Interviews
Interviews
-
Let’s Play: Genki Kawamura and Jirô Nagae on a New Kind of Video Game Cinema
At first glance, film producer and novelist Genki Kawamura would not appear an obvious fit to helm a big-screen adaptation of an indie video game. Best known for producing major titles such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, Kawamura made his directorial debut in 2022 with A Hundred Flowers, a muted and focused dementia drama. “There was one sequence in that film that was well-received in how it showed how the world looks from that perspective,” reflects Kawamura. “I was hoping to expand on that, so I searched for some kind of elevated horror project to do […]
-
“The Scorpion Doesn’t Die”: Japanese Actress Meiko Kaji on Her 60-Year Career
Starting in the 1970s, Meiko Kaji tore through the Japanese film industry, delivering iconic performances that resonate to this day. Few performers commanded the screen with her authority. Kaji played delinquents, gang bosses, daughters sold into slavery, unrepentant killers—characters far outside societal norms. Through them all she was an implacable force, seeking vengeance and delivering retribution in a world of corrupt, perverse men. For the next 60 years, Kaji battled for her place in cinema, switching studios, working freelance, collaborating with novice directors, working in television and pop music when necessary. Kaji visited New York for the first time in […]
-
“What Solidarity Really Looks Like”: Yael Bridge on Who Moves America
When the UPS Teamsters—the largest bargaining unit in the country at 340,000 strong—were negotiating their 2023 contract, it became increasingly clear that management wasn’t looking to ameliorate legitimate workplace woes. Drivers were delivering packages in deadly heat with no air conditioning; part-time employees, the majority of UPS’ workforce, experience massive turnover rates; and, as is true across the country, wages aren’t rising at the same rate as the cost of living. So when director Yael Bridge and a collective of labor-oriented filmmakers got wind that the Teamsters’ newly-elected president, Sean O’Brien, was advocating for a strike if UPS leadership refused […]
-
Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
-
“I Wanted to Turn Splash on Its Head”: Tyler Cornack on Mermaid
If you search the phrase “Florida Man,” you’ll get a different result every day. A few days ago, it was “Florida man arrested after human remains discovered in suitcase.” Today, “Florida man charged with DUI after crashing e-bike into tricycle.” Mermaid, the latest from Florida-bred filmmaker Tyler Cornack—who also made Butt Boy (2019), his surreal, cavity-searching debut—explores the myth of this cryptid-like civilian. The film follows Doug (Johnny Pemberton), a lonely drug addict who plans to commit suicide. But just as he’s about to end his life, he discovers something in the water near his beachside home: an injured mermaid. […]
-
Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary
David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has alternated between Nomadland and Hamnet on one hand and The Eternals on the other, Lowery has given us deeply personal films like The Green Knight as well as mainstream fare like Peter Pan & Wendy. In fact, it’s the delta between those two approaches to filmmaking, and the identity questions that arose while switching between them, that inspired his latest […]
-
“Like a Surveillance Camera”: Christian Petzold on Miroirs No. 3
Following a fatal car crash in the countryside that leaves her injured and her boyfriend dead, Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist visiting from Berlin, is nursed back to health over several days by Betty (Barbara Auer), a quiet woman who lives near the crash site. Through carefully placed moments of subtle exposition, German filmmaker Christian Petzold slowly reveals to the viewer the extent to which Betty (who seemingly lives alone, but then…not) needs Laura to be a part of her daily life. Much of the fun of Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 then comes in the mysterious yet heartbreaking ways the […]
-
They Will Kill You Took the Blood, Sweat and Tears of Kirill Sokolov, Zazie Beetz, and Myha’la
It’s the closing night of the 2026 SXSW Film Festival and They Will Kill You director Kirill Sokolov is taking to the stage of the Paramount Theatre in Austin. He has multiple pages in hand listing out all of his collaborators he wants to thank. Where most filmmakers give a few brief remarks, possibly crack a joke or two, and then make a quick exit stage left, Sokolov, who previously made the films Why Don’t You Just Die! and No Looking Back in Russia, is running down as many people as he can possibly get through. This is all taking […]
-
Inspired by Meatloaf: Alice Maio Mackay on The Serpent’s Skin
It’s been a whirlwind year for Alice Maio Mackay. Her latest film, The Serpent’s Skin, has been a darling at festivals from London to Montreal, and her next one—her seventh before the age of twenty-two—is already in the can. This one’s a supernatural romance about two queer women, Anna (Alexandra McVicker), innocent and extremely new-in-town, and Jen (filmmaker Avalon Fast), a mysterious goth tattoo artist, who discover they share magical powers and have to fight a demon that’s possessing Danny (Jordan Dulieu), the dreamy alt-boy-next-door who Anna’s recently friend-zoned. With this sweet, sharply witty romp, the twenty-one-year-old Australian filmmaker, both […]
-
Talk Is Cheap: Radu Jude on Kontinental ’25
From Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline to Antonioni’s aimless, quasi-somnambulant heroines, the wandering woman has a venerable history in cinema. The figure has given filmmakers a vehicle for formal experimentation and narrative risk and stories organized less around destination than duration, encounter, and drift. With Kontinental ’25, Radu Jude continues his exploration of wandering women, this time through Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff reeling after the suicide of her most recent evictee—a former athlete turned squatter living in abandoned buildings in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Guilt or shame? Humiliation or distress? Jude doesn’t delineate Orsolya’s feelings so much as […]
