Interviews
Interviews
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“A Relationship is Never a Straight Line”: Joanna Hogg on Exhibition
“It’d be nice if you could come up here, maybe distract me from my work,” H (Liam Gillick) tells his wife D (Viviane Albertine) at the start of Joanna Hogg’s surprising and stunning new film Exhibition. The two speak via intercom, from separate stories of their postmodern London behemoth, and Hogg’s film is as much about communication, or lack there of, as it is about staving off our most prized objectives. D and H — both artists, only one of whom is “successful” — have decided to sell their house after living there for nearly 20 years. That decision, or rather, acquiescence on D’s part, […]
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“It is a Long Journey”: DPs Emre Erkmen and Wojciech Staroń in Conversation
Cinematographers are the best whores in the world. Christopher Doyle, the award-winning Australian cinematographer behind In the Mood for Love and Hero, sincerely believed this. He echoed this thought to Michael Ballhaus, the German cinematographer who shot Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, when the two met at a panel in Berlin. (Ballhaus agreed.) Several such anecdotes and beliefs on the art of photography were revealed when Turkish cinematographer Emre Erkmen hosted Wojciech Staroń, his Polish counterpart, for a conversation at the 33rd Istanbul Film Festival earlier this year. Staroń recently worked on Papusza, a black-and-white Polish biopic about the […]
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Scam School: Andrew Rossi on Ivory Tower
Page One: Inside the New York Times director Andrew Rossi’s damning doc Ivory Tower details how the increasingly outrageous cost of a college education — spurred by the rise of administrative salaries, lack of government support and the arms race for the best and brightest (and richest) among us — is killing the American dream and heightening the divide between the haves and have nots. Rossi’s movie isn’t covering especially new ground if you’re out in the world while reading about how it’s all falling apart. The Reagan/Friedman ideology suggesting education is a private good that ought to be paid for […]
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Five Questions for Recommended by Enrique‘s Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia
Director Rania Attieh was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and her partner Daniel Garcia grew up in South Texas. Their first feature together, Okay, Enough, Goodbye crisscrossed Attieh’s hometown, canvassing 30 locations in 40 days to create a story, they say, that is a “love/hate relationship with the city itself.” So, after that feature won plaudits on the festival circuit — and landed the two on Filmmaker‘s 2011 25 New Faces list — it seems only appropriate that they head to Texas for their follow-up. Premiering tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Recommended by Enrique is described as “a tale […]
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No Clean Getaways: Amat Escalante on Heli
It starts with a slow tilt over dead bodies traveling in space, slowly revealed to be tucked into the back of a white pick-up truck. One of them will soon be hung from a bridge, the early morning light silhouetting the dangling body: its formal sleekness notwithstanding, Heli isn’t for the faint of heart. Soon we’re introduced to a small, modest family in a remote Mexican village: a father and his two children, one of whom has a child of his own from a young wife. Surrounded by desert and not too far from the auto plant which employs many […]
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“Maybe I Hate Pity:” Nathan Silver on Uncertain Terms
Nathan Silver first courted audiences in 2012 with Exit Elena, his charming, claustrophobic take on arrested development through the eyes of a live-in aide. His follow-up, Soft in the Head, also captured an outsider’s rambunctious navigation of new environs, so it should be no surprise that Uncertain Terms, premiering this Saturday at the Los Angeles Film Festival, treads the familiar territory of interloper interrupted. Silver may be a premature embodiment of Fassbinder’s creed that “Every decent director has only one subject and finally only makes the same film over and over again,” but Uncertain Terms feels more patient in execution than its predecessors, mirroring the bucolic enclave which houses a bevy of […]
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Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Wild Tales Director Damián Szifrón
Argentine director Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales opens with the ultimate revenge fantasy, one that unfolds into a firestorm before the credits finish. The film’s six stories get only more wicked, quickly descending into the depths of the human psyche on the verge of imploding. There is truly never a dull moment, a rarity for the Cannes lineup. A waitress gets help paying back the loan shark who drove her father to suicide. A quick road rage incident unfolds into a searing tale that will warn anyone against yelling at another driver. An explosives engineer fires back against his city’s criminal […]
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“Wait, That’s Your Dream Project?”: Michael Tully on Ping Pong Summer
Summer, 1985: Casey Kasem is on the radio and mastering the moonwalk is a must. Radford “Rad” Miracle (Marcello Conte) has to go on family vacation with his patient mom (Lea Thompson), sneeringly cool goth sister Michelle (Helena May Seabrook), and cheapskate cop dad (John Hannah), who insists on driving to Ocean City, Maryland in his police car to save money. All Rad wants to do is play ping pong, get cooler, and get the girl, but the local rich kid bullies are an impediment. Can Rad up his ping pong craft enough to beat them? And what’s up with […]
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Legendary Producer Marin Karmitz on Great Directors, Producing, and Why Money is Never the Real Problem
Combining taste, business savvy, and enduring idealism for the role cinema can play within the broader culture, legendary producer, distributor, director and exhibitor Marin Karmitz has helped shape the course of world cinema since launching his MK2 Films in the early 1970s. Beginning his career as an assistant director to, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, Karmitz went on to become one of the most distinguished producers of his generation, with such classics as Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Claude Chabrol’s Ceremonie to his name. But his list of producing credits only tells […]
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The New Ultra-Wide LG 34UM95 Monitor Is A Gamechanger for Sound and Video Editors (Sponsored)
The following is a sponsored editorial post from LG. For video and sound editors, getting enough screen space to get work done efficiently has long been a problem. Even with two 16:9 monitors running off one CPU, there’s still bezel barriers to contend with, and your working space quickly grows cramped, slowing down workflow as you struggle to make all your programs fit. Now there’s a solution: the LG 34UM95, an ultra-wide 21:9 monitor with 3440×1440 Quad HD resolution. Sound mixers can now see all their tracks in a wide, uninterrupted linear sequence, with the high resolution eliminating time wasted […]
