I first became aware of cinematographer Darren Genet when I encountered his work on All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a surprisingly lyrical and beautiful horror film that had more in common with the work of Terrence Malick and ’70s-era Peter Bogdanovich than with other teen slasher films. Awestruck by Genet’s visual originality and technical precision, I continued to follow his work as he ventured into television (CSI: Miami) and continued to evolve as a feature cinematographer on films like Jada Pinkett Smith’s criminally underrated directorial debut, The Human Contract. That film exhibits all of Genet’s strengths: a bold and […]
A legend in lesbian cinema, Monika Treut has been making films for 30 years, starting with her 1985 narrative feature Seduction: The Cruel Woman (featuring Udo Kier – not bad for a debut film), and right through to this year’s Of Girls and Horses, a poetic coming-of-age tale that also serves as a celebration of nature’s transformational power. Along the way Treut has also explored the nonfiction realm, turning her lens on everything from gender identity (1999’s Gendernauts) to Taiwanese food (2012’s The Raw and the Cooked). Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with the Hyena Films co-founder (along […]
A holy grail for both cinephiles and rock and roll enthusiasts finally arrives on DVD this week in the form of Shout Factory’s superbly assembled The Decline of Western Civilization boxed set. The first two Decline films are essential artifacts of the late ’70s punk rock movement and the ’80s metal scene in Los Angeles; the third, made in the ’90s, is a sober chronicle of Hollywood’s gutter punks, homeless kids tossed aside by “polite” society. All three movies contain terrific concert footage of seminal punk and metal bands (including Fear, the Circle Jerks, and Faster Pussycat, among many others) […]
Filmmaker‘s Taylor Hess recently attended and reported on the U.S. in Progress series at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. While there, she spoke to a number of female directors, producers and actresses. Below, her conversation with Hannah Gross and Deragh Campbell, who both appear in Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven. Filmmaker: I Used To be Darker was your first film together, and Deragh, your first time acting? Campbell: Right, I’m not trained. My college degree is in writing and my background is publishing and writing. In a lot of ways I look at acting as another way of interacting with material and […]
Filmmaker‘s Taylor Hess recently attended and reported on the U.S. in Progress series at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. While there, she spoke to a number of female directors and producers. Below, her conversation with Applesauce producer Melodie Sisk. Filmmaker: What was your timeline on Applesauce? Sisk: Applesauce moved so fast! We essentially had no real pre-production and had to jump right in. This made our schedule erratic, we’d shoot a few days at a time, jumping around between holidays, and then, just like that, we premiered at Tribeca exactly five months to the date of our first day of shooting. It […]
When I ask cinematographer Tim Orr if – after ten feature films together with director David Gordon Green – their references are most frequently their own movies, Orr replies, “Well, you don’t want to make the same movie over and over again.” No one is going to accuse the duo of that. In a collaboration that dates back to their days at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Orr and Green have made everything from lyrical Malick-esque meditations and medieval stoner comedies to surreal odes to lovelorn locksmiths. The latter describes Manglehorn, an odd mixture of magical […]
Actor Michael Murphy is perhaps best-known for his collaborations with Robert Altman, which practically spanned the director’s entire career. But, for a brief moment, he wasn’t known primarily for his turn as a political organizer in Nashville or other Altman roles, but for playing an adulterer. In two consecutive films — An Unmarried Woman and Manhattan — Murphy was the archetypal heel of the moment. That time has passed; Murphy is now often called upon to playspoliticians, judges and ambassadors, parts which take advantage of his patrician/WASP-esque appearance: he looks like someone to the establishment manor born. Woman‘s place in […]
Using the island of Cyprus as its setting and object of pointed criticism, Iva Radivojevic’s Evaporating Borders views the third largest island in the Mediterranean as both a place of familiarity and disconnect. With immigrants currently making up 25% of Cyprus’ residents (the majority being Greek and the minority Turkish), an intense feud has developed between the “natives” and the refugees who live in fear of their welfare benefits being confiscated by the government. As rallies and protests broke out magnifying the separation between the communities, Radivojevic, with camera in hand, took to documenting the experience in the form of […]
“Free love? That’s the only love I can afford!” Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley is no mere behind-the-scenes reenactment of the circumstances that would add up to Shirley Clarke’s seminal 1967 Portrait of Jason, but rather a full-bore interrogation of what Clarke’s documentary cost its participants during shooting. To those ends, the film’s rendition of gay hustler Jason Holliday (portrayed here by Jack Waters) is remarkable: it sketches out Jason’s dreams and nightmares in brazenly emotional flights of inward fancy, made all the more jarring by Waters’ unflinching, body-pressurized performance. As Clarke, writer Sarah Schulman gives off an uncanny with-it […]
With Burying the Ex (opening theatrically and on VOD June 19), one of the greatest directors of the past forty years returns to the style that made him famous while also striking out in immensely entertaining new directions. Joe Dante’s first film, the Roger Corman-financed Hollywood Boulevard (co-directed with Allan Arkush), established him as a singular satirical voice; like many of the films that would follow (The Howling, Gremlins and Gremlins 2, Matinee, etc.), it was both a celebration of and a sly commentary on American pop culture, with a delirious wit and energy masking an underlying seriousness. Over the […]