Interviews
Interviews
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“Literally Filmed Within Two Miles of My House”: Larry Fessenden on Blackout, Streaming and His Role in Killers of the Flower Moon
Reviewing a boxset of writer-director Larry Fessenden’s work in 2015 for Filmmaker, I began by noting that “Fessenden can frequently be found on the outskirts of the New York filmmaking community, using his production company Glass Eye Pix as an outlet of support for fellow filmmakers.” While my summation of the celebrated horror auteur’s altruism remains accurate (the company turns 40 in 2026), Fessenden’s own films have grown tougher to get off the ground. A new film by him is therefore a major event, albeit one that happens quietly. Having made its world premiere at the 27th Fantasia International Film […]
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Reject Departmental Sectarianism: Production Designer Akin McKenzie and Writer-Director Terence Nance
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. At the heart of production designer Akin McKenzie and writer-director Terence Nance’s long-running collaboration is a mutual recognition of the importance of, as Nance puts it, “creative execution that flows from emotional framework.” The two first worked together on the Peabody-award-winning HBO show Random Acts of Flyness and went on to create Space Jam: A New Legacy and award-winning commercial campaigns for […]
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“Contrary to Jean-Luc Godard, This Film Isn’t Truth 24 Frames a Second”: Errol Morris on The Pigeon Tunnel
Heralded as perhaps the greatest espionage novelist of all time (though some find this label horribly reductive), David Cornwell, best known by his pen name John le Carré, wrote 26 novels over the course of his 60-year career. But filmmaker Errol Morris decided to chronicle the life and career of the English writer and former British Intelligence agent through the lens of his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. This decision makes perfect sense on paper: why wouldn’t Morris utilize Cornwell’s own recollections and reflections as the backbone of his documentary profile, particularly with a subject who, […]
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“You Provide Everything That’s in Every Shot”: Production Designer Sara K White and Director Susanna Fogel
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. In the first episode of The Wilds, one of the main characters is introduced via a quick beat of her smoking a cigarette on her family’s back deck with a nicotine-stained, pink flamingo ashtray nestled on the rail nearby. Sara K White, the show’s production designer, recalls: “We were working to build out Dot’s character—a girl who doesn’t come from money and […]
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From 50 Crew Members to Five: Director Eddie Alcazar on Divinity
“Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept,” says biologist and researcher David Sinclair. And while the scientist’s work on aging and epigenetics is tied to discoveries in biology from the mid-20th century onwards, within the arts the theme of immortality goes back centuries. Filmmaker Eddie Alcazar, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2011, is the latest to tackle man’s search for eternal life, doing so at a time when interest in longevity and even avoidance of death is contemplated by tech community thinkers […]
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“The Price of Making a Movie is That I Have to Direct It”: Todd Solondz on Happiness
Todd Solondz’s indelible Happiness was released 25 years ago today. Filmmaker is reposting here its interview with Solondz, the cover story of our Fall 1998 issue. — Editor Winner of the Critic’s Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Todd Solondz’s startling new Happiness is not only one of the most challenging and invigorating independent films of the year, it’s also, by virtue of the strange politics of its release, a talking point for prognosticators everywhere concerned with the co-option of indie-film attitude by corporate-controlled majors and mini-majors. Ambitiously weaving five separate tales of modern alienation, romantic woe, and shocking […]
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“We Had to Row a Kayak to the Camera Truck to Save the Film Cans”: Director Derek Cianfrance and Production Designer Inbal Weinberg
Ahead of the launch of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of meetings between directors and production designers in which they discuss the particularities about their working dynamics as well as how production design can elevate the vision of a filmmaker. Derek Cianfrance and Inbal Weinberg first collaborated on Blue Valentine, which set the stage for exploration and discovery. They continued to experiment with environment and process on such projects as The Place Beyond The Pines and I Know This Much Is True. Here they discuss the delicate balance of artifice and authenticity […]
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“We Offered to Bear Witness”: Sonia Kennebeck on Reality Winner
Reality Winner was a US Air Force vet and NSA employee whose leaking of an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which subsequently handed it over to the FBI in a bungled, source-disclosing attempt to verify it wasn’t a hoax, in turn led to her arrest. The saga has been well-documented, to say the least: Just this year, Tina Satter premiered her Sydney Sweeney-starring HBO film Reality, adapted from the playwright’s IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription. Now we have Sonia Kennebeck’s Reality Winner, itself an extension of the 25 New Faces alum’s […]
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“I Become a Better Designer Every Time I Work with David”: Production Designer Jade Healy and David Lowery
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Below, is the first of these conversations published at Filmmaker, a conversation between production designer Jade Healy and director David Lowery. Their first collaboration had them wearing different hats. Shot in Costa Rica, It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home was written by four friends, among them Jade Healy, an actress, and David Lowery, sound designer and editor. Years later, as […]
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Exorcising the Curse of the US: Miko Revereza on Nowhere Near
After living undocumented in the US for 26 years, in Nowhere Near (2023), director Miko Revereza journeys back to the Philippines in an attempt to trace the source of the colonial ghosts causing his parents’ amnesia. Through an abstract odyssey into personal history à la Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Revereza works in a range of mediums to express the borderless aesthetic of statelessness. What results is an investigative documentary layered with the narration of his own novel, floating into the mysteries of psychogeographical disconnect with superimposed images and submerged family portraits. On the day of the film’s US premiere, Revereza […]
