1937 in Guangdong, Lau entered the movie industry as an extra and stunt man in the 1950s. Trained in martial arts by his father, Lau began choreographing fight scenes, most notably with director Chang Cheh (The One-Armed Swordsman, Golden Swallow). He was the first action choreographer to be promoted to director at the Shaw Brothers […]
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“I Think the World Needs More Truly Queer Films”: Director Drew Lint on his Gay Identity-Swap Thriller, M/M
The unofficial centerpiece of Berlin’s Xposed International Queer Film Festival, Drew Lint’s M/M takes a decidedly unique approach to the identity-swapping thriller. Somewhat reductively categorized as a gender-reversed Single White Female, Lint’s feature debut is a near dialogue-less delve into the darkest recesses of obsession. Matthew (Antoine Lahaie) is a French-Canadian new to Berlin who becomes increasingly fascinated with Matthias (Nicolas Maxim Endlicher). The Berlin-based, Ontario-bred Lint interrogates Matthew’s subsequent identity assumption with hypnotic and occasionally fantastical vignettes, set to the thrums of appropriately dissociative techno. Where films of a similar set-up may stop short of any sort of thesis, […]
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Nine Cameras and 101 Shooting Days: Director Dante Lam and Producer Candy Leung on Operation Red Sea, Stunt Choreography and Working in English
The second-highest grossing Chinese film of all time, Operation Red Sea has earned over a half-billion dollars since its release this past February. Writer/director Dante Lam introduced the film at a New York Asian American Film Festival screening on June 30 and accepted the festival’s Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Operation Red Sea is loosely drawn from the real-life evacuation of Chinese hostages during the 2015 civil war in Yemen. In the movie version, Jiaolong, an elite task force, not only have to free hostages, they must also stop an attempt to sell yellowcake uranium to terrorists […]
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“Agitating the Information”: Director Gus Van Sant on his Long-Take Columbine Drama, Elephant
The following interview was originally published in our Fall, 2003 print edition. When I first interviewed Gus Van Sant, he had just finished editing his feature Gerry and was preparing to launch it at the Sundance Film Festival. A radical left turn from the two studio films, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, that preceded it, Gerry mixed together movie stars (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), the “long-take” style of such filmmakers as Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman and a simple yet metaphorically rich scenario taken from the news headlines. Working without a formal script but with the remarkable director […]
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“… the Way Someone Would Shoot a Film in an Architectural Magazine”: Gus Van Sant on Last Days
The below interview with Gus Van Sant originally appeared in our Summer, 2005 issue. The subject matter of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Last Days, appears on the surface to be the stuff of a sensationalistic movie of the week. A moody, confused, perhaps drug-adled rock star Blake (Michael Pitt) — who bears more than a coincidental resemblance to Kurt Cobain — wanders aimlessly through a dilapidated mansion just before his end comes. Van Sant’s two previous films, which form a loose trilogy with Last Days, were also torn from the headlines: Gerry was inspired by a newspaper article about […]
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James DeMonaco on The First Purge, Test Screenings, Filming Guns in Washington D.C. and the Trump Administration
When I speak to James DeMonaco, The First Purge is only 48 hours from hitting theaters, but the franchise’s creator is otherwise engaged. DeMonaco has two production days left on his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island. It’s a personal movie, a coming-of-age drama starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. The film that exists because DeMonaco wrote and directed 2013’s The Purge, plus its two sequels. His latest is even funded by his boss of the last several years, Jason Blum, the namesake head of horror unit Blumhouse Productions, making it only the second non-genre picture they’ve handled […]
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“Maybe It’s a Filmmaker’s Job to Look for Hope, To Find Examples of When People Do Things Right…”: Writer/Director Debra Granik on Leave No Trace
Following a strong reception at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, Debra Granik’s latest feature, Leave No Trace, has been placed by critics as the third in a trilogy of films (after Down to the Bone [2004] and Winter’s Bone [2010]) about people living “in the margins” of American society. A less thorough and invested filmmaker may have been tempted to make a reactionary and didactic film about those left behind in Trump’s America, but Leave No Trace is pared back both on the level of its dialogue and in its unwillingness to assign blame to any one party. Granik […]
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YouTube Body Horror: Penny Lane on Her Morgellons Disease Doc, The Pain of Others
In the era of fake news and alternative facts, and of people constructing their own custom-made versions of reality, Penny Lane’s The Pain of Others feels very timely, to say the least. Defying any expectations and preconceived notions, Lane’s perfectly titled “body-horror doc” acts as a challenging and thought-provoking sociological study of one unusual YouTube community (which, with Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President also on the fest circuit this year, makes me think “YouTube behavioral psych” might soon become a thing). The Pain of Others weaves together the video diaries of three women suffering from Morgellons disease, a term given […]
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Unresolved Pain and the Spanish “Pact of Forgetting”: Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar Discuss The Silence of Others
Executive produced by the Almodóvars, and nabbing the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary and Peace Film Prize at this year’s Berlinale (not to mention, most recently, the Grand Jury Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest), Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s The Silence of Others was one of the most compelling films I caught at Hot Docs back in April. It was also unnervingly revelatory, as the Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week project — which will be co-presented by IFP tonight at New York’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival — deals with a disturbing piece of buried history I knew nearly […]
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Jim McKay on His Return to Feature Filmmaking, the Soccer-Themed Drama, En el Séptimo Día
The following interview with director Jim McKay was published during last year’s BAMcinemafest and is being rerun today as his feature En el Séptimo Día is in release from Cinema Guild. The film can currently be seen at the IFC Center in New York and the Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. Many other cities are scheduled over the next two months, including, on Friday, the Roxie in San Francisco. Jim McKay, whose early, mid ’90s/early-aughts features (Girls Town, Our Song, Everyday People and Angel) were empathetic and involving New York dramas suffused with a love of neighborhood and feeling for […]
