Interviews
Interviews
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“The Film Became About What Growing Up in the Midst of a War Does to a Child… ”: Simon Lereng Wilmont on The Distant Barking of Dogs
I discovered Simon Lereng Wilmont’s The Distant Barking of Dogs, a poetic look at everyday life on the frontline of the War in Donbass — as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy who lives with his grandmother in the warzone — at IDFA last November. After nabbing the First Appearance Award at that prestigious festival, it went on to win the Student Jury Award (from an all-kids jury) at the Docudays UA fest, where I watched as the Danish director appeared onstage only to quickly step aside so that the young protagonist and his entire family, having […]
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“Making a Good Movie Has to Come from the Heart, Not from a Mental Understanding of an Issue”: Matthieu Rytz on Anote’s Ark
Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Matthieu Rytz’s Anote’s Ark follows the international, one-man crusade of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati. That island republic is situated smack in the middle of the Pacific with an indigenous population — exemplified here by Sermary, a young mother of six forced to choose between family and a future in New Zealand — poised to lose their 4,000 year-old way of life as climate change will soon cause the entire country to disappear into the ocean. As the title implies, Tong is less concerned with saving Kiribati itself — he’s painfully aware it’s […]
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“There Is a Reverence On Set When the Camera is Spitting Film Through its Gate.”: DP Darran Tiernan on Westworld, Season Two
When I interviewed cinematographer Paul Cameron about his work on the Westworld pilot, he likened the show’s mechanical hosts to the workers on set. “By the end of the day, half the hosts have been shot up and need to get washed down, the lead pulled out and get re-programmed to be put back into work the next day,” said Cameron with a laugh. “It’s kind of like a film crew.” For Season Two of HBO’s sci-fi/western hybrid, cinematographer Darran Tiernan was among the crew getting the metaphoric lead pulled out every night. Tiernan lensed five of the ten episodes, […]
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This is Where We Blow Up: Writer/Director Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You
“The papers on the boardroom table were stained from corpses.” Those lyrics, from The Coup’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You, offer some idea of the ideological imperative propelling Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, Brazil-meets-Afrofuturism satire of the same name. Struggling to make ends meet in Oakland, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) takes a job with telemarketing firm RegalView, where he finds himself rocketing to the top of the corporate ladder after he uses his “white voice” to drum up sales. His activist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) disapproves, especially after Cassius comes to the attention of deranged tech bro Steve Lift (Armie […]
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Breaking Character: Josephine Decker Talks to Mike Mills about Madeline’s Madeline
Madeline (Helena Howard) has a hospital bracelet on her wrist and a rehearsal to go to. One of the questions fueling Madeline’s Madeline, Josephine Decker’s third feature as a solo director, is how two of the biggest elements of Madeline’s life — some unspecified form of mental instability and her promise as a young actress — interact, or if they even can safely. Howard’s breakout performance as the troubled thespian is part of an unusual triangle. At one point is her mother Regina (the writer, actress and performance artist Miranda July), whose protective custody of her unstable daughter is unreadable: justifiable […]
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Notes on Camp: Desiree Akhavan on The Miseducation of Cameron Post, ADR Rewriting and 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up”
In Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut, Appropriate Behavior, the cowriter/director was front and center as Shirin, a young, bisexual Persian Brooklynite trying to figure out how to live her life, one sexually impulsive bad decision at a time. It was in keeping with the of-the-moment nature of The Slope, Akhavan’s reputation-making 2011 web series about a year in a lesbian couple’s New York relationship, in which she again costarred. Her sophomore feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, tackles new territory: It’s Akhavan’s first time working from an adaptation, first period piece and first time staying offscreen in her work. Miseducation was […]
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Complicated Grief: Ari Aster on Hereditary‘s Family Nightmare
There are films that scare you, and then there are films that do something more. The former are easy to name—maybe you remember a particular jump scare or chilling scene—but the latter are more difficult to describe. These are films that dig deep into your subconscious, films that identify a weakness or fear and prey upon that with their cinematic imagination. You’ll remember scenes from these movies in detail, too, but also how old you were, and where you were, and what was going on in your life when you saw them. You’ll remember how they made you feel, and […]
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My Life… As I Repressed It: Writer/Director Jennifer Fox on Her Explosive New Film about Sexual Abuse, The Tale
In 1992, award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox began round-the-clock filming of an interracial couple living with their two daughters in Flushing, Queens. Over 17 months she accumulated over 1,000 hours of footage documenting their daily lives. In 1997 An American Love Story aired as a nine-hour miniseries on PBS, described by The New York Times as “the most ambitious, exhaustive documentary about private life since An American Family.” The film, as I recall it 20 years later, was an enthralling and intense examination of love, middle-class aspirations, race relations and the failings of America to create a truly integrated society. […]
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“This Kind of Storytelling with Real People is Social Experimentation”: Marcus Lindeen on his CPH:DOX-Winning Conceptual Doc, The Raft
Reposted here from its original publication following last year’s CPH:DOX — where the film won the top prize — is Pamela Cohn’s intensive interview with director Marcus Lindeen about his provocative non-fiction experiment, The Raft. The documentary opens tomorrow for a run at New York’s Metrograph, with Lindeen and various commentators and critics appearing at the various screenings. Swedish artist, writer and director Marcus Lindeen stepped into documentary filmmaking with a very specific method in mind as to how he wanted to frame people’s stories. His particular obsession within the context of nonfiction is in the performative aspects of insinuating […]
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Back to One: Margaret and Nancy Star J. Smith-Cameron on Stage, Screen and Her “Inner Actor”
The brilliant J. Smith-Cameron blew us away in Margaret (written and directed by her husband, Kenneth Lonergan) and in the acclaimed series Rectify. Currently she’s starring in the new play Peace For Mary Frances (with Lois Smith), and the praiseworthy film Nancy (written and directed by Christina Choe and co-staring Andrea Riseborough and Steve Buscemi), which opens Friday June 8th. We talk extensively about her work in the latest two pieces and how her desire for rehearsal is sometimes satisfied in a roundabout way on a TV shoot. She also shares what she does right before she steps on the […]
