Interviews
Interviews
-
Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Welcome to New York Director Abel Ferrara
It’s been the most talked about film of Cannes this year, one of the most well-reviewed yet, and it’s not even part of the competition line-up. That’s just Abel Ferrara’s style: he’s still one of the few directors who consistently manages to make films his own way, outside the typical studio system. His latest is a masterstroke of filmmaking. It’s a story that puts the fun back into cinema, a film that breathes wit, heart and imagination. The New York native returns to the Croisette with Welcome to New York, a damning film inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. The film […]
-
West Memphis Redux: Atom Egoyan on Devil’s Knot
The West Memphis Three case was the subject of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s much-lauded Paradise Lost trilogy (1996, 2000, 2011), as well as Amy Berg’s 2012 West of Memphis. Each documentary chronicled the ongoing evolution of a uniquely American tragedy: the wrongful convictions of three teenage outcasts in the grotesque slayings of three eight-year-olds in West Memphis, Ark on May 5th, 1993. In Devil’s Knot, Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s fictionalized retelling of the events, the teenagers who stand accused — Jason Baldwin (Seth Meriwether), Damien Echols (James Hamrick), and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (Kris Higgins) — are clearly railroaded by local law […]
-
Don’t Mess with the Missionary Man: Machine Gun Preacher Sam Childers
I recently attended the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Florida, where I served on the documentary grand jury as well as a panel discussion about filmmakers and the press. In the Filmmaker Lounge post-panel, I was surprised to meet the subject of one of the docs I’d watched. Kevin Evans’ Machine Gun Preacher tells the unbelievable tale of Sam Childers, outlaw biker turned rescuer of African children, fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army with a Bible in his hand. (If this stranger than fiction story sounds familiar, it’s probably because you saw Gerard Butler play Childers in the 2011 Hollywood […]
-
Creating Moonshine Kingdom: An Interview with Milton Horowitz and Ryan Forte
Mooshine Kingdom director Milton Horowitz says that, like a lot of Americans, he grew up watching too much television. This eventually led to film school at Cleveland State University, where he met cinematographer Ryan Forte. “Ryan’s younger than me,” says Horowitz. “He’s 21, I’m 32, and even though we’re 11 years apart we still love the same types of films and the same movie techniques.” While this is ostensibly their first feature film, Forte says he tried to make a feature film when he was younger that became “way too long. I sent it to a film festival and it […]
-
Stanley Kubrick’s Producer Jan Harlan on His Life in Film
If, like me, you’re a hardcore film geek who ranks Stanley Kubrick as your favorite director of all time, then Jan Harlan needs no introduction. At least that’s what I thought when I met Kubrick’s longtime producer (beginning with A Clockwork Orange — or rather the never-made Napoleon – right through to Eyes Wide Shut) this year at the Bermuda International Film Festival, where I’m on the international advisory board. Harlan was also Kubrick’s brother-in-law: his older sister Christiane was the director’s wife. It was a simple twist of fate that I found myself filling in as a last-minute replacement […]
-
Vincent Laforet on Directing, Cinematography and Knowing Your Craft
Vincent Laforet is a Los Angeles based director and DP who has directed a number of commercials and short narrative films. A prize winning still photographer who has worked for The New York Times, he is perhaps best known for Reverie, the short movie that introduced the world to the video capabilities of the Canon 5D Mark II. Laforet is currently undertaking a US workshop tour with the Directing Motion workshop, which will visit 32 cities over the next ten weeks. “I knew that there was a hunger for learning about the craft of filmmaking, and I thought this would be […]
-
Courage of Conviction: A Conversation with Ida Director Pawel Pawlikowski
Although state-side cinephiles may not be familiar with the work of filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski or the nuances of Polish history, here at Filmmaker Magazine we suspect you’re about to find both deeply compelling. In Ida, a beautifully wrought gem of a film, the writer/director brings audiences the story of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young orphan raised by Polish Catholic nuns who meets her next of kin — the hard-drinking and cynical Wanda (Agata Kulesz) — on the eve of joining the convent, and learns that her family is Jewish. Together, the women set off on a road trip seeking the truth about their family’s past. In this conversation, Pawlikowski discusses his […]
-
IFFBoston: How Do You Interview Subjects?
At this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston, the panel “The Art of Documentary Film Editing: Case Studies” featured moderator Jim Hession, editor of Rich Hill, Lucia Small, director and editor of One Cut, One Life and Bryan Storkel, editor of Fight Church. An audience member asked the panel how they interviewed people and whether they prepped them beforehand, adding “Whenever I interview people, they’re always really bad talking to the camera.” Storkel: I try and do as little prep as possible. I try to show up and just start talking and get to know them on camera. I’ll have my questions […]
-
A Conversation with Mentor Director Alix Lambert
“It’s Better in Mentor.” A shot of that roadside sign offers an early irony in director Alix Lambert’s new documentary, named after the Ohio town — and high school — where five students committed suicide between 2005 and 2010. Focusing on two families who brought lawsuits against Mentor High, alleging that its administration ignored a clear pattern of student bullying that led to the deaths of their children, Mentor is both heartbreaking and soberly resolute in its inquiry into the institutional forces and “culture of conformity” that fail young members of our communities. As she has done in her previous […]
-
Director Phillip Rodriguez and Producer Jennifer Craig-Kobzik on Life, Death and Legend in Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle
For the generations who have come of age knowing the legend of slain journalist Ruben Salazar, there is as much they don’t know about him. A new documentary, Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle, takes advantage of police records and decades of hindsight to take Salazar out of myth and give him back his humanity. The film premieres as a Special Presentation of PBS’ VOCES on Tuesday, April 29 at 9:00 PM ET. Salazar’s contribution to journalism began in the ’50s with his work as a reporter with the border daily El Paso Herald-Post in the city where he had […]
