Interviews
Interviews
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“This is Softcore”: The History of Radley Metzger
Opening today, August 7, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is This is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger, a survey of the director whose arty erotica more or less defined what in the ’70s was dubbed “porno chic.” On the occasion of this retrospective we are reposting, from our archives, this wide-ranging 1997 interview conducted by Steve Gallagher. Among the topics: Metzger’s days creating edited versions of European arthouse masterworks; the origins of his glamorous soft-core aesthetic; distribution in the ’60s and ’70s’ his hardcore work, including The Opening of Misty Beethoven, done under the name […]
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“Makin’ Your Own Rules”: Ron Mann’s Altman
Altmanesque. Ron Mann asked a dozen admirers to define that term in Altman, his new documentary about the director of *M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Player, Gosford Park and 40 other features spanning an astonishing five decades. “Inspiration,” Paul Thomas Anderson answered unsurprisingly. “Creating a family,” Lily Tomlin offered. “Makin’ your own rules” was James Caan’s definition. Mann’s portrait of Robert Altman is exciting and eloquent but nearly too reverential, more a tribute than a biography. The capacity audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday night didn’t need reminding of Altman’s greatness. The Canadian premiere of Altman kicked off a retrospective that […]
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Animal Portraiture: An Interview with The Strange Little Cat Director Ramon Zürcher
For this correspondent’s money, the film to beat so far in 2014 is Swiss filmmaker Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen), a dazzlingly low-key schematic diagram of a single day’s ebb and flow in a German apartment. Zürcher cracks the space open like a dollhouse, but his exacting frames don’t create drama; rather, each individual component — a kettle, a ball, a clock, the nominal tabby, a regularly screaming child or any of the extended family members shuffling in and out of Zürcher’s rooms — invites the viewer’s attention as they often repeatedly intersect. Between narrative scenes, Zürcher stops for montages […]
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Adam Epstein Talks Editing for SNL and “The Cutting Edge” Workshop
Adam Epstein is a freelance editor. For the last five years, he’s worked with the Saturday Night Live film unit, editing parody pieces of all kinds. He’s just begun a nationwide workshop tour with “The Cutting Edge Post-Production Tour,” a day-long seminar covering techniques, theories and editing insights. We recently spoke to Epstein about editing, working on SNL and the workshop tour. Filmmaker: How did you become an editor? Epstein: In my experience, it’s never a direct path. I started out in school, working on a student-run sketch comedy show, and we were able to get our hands on some of the […]
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Interview Avoidance and Bollywood Rip-offs: Park Chan-wook on Vengeance, End Titles and Medium Cool
“Mr. Park Chan-wook is not giving any interviews. Sorry.” The Korean auteur was one of the biggest names present at the recently concluded 31st Jerusalem Film Festival, second only perhaps to Spike Jonze (who doesn’t really make for charming interviews). The problem with big names at festivals, though, is that securing a short meeting with them — let alone an interview — is difficult. The curt message from the festival press department, quoted above, is an example of that. Nevertheless, armed with the kind of resilience and never-say-die attitude that arises naturally out of journalistic passion and an empty bank […]
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Sympathy, Said the Shark: Shooting in POV
Writer, director and editor Devin Lawrence says that when he set out to make Sympathy, Said the Shark he’d already gone through two projects which had stalled out due to lack of financing, so he decided he had to come up with something where “money can no longer be the ultimate road block.” The resulting project was shot in 14 days and primarily in one location, but it was by no means a simple project to make as much of it was shot using a POV rig built around the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. Lawrence, who works in LA primarily as […]
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“Everything Seems to be Licorice”: Land Ho!’s Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz on Shooting in Iceland
Land Ho!, co-written and co-directed by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, is an odd-couple two-hander like Katz’s previous Cold Weather and Quiet City, and a progressively rural odyssey like Stephens’ Pilgrim Song, accented by the hues of regional color familiar from both directors’ palettes. But given the film’s Icelandic setting, perhaps another frame of reference is also called for. In interviews, the filmmakers frequently discuss the remoteness of the Icelandic landscape, its incongruity with the day-to-day lives of their characters, and, above all, its mysterious and “otherworldly” beauty. In Iceland, where I currently live, this view is not necessarily reflective […]
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A Round-Up of the Last Non-Linear Editor Updates
June proved to be a rich month for non-linear editor users. Adobe released their latest Creative Cloud update, Apple updated Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, the public beta of DaVinci Resolve 11 was released, and the Mac beta of Lightworks finally appeared. Adobe Creative Cloud On June 17 Adobe released the second major update to Creative Cloud. For Premiere Pro this release adds a new masking feature for effects. You can now easily add an effect mask either using an Oval or a four-point polygon tool. A built-in tracking tool makes it possible to track a shape […]
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“In Prison, I Had Some Peace of Mind”: Jafar Panahi on Closed Curtain
Dogs have been banned as pets in Iran, providing the starting premise for Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. A screenwriter (Kambozia Partovi, also the co-director) has a dog smuggled into his seaside villa by friends. Once the animal’s inside, the man systematically draws the curtains over windows on all three floors. The opening of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain fictionalizes the necessary circumstances of its production: working in secret, the director was forced to draw the curtains for as much of the shoot as possible to make sure no one could see what was going on inside. There are echoes of recent scenes […]
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Even Making a Cup of Tea is Erotic: Bernardo Bertolucci on Me and You
Bernardo Bertolucci was barely out of his teens when the first feature film he directed, La Commare Secca, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, premiered in 1962. In today’s poetry-averse art house environment, his influence surfaces only sporadically — perhaps most clearly in the impulsive, unabashed aesthetics of Paolo Sorrentino — but his filmography remains strong and singular. Nothing feels quite like a Bertolucci film, with its peculiar, poetic fusion of the sensual, the political, and the spiritual. Bertolucci is 73 now, and, because of a series of botched back surgeries, confined to a wheelchair. His newest film, […]
