Interviews
Interviews
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Goodbye Co-director Ari Palitz
Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago. Pinchas Gutter, who as an eleven-year-old boy lost his entire family at the Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland, fills this role admirably. Locations include the camp grounds, cells, and an incinerator, but despite the breathtaking technical achievement of the footage — in […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with No Man’s Land Director David Byars
Documentary filmmaker David Byars had either the luck or the foresight that every first-time director envies. He had been following the patriot movement — a loose collection of rural conservatives who resent the federal government’s authority over issues like public lands — for years, focusing on emerging leaders of Cliven Bundy and his sons Ammon and Ryan and trying to piece together a story that would make a compelling film. So when the younger Bundys led an armed group of demonstrators to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon last year, Byars was prepared: he had the […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with Rainbow Crow Producer Maureen Fan
One of my favorite virtual reality pieces at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the animated Invasion! from San Francisco-based Baobab Studios. The short film, directed by Baobab co-founder Eric Darnell, was reportedly downloaded over one million times (including in my household, where my kids loved its Google Cardboard version), making it the most-downloaded virtual reality piece yet, and in September a feature film adaptation was announced. Baobab thus had a high bar for their next project, so they launched two: Asteroids!, which premiered at Sundance in January, and now Rainbow Crow, which premiered this year at Tribeca. Following in the kid-friendly tradition of Darnell’s […]
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Tribeca 2017: Erik Nelson on A Gray State
Originating as a concept trailer tapping into an increasingly burgeoning pocket of anti-police-state paranoia, David Crowley’s A Gray State was a film that warned of big government (FEMA = bad) taking over its innocent citizens to enslave and execute them. Like The Purge but with more guillotines and public massacres, Crowley’s footage depicted a low-budget world of state-led slaughter in the streets taking place to control those it sought to protect. A rebellion would be imminent, the story implies, and its tagline, “by consent or conquest,” sounds as much like generic action movie marketing as it does a patriotic call-to-arms. To doubters, the film would […]
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Tribeca 2017: Drew Xanthopoulos on The Sensitives
There’s a certain feeling of disappointment when you knowingly choose to keep your cell phone, doubling as your alarm clock, near your face when settling in for an evening’s sleep. Having been warned of radiofrequency waves’ ability to cause cancer, keeping an electronic device that close to your brain for hours on end is not, we’re told, a wise decision to make. There are so many electric and synthetic materials in today’s everyday devices that to avoid them all would be to effectively remove yourself from modern society. You accept the potentially harmful results in order to live and work […]
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Behind The Graduate‘s “Leg Shot”: Daniel Raim on Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
Two unsung heroes of the American film industry get their due in Daniel Raim’s extraordinary documentary Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story. Most filmgoers – even the most informed ones – have probably never heard of Harold and Lillian Michelson, but the history of movies was forever changed by their contributions to classics like The Ten Commandments, The Graduate, The Apartment, West Side Story, and DePalma’s Scarface. Harold was a storyboard artist and Lillian ran a massive Hollywood research library; separately or together, they were essential resources for directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Coppola, Danny DeVito, and Stanley Kubrick. They […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Animals Director Kate Brooks
The Tribeca Film Festival has a history of showing tremendous new environmental documentaries, and this year the stand-out film in this area is Kate Brooks’ The Last Animals, a gut-wrenching investigation into the illicit ivory and rhino horn trade around the globe. When seen in conjunction with the short virtual reality piece The Protectors, which also features the rangers at Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this feature-length doc shines a new light on an issue that is not as far from home as many North American viewers may suspect. At its world premiere screening last week the […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with Blame Director Quinn Shephard
Most of the conversation surrounding Blame, a new film by writer-director-producer-editor-star Quinn Shephard, focuses on her age. At 22, she seems exceptionally young to be undertaking so many roles on a debut feature, but the results attest to her talent and drive. It should be said upfront that Blame is a poignant and incisive examination of modern American adolescence, as filtered through the lens of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the Salem witch trials of 1692, which form the inspiration for this modern-day narrative. The film delves deepest into high school mean-girl culture — with excellent performances by Sarah Mezzanotte and Nadia Alexander, who […]
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Coffee, Sake and Ambien: Writer/Director Richard Shepard on His Tribeca ’17 Short Film, Tokyo Project
An unexpected pleasure at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Tokyo Project is a romantic drama with a psychological twist starring Elisabeth Moss and Ebon Moss-Bacharach and directed by Richard Shepard, whose career traverses dark comedies like The Matador and Dom Hemingway as well as some of the most memorable episodes of TV’s Girls. But what’s unexpected about this story of two American wanderers who hook up in Tokyo while both seemingly escaping their normal lives is, simply, its existence. The half-hour work is beautifully acted and shot (by Giles Nuttgens), coursing with a kind of romantic cinephilia, and, unlike other […]
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“Can You Make All Your Money Back Just Showing on TV Every Mother’s Day?”: John Waters on Serial Mom
The last couple of months have been good ones for John Waters fans. Last month Criterion put out a gorgeous restoration of the director’s first truly great film, Multiple Maniacs, and on May 9 Shout Factory is set to release Serial Mom, a movie Waters made 24 years after Multiple Maniacs with the full resources of Hollywood at his disposal. A hilariously provocative riff on the true crime genre, Serial Mom follows suburban wife and mom Beverly (Kathleen Turner) as she’s driven insane by everything from loud gum chewing to women wearing white after Labor Day; a pristine overseer of […]
