Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions for The Reach Director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti
After screening his debut feature, Carre Blanc, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, French director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti returns to the festival to world premiere his latest, The Reach. Described as a cat-and-mouse thriller about a corporate shark and the young guide he hires for a hunting trip across the Mojave desert, it stars Michael Douglas, whose capacity for embodying and, through his performances, critiquing American greed is unquestioned. Below we ask Leonetti about Douglas, maintaining tension in a two-hander, and the differences between French filmmaking and American. Filmmaker: In both this film as well as Carre Blanc, class […]
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Five Questions for Spring Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
“Before Sunrise with a supernatural twist” is how Toronto programmer Colin Geddes preps us for Spring, the second co-directed feature by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. In their earlier Resolution, the two explored themes of friendship and substance abuse within a twisty, ironic horror narrative. Here, as Geddes indicates, they decamp for abroad, settling their film in Italy where a young American traveler (Lou Pucci) falls for a beautiful German woman (Nadia Hilker). A (“terror”) romance follows. Below, we talk to the two directors about shooting abroad and trying to stay original when working within the horror genre. Spring has […]
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Five Questions for The Yes Men Are Revolting Director Laura Nix
Five years after political superheroes the Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano) made everything all right in The Yes Men Fix the World, our planet seems pretty screwed up again. So, once more the two hit the airwaves, corporate board rooms and tabloid front pages in The Yes Men Are Revolting, directing their activist wit towards the issue of climate change. Along the way, they are joined by Laura Nix, who produced the previous film and this time directs alongside them both. Nix’s directing credits include The Politics of Fur and The Light in Her Eyes, and below she […]
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“Making a Great Movie Music Moment”: Stuart Murdoch on God Help the Girl
There’s a certain rhetoric about the “perfect pop song” that feels like it peaked 25ish years ago somewhere on a bus in the UK, where earnest young people bonded over shared cultdom to pass the time, the guiding sensibility that (random example) led Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins to approach future bandmate Steve Daly because of a Buddy Holly button he was wearing — a sign they had more to talk about than initially evident. This kind of living through music is the force powering Belle and Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut God Help The Girl, an indie pop […]
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Joel Bach and David Gelber on Years of Living Dangerously
The title Years of Living Dangerously could just as easily refer to the time its creators spent producing the recent series, and it has indeed been a busy few years for the journalists-turned-film producers Joel Bach and David Gelber. The pair left their posts at 60 Minutes several years ago to pursue a passion project, a long-form documentary on global warming. The result was a nine-part series that aired on Showtime this spring and, last week, took home the Emmy for the best nonfiction series, beating out Fox’s fantastic, much-lauded series Cosmos. Now the team is gearing up for phase two of the release, a DVD […]
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Checkmate Director Timothy Woodward Jr. on Shooting with the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K
Director Timothy Woodward Jr. is currently in post-production on Checkmate, an action thriller with supernatural undertones shot using the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K. The movie is expected to be completed by October, and is one of the first features shot with this camera. We spoke to Woodward about shooting with the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K, as well as about shooting action sequences and why you shouldn’t “fix it in post.” This is part one of the interview. Filmmaker: Where did the story come from? Woodward: We found the story on a service called InkTip.com. It was very clever. It was well […]
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Life’s Compass: Talena Sanders on Liahona
Liahona begins with distant figures walking silently through a field. It is nighttime, and both the sky and the ground seem to sparkle. The people move slowly while wearing glittering and flickeringly feathered costumes that, from a distance, make them appear to be extraterrestrial. Within the scope of modern American culture, perhaps they are: they’re members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, known more commonly as Mormons. This opening sequence of American filmmaker Talena Sanders’s 2013 debut feature — which will screen in September at Brazil’s Indie Festival, following sessions at FIDMarseille and at last year’s New York Film Festival — […]
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“This is Softcore”: The History of Radley Metzger
Opening today, August 7, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is This is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger, a survey of the director whose arty erotica more or less defined what in the ’70s was dubbed “porno chic.” On the occasion of this retrospective we are reposting, from our archives, this wide-ranging 1997 interview conducted by Steve Gallagher. Among the topics: Metzger’s days creating edited versions of European arthouse masterworks; the origins of his glamorous soft-core aesthetic; distribution in the ’60s and ’70s’ his hardcore work, including The Opening of Misty Beethoven, done under the name […]
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“Makin’ Your Own Rules”: Ron Mann’s Altman
Altmanesque. Ron Mann asked a dozen admirers to define that term in Altman, his new documentary about the director of *M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Player, Gosford Park and 40 other features spanning an astonishing five decades. “Inspiration,” Paul Thomas Anderson answered unsurprisingly. “Creating a family,” Lily Tomlin offered. “Makin’ your own rules” was James Caan’s definition. Mann’s portrait of Robert Altman is exciting and eloquent but nearly too reverential, more a tribute than a biography. The capacity audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday night didn’t need reminding of Altman’s greatness. The Canadian premiere of Altman kicked off a retrospective that […]
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Animal Portraiture: An Interview with The Strange Little Cat Director Ramon Zürcher
For this correspondent’s money, the film to beat so far in 2014 is Swiss filmmaker Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen), a dazzlingly low-key schematic diagram of a single day’s ebb and flow in a German apartment. Zürcher cracks the space open like a dollhouse, but his exacting frames don’t create drama; rather, each individual component — a kettle, a ball, a clock, the nominal tabby, a regularly screaming child or any of the extended family members shuffling in and out of Zürcher’s rooms — invites the viewer’s attention as they often repeatedly intersect. Between narrative scenes, Zürcher stops for montages […]
