Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions with The Cold Lands Director Tom Gilroy
In 2000, IFC Films released Spring Forward, the first feature directed by actor Tom Gilroy. Starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, it’s a quiet, unassuming film full of carefully observed interpersonal intricacies, focusing on the growth of the two men’s relationship over the course of a year while they work for the Parks Department in a small Connecticut town. One of the smartest, subtlest indie films of its era, Spring Forward won awards and an impressive array of rave reviews. Nevertheless, it took Gilroy nearly a decade to get going on his second feature, The Cold Lands, which is only […]
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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his first directorial feature in 23 years at Cannes this year with the fictionalized autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. The man behind cult favorites El Topo and The Holy Mountain delighted audiences with his magic-realist account of growing up in Tocopilla, Chile. It was met with a standing ovation, and the director called the film’s reception in France one of the proudest moments of his life. The Dance of Reality is marked by fantastic, surreal characters, from an opera-singing mother to an overzealous anarchist to a painted religious guru. It is easy to see how Jodorowsky’s […]
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Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Call Me Kuchu
In 2009, a bill was proposed in the Ugandan parliament that would outlaw homosexuality, making the offense punishable by death. In response, the newspaper The Rolling Stone began outing members of the LGBT community with the headline “Hang Them.” The LGBT activist David Kato, the first openly gay man in the rapidly anti-gay nation of Uganda, took the publication to court to prevent them from further printing the names and pictures of gay people — and won. Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral’s remarkable documentary Call Me Kuchu chronicles the brave battles of Kato and his comrades, as they very publicly seek to protect […]
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Five Questions with The Great Beauty Director Paolo Sorrentino
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, The Great Beauty, premiered in competition in Cannes this year, wowing fans with its over-the-top depiction of modern Rome. Seen through the sad eyes of an aging journalist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), the film uncovers a series of unsettling scenes where everyone in Rome aims to be an actor on his or her own stage. And Jep is at the center of it all, a man who squandered his writing talents in exchange for a hard-partying lifestyle. He is surrounded by characters too distracted by their urban surroundings to make anything meaningful. Yet behind every image of decadence […]
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The Scent: Interview with D.P. Stefan Müller
What do you do when you get a new camera? Some people run out and shoot test footage, while others just gamble and use the camera on the next shoot they have lined up. When Stefan Müller, an Austrian freelance film director, d.p. and editor acquired a Canon C100, he went out and shot The Scent, a 12-minute short. One of the stars of this short is a black Labrador called Sky. Despite W.C. Fields’ admonition, “Never work with children or animals,” Müller captured a great performance from the dog, yet when asked if anything interesting or unusual happened during […]
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Morgan Neville on Twenty Feet From Stardom
Backup singers, the ones who provide delicate harmony, who fill out so many of American popular music’s most famous songs, rarely if ever get their due. With Twenty Feet From Stardom, director Morgan Neville sought to change that. A big-hearted, engrossing, pleasurably watchable tribute to the underheralded work of dozens of key performers from the golden age of Blues, Rock, Soul and RnB, the film is a delightful recognition of artists who have long toiled in the shadows of some of American music’s most legendary performers. Emmy award winner Neville, whose past films have included well-received profiles of a gallery […]
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“I Would Never Do This to a Friend”: Tobias Lindholm on A Hijacking
A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]
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John Malkovich: a Figure in Someone Else’s Dream
Last weekend, John Malkovich came to Toronto to play Casanova onstage in The Giacomo Variations. The lanky 59-year-old made local headlines when he aided a fellow guest at his hotel who gashed his neck on some sharp scaffolding. Malkovich wondered if the next time the fellow saw him on screen, “He may think, ‘This guy had his hands around my neck.’” Malkovich was speaking to a capacity audience at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. He appeared between performances to kick off TIFF’s summer program that was sharing space with the Century of Chinese Cinema program featuring the likes of Chris Doyle and […]
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“The Studios are Dead:” Chen Kaige on China’s New Filmmaking Machine
It’s fitting that Chen Kaige kicked off TIFF’s Century of Chinese Cinema program last week in Toronto where he introduced screenings of his films and spoke about his career in two public talks. The movies of the Fifth Generation filmmaker cover several eras of Chinese society, ranging from pre-World War Two in Farewell My Concubine (1993) to today’s social media of Caught in the Web (2012). More importantly, Chen is a key figure in elevating Chinese cinema to the world stage, starting in 1984 — when his first film, Yellow Earth, shattered the tyranny of state-sponsored propaganda films — then […]
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Five Questions with I Send You This Place Directors Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson
The following interview was conducted earlier in the year to coincide with the New York festival premiere of I Send You This Place. It is republished here to mark the start of the film’s theatrical release at the reRun Theater today. The debut film from husband and wife team Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson (also known collectively as Lauren Edward, a composite of their middle names), I Send You This Place is a very unconventional documentary which tackles themes of mental health, creativity and the natural world through the prism of the couple’s trip to Iceland. Gorgeously shot and made […]
