Interviews
Interviews
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6,500 Kilometers in 29 Shooting Days: Jérôme Reybaud on 4 Days in France
I wrote a little bit about 4 Days in France yesterday; a few hours after publishing, I went to meet writer/director Jérôme Reybaud to follow up on some particular points of interest. Some basic plot points about this recommended quasi-romance/road trip narrative: a great deal of the film follows two men driving cross-country across France (one in pursuit of his just-left partner until their routes converge) to an extensive collection of classical recordings, stopping at locations including the top of the very cold Alps, a used bookstore, a theater, and an encounter with a notably aggrieved lady who chews out one character […]
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Nostalgia for Blockbuster Video Covers: Kyle Mooney on Brigsby Bear
If you haven’t watched Kyle Mooney’s early work, you’re missing out — it’s a healthy crop of innovative character work made with comedy group Good Neighbor. Mooney has also, along with fellow members Beck Bennett and writer Dave McCary, brought some of the best sketches to SNL in years. There’s the Kanye vs. Kyle bit and Mooney’s romance with Leslie Jones; often the best sketches are the ones that are cut for time (Ryan Gosling is a gem). When it was announced that Mooney and McCary’s first feature film, Brigsby Bear, would premiere at Sundance, there was anticipation around how they […]
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“Every So Often a Train Would Come Rumbling By and the Set Would Shake”: DP Doug Emmett on Shooting HBO’s Room 104
An octogenarian couple returns to the hotel room where they spent their first night together — it’s a logline that would typically preface an elegiac rumination on love and mortality. But by the time that set-up arrives in the season finale of HBO’s new anthology series Rooms 104, it seems just as likely to give way to horror or violence…or interpretive dance. That’s the joy of the newest Duplass Brothers creation — each episode begins as a blank slate capable of unexpectedly evolving into any genre or tone. The 12-episode series — which debuted last Friday night — unfolds entirely […]
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Alexandre Rockwell on Restoring and Preserving the Unique Black and White of In the Soup
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Alexandre Rockwell‘s landmark indie In The Soup, which is currently crowdraising funds for a badly needed restoration and re-release. We’re happy to share this interview with Rockwell, conducted by Factory 25’s Matt Grady. Click here to learn more and check out the Kickstarter campaign, and here for a video interview for more from Rockwell. What’s so unique about how you made In the Soup? One of the most defining things about In the Soup is its look. The stellar cinematography of Phil Parmet comes across in a rich, high-contrast look, deeply saturated blacks and brilliant […]
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Laura Poitras Talks Assange, Her Final Version of Risk and Trump’s Tax Returns
Just now released on Showtime, Laura Poitras’s Risk, which found its way to theaters in May via upstart distributor Neon, is in a vastly different form than when it premiered last year in Cannes. The documentary traces a thread running counter to the moral certitude heard from our politicians, mostly on the right, about the role of leaks in degrading democracy. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the film’s primary subject, has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly five years following allegations — and, later, charges — of sexual assault against two Swedish women. (The rape investigation was recently […]
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“VR is Not Another Kind of Filmmaking”: Baobab Studios’ Eric Darnell on Animated VR
If you’d mentioned Eric Darnell’s name a few years ago, most people would have thought of the Madagascar films or the Penguins of Madagascar spin-off, all of which he co-directed while at DreamWorks Animation, where he also directed Antz and contributed to films like The Prince of Egypt and Shrek. But think of him today and you’re just as likely to conjure up images of bumbling aliens, a fluffy and resourceful bunny or a multicolored crow, and all in virtual reality. That’s because Darnell is the co-founder and chief creative officer at Baobab Studios, which in just two years has established itself as one of the United […]
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On the Cusp: Person to Person Director Dustin Guy Defa on Turning a Short into a Feature, Directing Actors and the Question of Agents
Dustin Guy Defa is on the cusp of big changes. The filmmaker’s second feature film, Person To Person, opens tomorrow. In it, Defa delicately interweaves multiple stories taking place over one day in the lives of New Yorkers portrayed by an ensemble of legendary performers (Phillip Baker Hall, Isiah Whitlock Jr.), name actors (Michael Cera), newcomers (Abbi Jacobson, Tavi Gevinson, George Sample III), and so-called “non-actors” (Bene Coopersmith). It’s a bighearted, hilarious and impressive display of Defa’s directorial skills and the kind of film that can jump start a career. The road to getting it made is a bit unusual. […]
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Storytelling, Memory and Alternate Worlds: Michael Almereyda on Marjorie Prime and Escapes
Michael Almereyda has two films this year, the curiously rhyming duo of Marjorie Prime and Escapes. The former, as I wrote from Sundance, is “a heavily modified adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s play, customized to fit the ever-adventurous Almereyda’s tastes and frames of reference. The premise is both simple and tricky: in the future, your deceased loved ones can be brought back as holograms for company. Marjorie (Lois Smith), aging and losing her memory, has her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), eternally in his 40s, for company, a development which makes her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) a little nervous. From this low-key sci-fi […]
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Sharon Van Etten and Katherine Dieckmann on Scoring Strange Weather
In 2015, the year this story begins, Sharon Van Etten had never scored a film. She’d also never heard the name Katherine Dieckmann. Van Etten had just released I Don’t Want to Let You Down, the follow-up EP to her exquisite 2014 album Are We There. Van Etten’s music does things to people, and it did a number on Dieckmann, a former music video director for Aimee Mann, R.E.M., and Wilco. Enchanted by her songs of muted melancholy, Dieckmann became convinced that Van Etten had to score her latest feature, a road movie set in the American South. The two […]
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“We Don’t Want Them to Be Brilliant, We Want Them to Be as They Are”: Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel on Mister Universo
You wouldn’t typically catch me recommending a movie on the basis of its crowd-pleasingness or heart-warmingness, dead or alive. But we’re living in warped times, and it’s a travesty that Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s crowd-pleasing, heart-warming not-quite-documentary feature Mister Universo — which I caught by happenstance at last year’s Festival International du Film de Marrakech — didn’t have the good fortune of securing a US distribution deal after playing festivals around the world last year. The movie stars Tairo Caroli, a 19-year-old lion tamer from a real-life traveling circus in Italy, as himself. Among his few prized possessions is an […]
