Interviews
Interviews
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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 […]
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“To Remove What Feels Electronic in the Image”: While We’re Young DP Sam Levy
Early in writer/director Noah Baumbach’s latest effort While We’re Young, the film presents a montage of its 40-something protagonists (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) transfixed by the glowing screens of their digital devices, juxtaposed against a younger couple they’ve recently befriended (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) basking in the analog glory of board games, vinyl and VHS. To be a contemporary cinematographer is to embrace both worlds of this montage: the analog and the digital, the new and old, the 6K camera and the perfect imperfections of the vintage lens. While We’re Young cinematographer Sam Levy talked to Filmmaker about […]
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“Everyone Wants to Think Their Child could be President”: Morgan Krantz on Babysitter
Writer/director Morgan Krantz’s first feature Babysitter was accepted into SXSW as a work in progress, so Krantz was working on it until the very week it premiered. “It was hot off the presses, and suddenly it was on the big screen at the Ritz,” he says. Babysitter revolves around a teenage boy and his relationships with the women in his life: his Wiccan babysitter, his mom who’s using him as a pawn in her divorce from his father, and the druggie girl he has a crush on in school. As an indie drama that invites conversation about topics like feminism […]
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“It Was a Bit of a Rough Ride”: David Robert Mitchell on It Follows
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell has only released two films, but he has already shown himself to be a fascinating and diverse filmmaker. His first outing, 2010’s Myth of the American Sleepover, was a simple teen drama following a bunch of Detroit teenagers as they, well, had sleepovers. But for his sophomore effort, Mitchell created a horror film, and an excellent one at that. Despite the shift in genre, It Follows is very much a David Robert Mitchell production. It also follows a group of Detroit teens as they live their lives, and by focusing on creating believable characters, goes beyond genre […]
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“For Every Kink, There is a Case”: Anja Marquardt on She’s Lost Control
The erotic meets the clinical in German director Anja Marquardt’s debut feature, She’s Lost Control, a quietly intense portrait of two characters brought together by deeply personal physical and internal deficiencies. Ronah (Brooke Bloom) is a graduate student doubling as a professional sex surrogate for men struggling with physical intimacy. The student faces the ultimate test when confronted with her most troubled patient, Johnny (Marc Menchaca), an imposing, solemn figure who needs an alcoholic beverage to get through each session. Those sessions — sequences that allow the leads to take real risks as their characters interact unsupervised — are set in darkened […]
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The Gunman Actor Peter Franzén on Being a Global Artist (and Working with Sean Penn)
“Peter Franzén – remember that name,” is what I told everyone who asked me if I’d made any big discoveries covering the Finnish Film Affair in Helsinki in September 2013 — I’d even called this talented thesp “Finland’s ridiculously charismatic answer to Guy Pearce” in my coverage. But unlike that Australian actor, Franzén also writes and directs. His woefully underexposed directorial debut Above Dark Waters is based on his semiautobiographical novel, told through the eyes of a child living with a loving police officer father who happens to be a violent alcoholic. When I learned Franzén would be attending the […]
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Elizabeth Giamatti on her SXSW-Winning Collaboration with Alex Sichel, A Woman Like Me
Winner of a Special Jury Award for Directing at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, Alex Sichel and Elizabeth Giamatti’s A Woman Like Me is a frankly disarming and emotionally piercing hybrid doc as well as a necessary directorial collaboration. Filmmaker Alex Sichel’s 1997 debut feature, All Over Me, was an important entry in the decade’s New Queer Cinema, a scrappy teen lesbian drama that, in the L.A. Weekly, critic Manohla Dargis wrote “comes closer to unlocking the secret lives of girls than any other recent American movie.” In the years following that film, Sichel taught directing at NYU, raised a […]
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“Like Reading a Diary You Wrote as a Teenager”: Britni West on Tired Moonlight
Since taking home the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, most reviews have charged Britni West’s naturalistic narrative Tired Moonlight with the “documentary-like” or “hybrid” stamp of approval, but more than anything else, the film seems to suggest that such classifications were meant to be broken. An interwoven portrait of the inhabitants and topography of Kalispell, Montana, West collapses the conventions of an ensemble driven film by allowing her characters to roam free, presenting a beautiful, like-minded series of vignettes that form a cohesive whole. Recently back from Austin where she presented the film at RxSM (along with 7 Chinese Brothers at SXSW, on which she […]
