Interviews
Interviews
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Spirituality in the South: Something, Anything‘s Paul Harrill and Ashley Maynor
An alum of the 2013 IFP Filmmaker Labs (an experience he wrote about here), Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything is less saccharine than truthful. A quietly meditative, regional production, Harrill’s debut feature follows Peggy (Ashley Shelton), a young Southern woman who, after a series of tragic personal events, begins a spiritual quest to better herself as an individual with altruistic intentions. Ethereal throughout, Harrill’s film displays an assured, contemplative expressiveness behind the camera. The writer/director and his producing partner, Ashley Maynor, are as much advocates for strong storytelling in their own work as they are for encouraging it in the films of […]
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“I Can Make This Happen”: Danny Glover on Producing
Danny Glover is one of America’s most beloved actors, but few know about his equally impressive accomplishments as a producer. He’s served as executive producer on multiple films to help see them through to completion, and with Joslyn Barnes he created his own company, Louverture Films, in order to give voice to underrepresented filmmakers. Their first project, Abderrahmane Sissako’s award-winning 2006 Bamako, was followed by an incredibly rich slate of films, including Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. They recently released […]
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“Richard Helped Me Think About Myself”: 5 Questions for Boyhood’s Ellar Coltrane
There are few breakout roles that can top having your life documented on screen over the course of 12 years. Ellar Coltrane grew up in front of millions of eyes playing the role of young Mason in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. It’s near impossible for audiences not to relate to Mason’s character as he navigates school, friendships, moving, relationships and family. But Boyhood is also a film that leaves a lasting impression from its sum over its parts. The power of experiencing the characters transform over a dozen years is one that lets viewers appreciate more their own lives and changes. The […]
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Buying a Burning Building: J.C. Chandor on A Most Violent Year
As a moviegoer, there are few things I find more satisfying than a filmmaker who not only fulfills but wildly exceeds the promise of their early work. With his third film, A Most Violent Year, writer-director J.C. Chandor has done just that, elaborating upon the themes and techniques of his previous movies (Margin Call and All is Lost) to create a work far deeper and more ambitious than anything he’s done before. It’s another portrait of men and women under extreme pressure, but this time the broader implications are simultaneously more complex and more seamlessly woven into the narrative. Ambitious immigrant Abel […]
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“A Little Person Against the Government Machine”: Andrey Zvyagintsev on Leviathan
When Andrey Zvyagintsev brought Elena — his corrosively apocalyptic attack on the Russian oligarchy— to Cannes in 2011, he was alternately direct and evasive about its pessimistic national diagnosis. One interviewer was informed Zvyagintsev had considered calling the film Invasion of the Barbarians, but was another was told that focusing on class issues was missing the larger moral point. Much has changed in three years, and in interviews Zvyagintsev has been adamant that his fourth feature isn’t exactly what it appears to be — i.e., another head-on broadside against different segments of Russia’s ruling class. Leviathan can be unreductively considered a direct continuation/extension of Elena‘s line of argument, not least in again […]
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“I Don’t Know If Camus Would Have Approved”: Five Questions for Far From Men Director David Oelhoffen
David Oelhoffen’s latest film, Far From Men, is based on Albert Camus’ short story “The Guest.” Set during the Algerian War and shot in the manner of a Western, the film features a French and Arabic-speaking Viggo Mortensen as Daru, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria required, against his will, to transport murderous prisoner Mohamed (Reda Kateb) to meet his justice. The two men must confront their own morality and each other against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. The powerful film recently played at the Marrakech International Film Festival, near where the film was shot. Mortensen received a career tribute award for the […]
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“We Know How a Solar Panel is Made”: The Dardennes on Two Days, One Night
As a parable of solidarity, Two Days is programmatic and predictable in a way that’s new to the Dardenne brothers, and not in a good way; as a streamlined narrative, it’s impeccably crafted. The straight-up chase scene dropped into 2005’s L’enfant — a potential audition for a rote action film should they ever feel so inclined — indicated Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s handheld, ever-impassioned kineticism was reaching new levels of sheer technical proficiency. Two Days, One Night presents the dilemma of Sandra (Marion Cotillard) — fired from her solar panel factory job, ostensibly so the plant can remain competitive on a playing field leveled by Chinese labor. It’s clear […]
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“Scary and Sad and Difficult and Funny and Erotic and Exciting”: Angus MacLachlan on Goodbye to All That
Goodbye to All That‘s protagonist Otto Wall is a limited man — the type of man who just goes along with the flow, who doesn’t try to ruffle feathers. He’s not stupid, but neither is he gifted with remarkable intelligence. He has a good job, an attractive if possibly overbearing wife (Melanie Lynskey) and an adorable, auburn-haired daughter who is quickly turning into a North Carolina Methodist. He’s lucky, at least until he isn’t. Played with gentle moxie by Paul Schneider, in his most memorable motion picture role since Dick Liddil in The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert […]
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“I Always Try to Find Something Better”: Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Winter Sleep
Over the course of his seven feature films – the last five of which have won prizes at Cannes – the Turkish filmmaker and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan has moved from a dramaturgy primarily based in photography (in films such as 2002’s Distant) to one based firmly in screenwriting, as in the elegant structure and dialogues of 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. This development as a screenwriter has been accomplished in tandem with his wife, Ebru Ceylan, with whom he has co-written the last three films. Nuri Bilge Ceylan was trained first as a chemical and then electrical […]
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“The Last 50 Years Destroyed Our Old World”: Five Questions for Actress/Director Mélanie Laurent
French actress Mélanie Laurent may be best known to American audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. But in addition to acting in over 35 international roles, Laurent has also directed two feature films. Based on the YA novel by Anne-Sophie Brasme, her latest film Breathe premiered at Cannes this year. Laurent expertly crafts the world of adolescent codependency. She claims she’s learned from every director she’s worked with: one tip she stole from Tarantino is to play music in between scenes to get people to be more comfortable on the set. Laurent served on the […]
