Interviews
Interviews
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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 […]
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“This Film is a Celebration and Examination of My Fears and Anxieties about Fully Committing to Somebody”: Director Michael Shanks on NEON Body Horror Film, Together
Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks met his life partner of 17 years at what he calls the Aussie equivalent of spring break. “It probably sounds more glamorous than it actually is,” Shanks laughs. “A week after high school, you just go and get drunk with people in a park or something.” For the couple, it was love at first sight, a union that settled into a committed long-term relationship of nearly two decades. “We’ve been together for so long that when we started to live together, I was confronting the idea of sharing a life,” Shanks remembers. “We have all the […]
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“We Put Ourselves in the Center of the Universe Without Thinking of the Other Creatures and Species Around Us”: Victor Kossakovsky on Architecton
A film starring rocks should not be this thrilling. But in the meditative hands of master documentarian Victor Kossakovsky (2018’s Aquarela, 2020’s Oscar-shortlisted Gunda), Architecton, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, is an epic and hypnotic stone-centered quest to answer the existential question, “How do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?” And the original precursor to today’s concrete — the most-used substance in the world after water — seems to provide a surprisingly sensible answer. With Italian architect Michele De Lucchi as our bedrock, we’re swept into a visually striking, globetrotting excursion that takes us from the bombed-out buildings of […]
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“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington
Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history. Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and […]
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“Fairy Tales Are the Stories We Tell Our Children to Warn Them…”: Writer/Director Kelsey Taylor on Her Suspenseful Debut Feature, To Kill a Wolf
For viewers watching Kelsey Taylor’s terrific debut feature, To Kill a Wolf, it’s easy to miss that its very loose source material is the 17th-century children’s fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Yes, there’s a girl lost in the woods, a woodsman, a grandma (arguably), and a wolf, although the latter is hardly an obvious figure. But the relationships between these characters and their backstories are newly invented, mapping onto contemporary anxieties and fears as much an archetypal narrative structures. Consider To Kill a Wolf something of a remix, the kind where the source material haunts rather than dictates, and […]
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“You Go to L.A. and Then You Start Working with Roger Corman”: DP Paul Elliott on Duster, Ken Russell and Roger Deakins
In Duster, an impossibly cool wheelman (Josh Holloway) and a rookie FBI agent (Rachel Hilson) join forces to take down a crime boss (Keith David) in 1970s Phoenix. If any of the creative forces behind the HBO series ever wondered if they were properly capturing the vibe of 1970s pulp, all they had to do was turn to cinematographer Paul Elliott for confirmation. Though born and raised in London, Elliott arrived in the States at the end of the 1970s and began working at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures as a camera assistant. He crossed paths with cult B-movie figures […]
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“I Finalized the Script Two Weeks Before the Crew Arrived”: Alexandra Simpson on No Sleep Till
Against the darkening skies of an imminent hurricane in Atlantic Beach, Florida, disparate characters become unmoored in No Sleep Till, the feature debut from French-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson. Shot in the coastal enclave where she partially grew up with her father, Simpson’s film casts a “European gaze” (she was largely raised in Paris and attended film school in Geneva) tinted by a palpable nostalgia for a place she never truly knew and that she believes could one day disappear as a result of a natural disaster. There’s a laconic quality to No Sleep Till, but the absence of narrative-driving dialogue […]
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“We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny
As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s existence is then abruptly erased and turned into an “ideology” by right-wing transphobes. And it’s downright demeaning to have one’s identity suddenly hijacked and transformed into a hip “cause” by cisgender liberals. (The dehumanization inevitably leading to dangers like the NYTimes breathless bothsidesism reporting on […]
