Interviews
Interviews
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“So Much of What You Do is Intuitive”: Roger Deakins on Sicario
In an interview with Variety for his new film Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve claimed that the movie’s cinematographer Roger Deakins “could shoot with a shoe and it would look great.” Hyperbole aside, Villeneuve isn’t far off: if you can affix a lens to it, Roger Deakins can coax lyrical yet naturalistic images from it. Armed with an ARRI ALEXA Studio on Sicario – a slight step up from a shoe cam – Deakins pushed the camera to its boundaries to capture both the cruel harshness of the sunlight and the menacing unknown of the shadows for Villeneuve’s politically and morally complex tale of […]
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“It’s Good For You To Experience Disasters”: Oliver Laxe on His Forthcoming Feature Las Mimosas
Currently in post-production, Oliver Laxe’s second feature, Las Mimosas, is an ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut feature, You All Are Captains. Shot in Morocco, where the French-born Spaniard has lived for the best part of a decade, the film has been four years in the making. Produced by Zeitun Films and co-financed by Rouge International (France) and LaProd (Morocco), Laxe’s sophomore feature also received support from several funding schemes at film festivals, including Torino FilmLab and CPH:Forum. With Zeitun Films aiming to unveil the film at another major festival in 2016 (Captains debuted at Cannes in 2010), footage […]
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“There Is No Thinking of Poverty Without Subjectivity”: Isiah Medina on 88:88
From its opening frames, Isiah Medina’s first feature 88:88 announces itself as a torrential carousel of images and sounds, with one seemingly independent from the next even as they teeter along the same line of questioning. Loosely described as a personal meditation on poverty, friends and family in his hometown of Winnipeg (with scant commonalities to Guy Maddin’s characterization), Medina uses a variety of camera technologies to interrogate a specific situation of young adulthood that nonetheless consumes the viewer in its visceral flashes of intimacy. Filmmaker spoke to Medina about democracy in filmmaking, his concept of the cut, and whether or not he considers his work documentary. 88:88 […]
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“Two Girls Coming into your House and Unleashing Havoc”: Eli Roth on Knock Knock
Eli Roth’s Knock Knock is to Fatal Attraction what that film was to Play Misty For Me: an homage that expands upon its source and intersects with the zeitgeist in immensely entertaining, provocative ways. Like both Attraction and Misty, Knock Knock is a cautionary tale and a male fantasy turned nightmare: Keanu Reeves plays a husband and father who, when left alone on Father’s Day, answers the door to find two gorgeous young women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) stranded in the rain and looking for help. He invites them in and eventually succumbs to their erotic overtures, quickly […]
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Of Ghosts and Made-For-TV ’70s Horror Films: Ted Geoghegan on We Are Still Here
Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here is a love letter. Two parents, grieving over their lost son, move to a new house in Massachusetts. The house, of course, is haunted. It’s like Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery – intentionally so. It hearkens back to an older time, and it doesn’t really feel like a modern horror movie. Among the glut, it stands out, and the universally high marks it’s received from critics show that Geoghegan was onto something. After working as a writer and producer for years, this marks his feature debut as a director. It’s certainly a […]
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A Sense of Crisis: Directors Paula Ortiz, Mercedes Moncada, and Hanna Sköld at the San Sebastián Film Festival
“Life doesn’t have punch lines or a plot. It unfurls in ways that are somewhat random,” says Laurie Anderson. We’re sitting in a small room with fluorescent lighting and acoustically challenged walls. Anderson is wrapping up her last morning at the San Sebastián Film Festival with her newest hit, Heart of a Dog. She isn’t happy I showed up for the interview without having seen her film. I wasn’t happy myself, having missed the screening after several bus route missteps when I arrived in town the night before. If I hadn’t missed the film though, I wouldn’t have gotten the […]
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“If That Kid Hits Me in the Face, I’m Going to Hit You in the Face”: Tony McNamara on Ashby
In an early scene in Ashby, an English teacher asks the film’s young protagonist Ed (Nat Wolff) to expound on the themes of Ernest Hemingway. Wolff answers, “Proving you’re a man by trying to get killed,” tossing off the line as if it were an absurd relic of a less enlightened era. He then spends the remainder of the film embracing that antiquated view of American masculinity, whether it be in pursuing classmate Emma Roberts, taking a hit on the football field or befriending his terminally ill, ex-CIA assassin neighbor Ashby (Mickey Rourke). Ashby writer/director Tony McNamara describes the film as […]
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Lolo’s Julie Delpy and Eugenie Grandval at the Venice International Film Festival
“She’s an auteur,” Eugenie Grandval tells me. “She has a lot to do on set between directing other actors and creating as she goes. I’m just there to be supportive.” Grandval is the co-writer of Lolo, a comedy about a single-mom whose love life is sabotaged by her only child. The auteur whom Grandval is referring to is her co-writer and the film’s director and star, Julie Delpy. Together, the writer duo recently traveled from Lolo’s world premiere at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival to their North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Several decades ago, Delpy […]
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“I Didn’t Really Like Directors”: The Fits Filmmakers Anna Rose Holmer and Lisa Kjerulff at the Venice International Film Festival
About 4,500 miles away from my home state, I find myself back in Ohio. What’s cool about a film festival is experiencing stories from different places all over the world on the same screens all day everyday. What’s not cool about a film festival is spending more time experiencing Ohio on a screen than discovering Italy outside on the street. But in the case of two Cincinnati-based stories programmed in the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, I was delighted to be transported home. I use “home” loosely. I’m actually from Cleveland, and it’s not as if the stop-motion iteration of […]
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“If You Read the Script You’re Not Gonna Want to Do the Movie”: Mark L. Lester on Commando
Thirty years ago this month, director Mark L. Lester changed the course of action cinema forever when he solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger’s persona in the gloriously excessive Commando. Schwarzenegger was already a star thanks to the Conans and The Terminator, but Commando is the film that established the identity he would revisit in film after film – and that introduced the “bigger is better” combination of exaggerated action and comedy that producer Joel Silver would apply to his Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Predator series, among many other pictures. Those movies would be heavily influenced by Commando’s vivid palette and precise attention […]
