Interviews
Interviews
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“We Didn’t Even Have Time For a Table Read”: Cooley High Director Michael Schultz
Forty years ago, a film crew with exploitation financing and art-house ambitions arrived in Chicago to create Cooley High, a funny and poignant slice of life that would eventually become a classic. The movie — which tells the story of black teenagers growing up in the Cabrini-Green housing project as they fall in and out of love, get into trouble, and try to figure out their futures — served as a launching pad for actors Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Glynn Turman, and Garrett Morris, and provided inspiration for a later generation of filmmakers that included John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers. It […]
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“Your Obstacles are Basically Everything”: Writer/Actress/Producer Naomi McDougall Jones Talks Grassroots Female Filmmaking
Once again, the two-decade-old Bermuda International Film Festival, where I’m on the international advisory board, provided some truly unique networking opportunities. While I didn’t find myself star-struck like at last year’s fest – when I had the once in a lifetime chance to serve on a jury with a spry legend, Kubrick’s producer and brother-in-law Jan Harlan – the 2015 edition hosted several impressive names. Rounding out this year’s Academy Award qualifying shorts jury were producer/writer Hilary Saltzman (daughter of Harry Saltzman, best known as the producer of the first nine Bond films), the inimitable Killer Films co-founder Christine Vachon, […]
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Director Ronni Thomas on Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens
If you’re a fan of Victorian anthropomorphic tableaux then Walter Potter needs no introduction. For those not in the know (and in NYC), head over to this year’s Tribeca Film Festival where Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens screens starting April 18th. This fascinating documentary short is the brainchild of Brooklyn filmmaker (and connoisseur of the strange) Ronni Thomas, who tackles his titular subject – an English taxidermist who died nearly a century ago after founding a museum dedicated to his whimsical and unsettling dioramas – via five modern-day Potter enthusiasts. From taxidermied cats having a tea and croquet […]
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Kieślowski, WarGames and the ’80s: Carleton Ranney on Jackrabbit
Set in the not-too-distant future, Carleton Ranney’s debut feature Jackrabbit observes two young hackers living in City Six, a dystopian urban environment still recovering from The Reset, an event which caused the city to literally go back to square one. Interacting with the outside world via computers and video game systems that go back to user-friendly technology’s infancy (we’re talking pre-Pong), Simon and Max attempt to uncover the secret of a mutual friend’s murder, while fighting to escape City Six and the police/surveillance state they’ve grown accustomed to. An Orwellian fable, Jackrabbit is steeped in political paranoia and a fascination with the impersonal implications of a corporatized America. […]
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Camera Lucida: Edgardo Cozarinsky on Letter to a Father
“I have often wondered what makes us keep things that we know are bound to disappear,” states the narrator of the film Letter to a Father (2013). The voice belongs to Letter’s filmmaker, Edgardo Cozarinsky, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1939 and has spent much of his life in Paris. The things he has kept over time include items pertaining to his father, Mirón Cozarinsky, a naval officer he barely knew who passed away when he was 20 years old. In the Argentinian director’s most recent feature-length film, he visits his father’s hometown of Clara (located in the central Entre Ríos province) for the first time. […]
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Living With Lincoln: An Interview with the Filmmakers
In the late 1890s, Frederick Hill Meserve, the son of a Union solider, started collecting photographs from the Civil War. Collecting images — particularly those of President Lincoln — became something of an obsession, and he eventually acquired the largest single collection of Lincoln images. Meserve’s collection was used as the basis for the penny, the portrait on the $5 bill, the Lincoln Memorial and Mount Rushmore. The collection is vast — over 70,000 items — and became a family project for five generations. As if this didn’t sound more amazing than the plot of National Treasure, it gets better: Dorothy Meserve […]
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“I Don’t Want to Sound Negative About Digital”: DP Robert Yeoman on NAB Show, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Shooting Film
From April 11-16th, more than 100,000 tech heads and industry professionals will descend upon Las Vegas to gorge themselves on the latest cameras, lights and gadgets at the annual NAB Show. Nestled among this digital idolatry, you’ll find at least one psalm to the archaic when cinematographer Robert Yeoman takes the stage to talk the miniatures, stop-motion animation and 35mm photography of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yeoman will be featured as part of NAB Show’s Creative Master Series on April 13th in a conversation with American Cinematographer managing editor Jon Witmer titled “Checking into The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Sponsored by […]
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Five Questions for The Girl is Trouble Director Julius Onah
One of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces, Julius Onah sees his first feature, a twisty neo-noir set in the immigrant cultures of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reach theaters today via eOne. The Girl is Trouble stars Columbus Short (Scandal, and pictured above) along with Wilmer Valderrama, Jesse Spencer and, as the femme fatale, Alicja Bachleda. Spike Lee executive produced this tale involving an innocent DJ drawn into intrigue connecting a missing drug deal to the high-finance world of Wall Street. Below, I ask Onah about working with Spike, the film’s noir references, and a few of the things we talked about […]
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“Just a Normal Guy with Completely Predictable Middle-Class Morality”: Hal Hartley on Ned Rifle
When Hal Hartley arrived on the American filmmaking scene in the late 80s and early 90s, “indie film” wasn’t yet hardened into a niche or a brand. Possibilities seemed endless. Hartley’s debut feature The Unbelievable Truth, starring the late Adrienne Shelly, filtered humor and attitude through an unexpected rigor and formal seriousness. Like other early nineties filmmakers who have remained significant over the subsequent quarter-century (Haynes, Van Sant, Solondz), Hartley’s cinema has balanced a sense of specificity of place – many of Hartley’s films are rooted in the five boroughs, Long Island in particular – with international film culture and […]
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“We Didn’t Have to Add Too Much Creepiness”: It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis
Many a book and an infinite number of film studies thesis papers have noted the link in ’80s teen horror films between sex and death – though the actual inspiration for that correlation likely has less to do with Reagan-era conservative mores than the target audience’s bottomless appetite for nudity and gore. The connection between a character’s carnal desires and their demise has never been more explicit than in the new horror film It Follows, in which young Detroit suburbanite Jay (The Guest’s Maika Monroe) finds herself stalked by a murderous supernatural force following a sexual encounter. The force can take […]
