Interviews
Interviews
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80 Kilometers an Hour Through the Desert: DP John Seale on Mad Max: Fury Road
As much as Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where primitive warlords rule the desert wasteland and women are enslaved, Australian filmmaker George Miller had to battle financial difficulties, security concerns, and heavy rains turning the desert location into a landscape of wildflowers in order to bring the fourth instalment of the Mad Max franchise to the big screen. A further complication occurred when veteran collaborator Dean Semler left for personal reasons just before principal photography was to commence on Mad Max: Fury Road, leading to the Oscar-lauded cinematographer being replaced with Academy Award winner John […]
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Khalik Allah and Kevin B. Lee on Online Platforms vs. Festival Programming
Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake and Khalik Allah’s Field Niggas are radically different films. Lee assembles footage of the making of Transformers: Age of Extinction and related materials to delve into how Michael Bay’s hyper-blockbuster took over cities all over the globe and made deals with their governments to save money; Allah’s film is an hour-long piece of street portraiture from 125th and Park in Harlem, giving voice to the routinely marginalized. What they have in common is that they both initially launched online before receiving festival play. Lee’s film is still online, while Allah has pulled his movie […]
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“Addressing Their Wounds is a Revolution”: Laurent Bécue-Renard on Of Men and War
Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War is an immersive look at group therapy conducted at a California residential facility for young soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories are, predictably, horrific — a man trying to catch a fellow soldier’s brain as it fell out is typical — and it’s extremely difficult for others to understand what they’re experienced. Veterans talk amongst themselves in often grueling sessions, storming out for a smoke when it becomes too much. One man says he only gets three questions from civilians: did you kill someone, why did you kill them, and if there was any way not to kill […]
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Daniel Zelman on Netflix’s Bloodline and Darkness on Television
Recently on a day when I was not feeling particularly well I watched the entire first season of Bloodline, the Netflix drama created by Daniel Zelman and Todd and Glenn Kessler. The show feels quite different from their previous collaboration, Damages. I love the slower pace and, additionally, Bloodline appeals to my fascination with families — the relationships between siblings and parents, and the impossibility of breaking from one’s familial role. Opening with family members convening for a celebration, Bloodline is set in the Florida Keys, and it has an impressive cast that includes Kyle Chandler, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shephard […]
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Anagram Creators May Abdalla and Amy Rose on Door into the Dark
The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]
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“There are Medium and Little-Sized Movies about People, and There are Big Movies About Robots”: Helen Hunt on Ride
As an actress, Helen Hunt has thrived in the entertainment industry for over four decades. She’s won an Oscar, Golden Globe Awards and Primetime Emmys. She has succeeded on a large scale as both a film and a television actress, which is no small feat considering that, until recently, film and television actors have been largely kept in distinct and relatively immutable categories. Hunt has been directing for years, too, from episodes of Mad About You to her first feature film in 2007, Then She Found Me. But not until her latest effort, Ride, has she taken it upon herself […]
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“They Only Do One Black Movie a Year”: Robert Townsend on Hollywood Shuffle
In the mid-1980s, actor and comedian Robert Townsend had scored supporting roles in films like A Soldier’s Story and Streets of Fire, but was still limited in the opportunities available to him as a black performer. Frustrated by the lack of roles, Townsend created one for himself – and directed a landmark in American independent cinema in the process – by helming Hollywood Shuffle, a self-financed comedy about a young actor whose experiences mirrored Townsend’s own. Bobby Taylor (Townsend) is an aspiring thespian who dreams of playing superheroes and Shakespearean kings but mostly finds himself auditioning to play pimps and […]
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I Want to Take You Higher: Josh and Ben Safdie on Heaven Knows What
New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]
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Steadicam Operator Larry McConkey on Filming the Goodfellas Copacabana Tracking Shot and The Early Days of Steadicam
The Copa Shot: It’s one of the few shots in the history of cinema readily identifiable by name, instantly conjuring the image of Goodfellas gangster Ray Liotta leading Lorraine Bracco – and by extension the audience – through the back entrance of New York’s legendary Copacabana nightclub, as Steadicam operator Larry McConkey glides along behind them. How long did one of film’s most famed tracking shots take to pull off? It was in the can before lunch — which isn’t to say it was easy. With a 25th Anniversary screening of Goodfellas set to close the Tribeca Film Festival on April […]
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“Sometimes You Have to Put Your Camera Down”: Director and Producer Hanna Polak on the She Does Podcast
Hanna Polak, a Polish director and producer, has the stamina and guts that most filmmakers would envy. And now audiences at film festivals around the world are experiencing her dedication through Something Better To Come, a documentary that Hanna shot over the span of 14 years. The documentary follows the lives of Russians living in a massive garbage dump, located 12 miles from the center of Moscow. Hanna filmed many people living in the garbage dump, but one person in particular stood out: a young girl named Yula. We watch Yula grow up on-screen, experimenting with hair dye and makeup, […]
