Interviews
Interviews
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Poisonous Seaweed, Meddling Weinsteins and the Stench of Broccoli: Johannes Roberts on 47 Meters Down
If you happened to find yourself browsing through Walmart’s aisles in August of 2016, you may have come across a DVD titled In the Deep. Unless you particularly fancy Mandy Moore or Matthew Modine, there’s no reason you would’ve paid the movie’s shark-laden cover any particular attention – not with the glut of sharknados and sharktopuses gliding through the B-movie waters. Yet one year later that very same film – rechristened with its original title 47 Meters Down – debuted in American theaters on its way to a $40-plus million box office run. How did a movie seemingly resigned to the abyss […]
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Leaving the Hasidic Faith: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on One of Us
Described at one point in the film as a community based on survivors of trauma, the Hasidic population of Brooklyn, New York is known for being a tight-knit religious group as private as it is self-dependent. Keeping to the strict customs inherited from their ancestors, the men and women separate themselves from the secular community by adhering to strict dress codes, luddite beliefs and a need to keep their families intact. Equally stringent and oppressive, the Hasidic faith — in the case of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s new investigative documentary, One of Us, Hasidic New Yorkers — are particularly firm […]
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Four Years of Access to Whale Hunts: Director Mike Day on The Islands and the Whales
The Islands and the Whales, which recently had its North American theatrical premiere at IFC Center and broadcast premiere on POV, is one of the most innovative documentaries on marine conservation I’ve seen in years. Director Mike Day is carving out a niche for himself by addressing the interstices where traditional cultures butt against modern conservationist ideals, resulting in nuanced interactions that defy expectations. The Islands and the Whales, for instance, shows the people of the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic — Viking descendants who have lived off of the sea for generations — and how they are struggling […]
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Inequality and Systemic Racism in St. Louis: Landon Von Soest and Jeremy Levine on For Akheem
The St. Louis-set For Ahkeem’s central character, Daje Shelton, is on a path to avoid a life of poverty and disappointment. Having been suspended from her local high school for a number of petty offenses, Daje’s opportunities are narrowing by the season. Enlisting in a school for troubled youth as a last resort, her future is up in the air. While the documentary is centered around Daja, African-American teenage men are always present. Daja speaks of her many male friends who have been lost to gun violence, and her boyfriend Antonio (and their eventual son, the title character Ahkeem) will have […]
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Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]
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Director Lana Wilson Talks Gaining Trust, Valuing Life and Her Wise, Empathetic Suicide Prevention Doc, The Departure
One of the major discoveries of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Lana Wilson’s The Departure is a beautiful, wise and deeply empathetic immersion into one fascinating character’s unique approach to suicide prevention. Ittetsu Nemoto is a former punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who, in quietly wrenching group sessions, counsels the suicidal while facing down his own demons. Working in a small, remote temple in Japan, he constructs spare, philosophical rituals for his patients and then, separately, bonds with them in more personal, emotionally intimate ways. Following Nemoto both within his practice and outside of it, The Departure initially grabs hold […]
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“As Humans, We Will Never Settle”: Five Questions for Human Flow Director Ai Weiwei
World-renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei makes his feature-length filmmaking debut with Human Flow, an expansive documentary that shines a light on the global refugee crisis. Ai circles the globe to showcase the personal stories behind the sweeping headlines of fallout from war, famine and climate change in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Serbia, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand and Turkey. Today 65 million people have been forcibly displaced, more people than in the time period following World War II. Ai manages to show both the massive scale of the […]
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“A Coming of Age Story–with Jump Scares”: Jason Ballantine on Editing It
In horror movies, kids are often exempt from the carnage. It’s a trope of the genre—the cute moppet that any experienced horror viewer knows is in absolutely no peril within the confines of the film. Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of It opens with a grade-schooler in a yellow rain slicker having his arm torn off by a sewer dwelling clown—a creature who then drags the child into the underground bowels of Derry, Maine. The film’s brutal ground rules are immediately established – anyone is fair game and no appendage is safe. “I am very conscious watching any film where the main cast […]
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Five Questions for First Reformed Director Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]
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“Making a Hammer Film As If It Was Directed by Scorsese”: John Landis on Innocent Blood and Operating Muppets with Tim Burton
One of the most underrated films by one of America’s most underrated filmmakers just arrived on Blu-ray in the form of Warner Archive’s 25th-anniversary release of John Landis’ Innocent Blood. To call Landis underrated might seem perverse given that he’s directed some of the most successful and enduring movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s – National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Coming to America – but I still think his body of work has never quite gotten its critical due in this country, partly because his movies are so damn […]
