Interviews
Interviews
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The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
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Five Questions with John Lurie
John Lurie has never allowed himself to be pinned down, let alone pigeon-holed. The multi-talented Lurie — this month the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn — has been for many years a highly respected musician and composer, putting out records both as a solo artist and with his band the Lounge Lizards. In film, he has directed short films and music videos, composed numerous soundtracks, and been an actor in films by Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law), Wim Wenders (Paris Texas), Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) and David Lynch (Wild […]
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Five Questions with Trash Dance Director Andrew Garrison
Since its world premiere at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival, Andrew Garrison’s documentary Trash Dance has been a festival favorite, picking up audience awards at both Full Frame and Silverdocs. The film chronicles innovative choreographer Allison Orr’s attempts to wrangle a group of garbage men and turn them, and their trucks, into the participants in her latest project. Filmmaker spoke with the Austin, Texas-based Garrison, an experienced non-fiction director known for such films as Third Ward TX and The Wilgus Stories, about the process of making Trash Dance, which opens at the reRun Theater in Brooklyn today. Filmmaker: Why did […]
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Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
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Ron Morales on Graceland
Ron Morales’ nifty second feature Graceland centers on Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes), driver to corrupt senator Manuel Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias). The senator’s a pedophile with a penchant for underage hookers; Marlon — struggling to raise funds for an organ transplant for his ill wife — turns a blind eye. The two men’s daughters are friends, but when Marlon’s child is mistaken for the senator’s during a kidnapping, he has to lie his way into making sure the senator puts up the ransom funds. Running around Manila at the child-snatchers’ behest, Marlon and Morales take in a broad swath of pungent […]
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“We Walked the Tightrope with Grace:” Mira Nair on The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mira Nair lounges casually on the edge of a bed in her downtown New York hotel room. Between sips of tea, she asks, “Is this okay?” as if the informal atmosphere might throw off the professional nature of our meeting. (It doesn’t.) To borrow Nair’s own sentiment, which she uses to describe the way she aims to feel on set, the director looks “at home in the world,” comfortable even when promoting a movie that’s designed to be unnerving. Based on Mohsin Hamid’s international bestseller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Nair’s eleventh narrative feature, and a milestone in a filmography that […]
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All in the Family: Shawney Cohen on Hot Docs Opener The Manor
The titular subject referred to in Shawney Cohen’s debut feature has nothing to do with ladies and lords, but with the Cohen family business – a combo strip club/motel in a small Canadian town. And The Manor has nothing to do with in the ins and outs of the sex industry, so to speak, but with the inner workings of the Cohen family, which includes Shawney’s 400-pound father (who bought the place when the director was only six) and 85-pound anorexic mother. Ultimately, the doc’s not so much north-of-the-border, reality TV than a nuanced portrait of a loving yet dysfunctional […]
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Teenage Riot: A Conversation with Matt Wolf, Jon Savage and Jason Schwartzman
Youth culture didn’t start in the ’60s. In the parlance of today’s teens, the appropriate response to this might be “duh.” Teenage, director Matt Wolf’s artful new non-fiction film, uncovers the “hidden history” of youth culture and locates its origins in various youth movements in the first half of the 20th century. From German Swing kids to American Victory Girls, the film offers a veritable lexicon of lost teen vocabulary (“teen canteen,” “buzz bucket,” “boogie in the strut hut”), and reminds us that the invention of teenager culture depended on the invention of a new language — and one that […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: Vivek Bald
In the eighth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Vivek Bald, filmmaker, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT and a member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, answers our questions. Bald’s ongoing project, Bengali Harlem, documents the history of two little-known groups of South Asian immigrants. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How did you become a digital storyteller? Were there […]
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“How Do You Get Anybody to See It?” Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver and 21st Century Filmmaking
Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan. Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched […]
