Interviews
Interviews
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“It’s Black or White to Me, a Frame that I Like or Don’t Like”: Drew Xanthopoulos on Lensing Discreet
With three new films on the horizon, I sat down with cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos in the week leading up to the Berlinale World Premiere of Discreet. As part of the producing team of Discreet, I know the film intimately, and knowing also that Xanthopoulos had lensed three wildly different, challenging films in the last year alone, I wanted to learn more about how he creatively approaches his craft and new projects. (In addition to Discreet, Travis Matthews’s stark, carefully composed and mysterious thriller, he has shot Kyle Henry’s upcoming drama Rogers Park, about couples struggling to keep their love alive. […]
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“You Gotta Know the Chord Changes Before You Can do the Improvisation”: Ron Shelton on the 25th Anniversary of White Men Can’t Jump“
Growing up in the basketball-crazy early ’90s, Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump was iconic long before I took the time to actually sit down and watch it: the title (that font stretching!), the baggy tanks and starched casquettes, the deadpan visages of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes all but daring me to rent the movie every time I saw the VHS. Starring the duo as pickup basketball players who combine forces in an uneasy con-alliance, Shelton’s followup to Bull Durham is a stone cold classic: a big-hearted buddy comedy of dazzling cinematographic musculature, the camera bobbing and weaving cross-court […]
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Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on Their Noir-ish Stasi Doc, Karl Marx City
Now playing in New York at Film Forum, Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s follow-up to 2013’s The Flag. An entirely different meditation on national identity, in Karl Marx City Epperlein — who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall — travels back to her East German homeland, and the film follows her as she attempts to discover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence that he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to the Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in […]
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“It Was a Long Uphill Battle”: Richard Kelly on Donnie Darko
A midnight movie for those not old enough to stay up past midnight, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko was, for a great number of millennial teens and college students, the ultimate cult classic. Along with Larry Clark’s Kids and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, I remember Kelly’s film being shared on home video like the Holy Grail, a movie viewed over and over again in sheer shock, fascination, and debate. A director’s cut followed three years later and only further mystified the film’s elaborate puzzle; subsequent ephemera — an explanatory book and an unwarranted sequel — cashed in on the growing fanbase. In 1988, a troubled suburban teenager (played by then-newcomer Jake Gyllenhaal) […]
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“Don’t Ever Ask Me For A Shot List”: Walter Hill on The Assignment
America’s greatest living action filmmaker returns in top form in The Assignment, the deliriously entertaining new film from director Walter Hill. The premise, from a screenplay co-written by Hill and Denis Hamill, is pure lurid pulp: male assassin Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) runs afoul of a brilliant but deranged surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who has him abducted and knocked unconscious. When Frank comes to, he discovers that he’s been surgically altered and now has the body of a woman – a revelation that only briefly slows down his obsessive quest for revenge. It’s a provocative conceit that might be offensive in […]
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“It Just Wasn’t Easy to Set Up a Movie About a Murdered Atheist”: Tommy O’Haver on The Most Hated Woman in America
The media dubbed her “the most hated woman in America,” and famously eccentric atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair wore that claim like a badge of honor. As played by Academy Award-winner Melissa Leo, O’Hair was an outspoken but noble mother who stood for her family’s First Ammendment rights in providing a voice to the voiceless. Protesting for basic civil rights with local African-American men and women and fighting back against the practice of prayer in public school, O’Hair fought very loudly against religious and anti-constitutional rhetoric beginning over fifty years ago. Her impact remains: the non-profit organization known as American Atheists, founded by O’Hair, is […]
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Power to the Priya: Ram Devineni on his Augmented Reality Comic Book Series
I first met Ram Devineni, creator of India’s first augmented reality comic book, Priya’s Shakti, at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival in February, where he was presenting the graphic novel’s follow-up, Priya’s Mirror. (This work ended up taking the FilmGate Special Jury Award). With the series Devineni and his co-creators have revolutionized the comic book form, and not just technologically but also culturally. A survivor of gang rape in the first installment, Priya joins forces with acid attack survivors in the second, rendering the titular super-heroine tougher than your average Western badass chick. Devineni is participating in the Art, Technology […]
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Creative Fraternity: Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio on their SXSW Doc, May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers
Two decades of writing, producing, and finally directing some of the most commercially and critically successful films in the world have given Judd Apatow enough cachet to make nearly anything. After his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), took in more than $175 million in domestic gross revenue, his Apatow Productions produced an ongoing string of gargantuan hits, including Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), Bridesmaids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015). But it is only within the last three years that Apatow has moved into a seemingly unlikely genre: documentary film. Last year saw his first nonfiction work as co-director with Michael […]
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SXSW 2017: Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff on The Strange Ones
Expanded from their 2011 short, Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff’s The Strange Ones starts with a house fire. A young boy (James Freedson-Jackson) stands paralyzed in front of it, and next we see him on the road with someone (claiming to be?) his older brother (Alex Pettyfer). Over the course of a long, strange road trip, we slowly put together some (but definitely not all) the pieces of a story of sexual assault and two people on the run from the law. Motels, diners and farms are among the upstate New York locations. The impressively assured, enticingly semi-enigmatic film had its premiere Saturday morning […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
