Interviews
Interviews
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Sounds that Cannot Be Unheard: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on The Zone of Interest
When director Jonathan Glazer first pitched Johnnie Burn his dramatic vision for The Zone of Interest, the sound designer took a deep breath. Over the past two decades, the pair had developed a strong rapport, collaborating on a variety of commercials, music videos and long-gestating movies (most recently, 2013’s Under the Skin), experiences Burn remembers taking a physical and mental toll on him. But this rigorous new project—a Holocaust drama in which hellish audio is layered over otherwise idyllic imagery—promised to be the most challenging, counterintuitive and audacious job of his career. “To be honest,” Burn says, “I was really […]
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Clothes Tell the Story: Costume Designer Stacey Battat on Priscilla
From the wan pastel prairie dresses of The Virgin Suicides to the candy-colored 18th century finery of Marie Antoinette to the aughts logomania of The Bling Ring, the style in Sofia Coppola’s movies is always brilliantly cohesive, capturing a distinct, ultrafeminine vibe like no other. Coppola’s latest, the impressionist biopic Priscilla, follows Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) from timid ’50s teenager to wife of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) to, finally, a liberated woman, using gorgeous midcentury fashions to capture an often painful journey into the heady world of celebrity. Spanning from 1959 to 1972—one of modern fashion’s richest transitional eras—Priscilla’s wardrobe alternately […]
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“Let’s Make It Feel Like You’re Watching TV During Y2K”: Directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald on Time Bomb Y2K
Where were you on December 31, 1999? Despite years of hearing Prince’s pleas to party, many Americans spent the evening at home, bewitched by a bizarre mix of sentimental reverie and fear. The end of the century, it turned out, was a time for reflection and mild panic. Media coverage warned that computers might register the year 2000 as the year 1900. Chaos could ensue, and you did not want to be caught in the club when the “millennium bug” caused the lights to go out and nuclear warheads to whirl mid-air. As Lisa de Moraes wrote in the Washington […]
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Bad Education: Writer/Director Molly Manning Walker on How to Have Sex
The act of recalling our earliest sexual encounters can unleash a wave of secondhand embarrassment for the people we used to be. What we previously said, did or even desired as unyieldingly hormonal adolescents will undoubtedly incite full-body cringes for as long as our psyches choose to preserve those encounters. Yet no staggering quantity of cautionary tales can—or, arguably, should—dissuade young people from fantasizing about the ideal circumstances for losing their virginity and navigating previously uncharted sexual waters. While there’s nothing wrong with romantic idealization, the idea of experiencing pure satisfaction during a formative sexual exploit is, at the very […]
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“Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things”: George C. Wolfe on Rustin
It might seem strange for an actor to have a breakout year at age 54. To those who witnessed Colman Domingo’s star rise on the New York theater scene in the early aughts and would cringe at now labeling the actor a “discovery”—I don’t disagree! I first encountered Domingo’s stage work in summer 2008, in the Broadway premiere of Passing Strange that would be filmed a few days later by Spike Lee. (Looking over Domingo’s earlier theater credits, I realize now that I would’ve first seen him in the 2003 Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V, but the […]
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Cannes 2023: Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton on The Sweet East
Originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, our interview with Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton about their recommended feature, The Sweet East, is being reposted today as the film is in theatrical release from Utopia. America’s fraught political present meets the less savory corners of cinema’s past in The Sweet East, the first feature directed by celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Penned with typically acerbic wit by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder in a should-be-star-making performance as Lilian, a high school senior who impulsively runs off while on a class trip to Washington, […]
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“Why Make It Simple?” Pedro Costa on The Daughters of Fire
In 1951, a volcano erupted on Fogo, one of the Cape Verde islands. That incident is the starting point for The Daughters of Fire, an experimental short by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa splits the screen into panels portraying three women—Adelaide, Clotilde, and Irodina—singing over an arrangement of Biagio Marini’s “Passacaglia (Opus 22).” The film ends with footage from A Erupcao do vulcao da ilha do Fogo, a 1951 documentary by ethnologist Orlando Ribeiro. The films are part of Canción de Pedro Costa, a museum exhibition currently touring Europe. In museums the films are projected separately in three different […]
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“I Have Never Seen Any Restaurant Movies”: Frederick Wiseman on Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Haute cuisine as a form of artistic creation—one both time-intensive in its preparation and ephemeral in its shelf-life—and how to keep such a tradition alive is at the center of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros. Whittled down from 150 hours of footage, the four-hour documentary takes on a leisurely pace matching both the unhurried unfolding of the dining experience at the titular restaurant and the elaborate process of crafting a meal. Beyond showing us the preparation of the food and every conceivable method of cookery, Wiseman brings us the source of it, too, following the Troisgois chefs as they visit […]
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Encounters with the Coachella Valley Landscape: Terra Long on Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Terra Long’s exquisite debut feature film, Feet in Water, Head on Fire, is at once cine-essay, landscape film and sensory investigation into the production of space. The space in question is the Coachella Valley of Southern California, on traditional Cahuilla territory, a place produced and transformed over multiple eras by overlapping mythologies, migrations and capital accumulation strategies. Arid, hot and prone to tectonic trauma, the landscape is challenging to many kinds of harvest, save the tenacious date palm, a species widely cultivated across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia with roots in Arabia stretching back millennia. That the […]
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How to Make Nickelodeon Slime Look Like Oil: Special Effects Coordinator Brandon K. McLaughlin on Killers of the Flower Moon
Brandon K. McLaughlin remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to work in the movie business. It was Halloween night and McLaughlin was eight years old. His uncle—a special effects technician—had invited him to set to watch the Disney adventure The Rocketeer being made. “I got to see them blow up the zeppelin while the Rocketeer was running on top of it,” McLaughlin said. “From that point on, I never wanted to do anything else. I was fascinated with everything that went into the magic of moviemaking, and the special effects department creates that magic, tricking the audience into […]
