Interviews
Interviews
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All Day and a Night: Josh and Benny Safdie on Good Time
I’m in the Safdie brothers’ office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, looking at a giant Japanese King of New York poster, and we’re talking about fired FBI director James Comey, whose awkward dinner with Donald Trump has just hit the news. “The guy is 6 foot, 8 inches,” Benny says. Or maybe it’s Josh. My tape recorder isn’t turned on yet, and the two talk rapid-fire, trading sentence fragments and out-exclaiming each other. “And he refused to play basketball with Obama! The one president who played basketball, Comey would be the tallest guy on the court, and he didn’t want […]
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Time Waits For No One: David Lowery on A Ghost Story
Most readers of this magazine will recognize David Lowery as the director of the breakout picture Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a Malickian, modern-day Western containing a beautifully spare, elliptical romance between Casey Affleck’s Bob and Rooney Mara’s Ruth. More mainstream moviegoers will recall Lowery from last summer’s multiplex, where his fantasy drama Pete’s Dragon, a remake in name only, pulsed with both wide-eyed innocence and emotional heart — two qualities often lacking in blockbuster entertainment. But more perspicacious viewers will go back further and remember two earlier works. The first is Lowery’s micro-budget 2009 debut feature St. Nick, a tale […]
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Explosive Memories: Five Questions for Dawson City: Frozen Time Director Bill Morrison
The poetics of decomposition are the haunting, thrilling and, in the case of his latest feature, Dawson City: Frozen Time, historically revelatory stuff of the cinema of Bill Morrison. In varying degrees and across films like The Miner’s Hymn, The Great Flood and Decasia — the latter dubbed “the best film ever made” by Errol Morris — Morrison has made the excavation of lost cinematic images both an informative and sensory-impactful experience. In the new Dawson City: Frozen Time, Morrison both dramatizes and draws upon the discovery of over 500 silent era films found iced and buried in a swimming […]
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DP Henry Braham on Shooting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 with the First Weapon 8K Vista Vision Full Frame Camera
Compared to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its squeaky clean Captain America and solemn United Nations accords, the Guardians of the Galaxy — a rogues’ gallery of smugglers, thieves and assassins — are outliers. Yes, by the end of Guardians Vol. 2 the titular team are two-time galaxy savers. But for Rocket, the genetically enhanced trash panda voiced by Bradley Cooper, that just means they can jack up their rates. Guardians’ departure from the status quo of Marvel’s ever-bloating Avengers coalition – which they will no doubt eventually be subsumed by – extends to behind the camera as […]
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“People Can Choose to Create the Collective, Social Experience”: Billy Woodberry on Bless Their Little Hearts
Billy Woodberry was a graduate student in UCLA’s film program when he started work on Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), a gauzy black-and-white portrait of a married couple in Watts as their responsibilities to one another are tested by the burdens of underemployment. Day-to-day gigging against a background of vanishing local industry, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) embarks on an affair, while his exhausted wife Andais (Kaycee Hardman) works double-time, commuting to her own job while also looking after their home and children. Chafing against the confines of roles that no longer seem to fit, their affections are suffocated by limits […]
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Violet: How They Achieved This Stunning 4:3 Film’s Most Stunning Shots
Floating in an ocean of equals parts uncertainty and obscurity after winning the Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus International Jury in 2014, Bas Devos’s feature debut Violet didn’t reach American shores, beyond a handful of festivals, until new distributor Altered Innocence took a chance and set a theatrical date and announced a subsequent physical release. Saved from being forgotten, the film is one of the most striking and pure cinematic works to arrive stateside this year, and exemplifies the importance of betting on unorthodox voices that aim to challenge the medium’s formal conventions. Shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio […]
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Jon Nguyen on David Lynch: The Art Life, How Twin Peaks Delayed Production and the Downside of Kickstarter
While David Lynch fans eagerly await the premiere of the new Twin Peaks on Sunday, a documentary that peers deep into the iconic director’s life is currently making its way around theaters across the U.S. After premiering last year in Venice to rave reviews, we caught David Lynch: The Art Life at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland toward the end of its festival circuit. The film will play local dates this summer before being sent out to the film’s thousand-plus Kickstarter backers who have been waiting on the documentary since its 2012 campaign. The film’s young director, Jon Nguyen, […]
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“There Was Baby Powder in the VHS Tapes Themselves”: Erin Lee Carr on Mommy Dead and Dearest
Sometimes the only way to escape an overprotective household is to resort to extreme measures. Erin Lee Carr’s latest documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, about a young girl raised from birth by her mother to believe she was physically incapable of surviving on her own, is impressive in the way it caresses its true crime story into being a film about redemption through murder as the only means out. A victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Gypsy Rose Blanchard spent much of her adolescent life in hospitals as a walking test tube, a medical experiment shopped around by a possessive mother desperate […]
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“The Film Gives Viewers Plenty to be Angry About”: Steve James on Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Steve James’ documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, is at once a heartfelt portrait of a close-knit family facing overwhelming adversity and an infuriating indictment of our U.S. justice system gone seriously awry. The film follows the Chinese immigrant Sung family, founding owners and operators of the Abacus Federal Savings Bank down in NYC’s Chinatown, who in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis found themselves locked in a half-decade battle with spotlight-loving Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. Though the bank had one of the lowest default rates in the country (with only nine out of 3,000 loans defaulting!), the […]
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Turning 13 Installation Screens of Cate Blanchett Into One Single-Screen Feature: Julian Rosefeldt on Manifesto
A conservative mother leads her family in a lunchtime prayer on pop art. A tattooed punk screams about stridentism at a roomful of drugged-out partiers. A teacher stifles her students’ creativity with the harsh dictates of the Dogme 95 movement. Cate Blanchett, the preternatural shape-shifter who can slink into Bob Dylan or Katherine Hepburn with equal ease, embodies these and nine other souls in Manifesto, the art installation turned feature film from Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto premiered in 2015 as a 13-screen sensory wonder at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The installation asks viewers to move from screen to […]
