Interviews
Interviews
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“Maybe The Mechanic Would Be Good for This”: DP Tim Orr on Manglehorn
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 […]
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“I Don’t Ever Want to Cheat on a Woman Again”: Actor Michael Murphy on An Unmarried Woman, Altman and The American Experience
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 […]
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“Acceptance of The Other”: Iva Radivojevic on Evaporating Borders
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 […]
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“The Only Film in the Canon Which had a Black, Gay Man as its Lead”: Director Stephen Winter on Jason and Shirley
“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 […]
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“You Can’t Turn Around Without Bumping into a Zombie Movie”: Joe Dante on Burying the Ex
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 […]
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Being Gentrified, Insomnia and Documentary Time: David Shapiro on His LAFF-Premiering, Missing People
In 2011 a friend said to me, “We are going to work on the movie later.” I smiled and nodded in response, knowing she would eke out more information at her own pace given her extreme privacy and love of intrigue. Little did I know that this friend, Martina Batan, was to be the subject of a feature film by David Shapiro, whose critically acclaimed directorial debut Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale was released nearly 15 years ago. Missing People parallels the life of Batan, a NYC gallery director, with that of an outsider artist […]
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“I’m Very Aware That in the Movies I Love There is No One Who Looks Like Me”: Lauren Domino on Producing in New Orleans
When Miles Davis moved to the Upper West Side in 1958, backyard jams with visiting musicians transformed the small block. His residency lasted about 25 years, so he was long gone by the time I moved in to the building next door. But I was there for the block party last year when the street was renamed in his honor. In spite of the loudspeaker recordings, I got to hear the street on jazz. And immersed in the throngs of his friends and relatives, I felt transported. The next day, walking past a new 24hr CVS on the nearby corner, […]
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Cannes 2015: Five Questions for Mediterranea Director Jonas Carpignano
Few films at Cannes were as reonant as Mediterranea, the first feature from director Jonas Carpignano. The film follows Ayiva (Koudous Seihon) and Abas (Alassane Sy), two men from Burkina Faso who board a migrant boat toward Italy via Tunisia and Libya. Their boat capsizes, and they are among the lucky that make it ashore. When they finally arrive to Rosarno in Southern Italy, instead of finding a land of promised opportunities, they discover only a hostile society and blatant labor exploitation. Mediterranea is expanded from Carpignano’s short film A Chjana, based on the 2010 Rosarno race riots that shook Italy. Another character who […]
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Not “Making Bad Movies with State Money”: Roy Andersson on A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
I used to dismiss the films of Roy Andersson for their coldness and repetition; a mistake. While the Swedish filmmaker’s camera hangs at an ever-stiffer remove, each scene he shoots is suffused with minute power dynamics, rendering the players — aimlessly shuffling to and fro, outfitted in sepulchral pancake makeup — both tragically pathetic and pathetically hilarious. A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Contemplating Existence, the 73-year-old auteur’s latest, caps Andersson’s so-called “human existence trilogy” with a surprising rumination on repressed cultural memory stitched within the director’s signature vistas of human cruelty. Andersson has been perfecting this droll, widescreen aesthetic […]
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Feminist Pornographer Jennifer Lyon Bell on Silver Shoes, PinkLabel.tv, and the Holy F*ck Film Festival
I’ve known Amsterdam-based, San Francisco-bred, Jennifer Lyon Bell ever since we met over half a decade ago at Brooklyn’s much beloved Monkey Town — back when a DIY, Williamsburg performance space could afford to host a Sunday brunch for CineKink Film Festival award winners. (Bell’s Matinée took the Best Narrative Short prize, while Un Piede di Roman Polanski, an homage to Roman Polanski’s foot fetish I co-directed with Roxanne Kapista, nabbed Best Experimental Short.) Since then Bell’s films have been both banned (Matinée from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival by the Australian Film Commission in 2009) and celebrated, most recently […]
