Interviews
Interviews
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“Forgetfulness is Fought with Words”: Lina Soualem on Her TIFF-Premiering Doc, Bye Bye Tiberias
“I wonder if we can find ourselves fully in a world we invented,” the French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem eloquently ponders in the role of ever-questioning narrator of Bye Bye Tiberias, her extraordinary, multigenerational, female-focused family portrait. Seen through contemporary footage and 90s home movies — expertly interwoven with material from historical archives — the women include not only Soualem’s conservative, customs-observing grandmother and great-grandmother, who never left the Palestinian village their entire community had been forcibly displaced to, but also her mother, Hiam Abbass, a rebellious dreamer set on becoming an international actress. And now, 30 years on […]
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“We Think of Trump as the First Meme to Hold Office in the White House”: A Conversation with Hello Dankness Creators Soda Jerk
For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples film, music and other various forms of pop culture. Their films are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and constantly surprising. Their newest film, Hello Dankness, is no different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a film about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an era of American history and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued daily life with a lasting weirdness […]
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“I Felt an Enormous Amount of Pressure to Deliver Something That Wasn’t Just a Music Doc”: Matthew Heineman on His Telluride-Premiering Jon Batiste Doc, American Symphony
“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.” Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a […]
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“Each Episode is Like Its Own Movie”: DP Benji Bakshi on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
In December of 1964, principal photography finished on the pilot of Star Trek, featuring captain Christopher Pike (played by The Searchers’ Jeffrey Hunter) as the commander of the Enterprise. When the show’s first episode finally aired almost two years later, Pike was nowhere to be found. The initial pilot had been scrapped and re-shot, with William Shatner’s James T. Kirk taking the helm and a different crew boldly going where no man had gone before. However, that wasn’t the end of Christopher Pike. The character returned as a Kirk mentor in the J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films. Now, with the Paramount […]
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“If We’re All Gonna Die…Then Why Wouldn’t You Take a Risk as an Artist?” Onur Tukel (Back To One, Episode 265)
Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]
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How to Explode a Car: John Wilson on How To with John Wilson‘s Final Season
“How To Watch Birds,” episode five of How To with John Wilson’s final season, presents a familiar trajectory: eponymous documentarian follows through with stated premise before being diverted into a completely different context. Not more than seven minutes into Wilson’s episode about birding he’s interviewing UFO expert Travis Walton, whose alleged abduction story inspired Fire in the Sky (1993), and not long after that he voluntarily agrees to a lie detector test. “Have you ever lied to someone on your show?” asks the administrator. “No,” Wilson replies, following a pregnant pause. When informed he is lying, Wilson quietly mutters, “Fuck.” […]
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“The Pitch Is a Performance”: Emily Mackenzie and Noah Collier on Carpet Cowboys
A ten-gallon hat floating in the ocean and psychedelically patterned polypropylene western wear wandering empty hotel halls might not seem like images from a documentary about the changing nature of American commerce, but those costumes define the dreams at the heart of Emily Mackenzie and Noah Collier’s Carpet Cowboys. After becoming obsessed with the seemingly drug-induced carpet designs lining every banal conference room and casino floor in the United States, Mackenzie and Collier stumbled upon Dalton, GA, known then as the “Carpet Capital of the World.” The pair went in, Mackenzie holding the boom and Collier the camera, with little […]
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Punching Down: Emma Seligman on Bottoms
The following interview was published in Filmmaker‘s Summer 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Bottoms arrives in theaters via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bottoms, the sophomore feature from Shiva Baby writer-director Emma Seligman, takes the concept of blood and guts in high school to a queer, campy pinnacle. Co-written by Seligman and Rachel Sennott—who starred in Shiva Baby and returns to act in Bottoms alongside frequent comic collaborator Ayo Edebiri—the project embraces a streak of absurdist satire that’s been present in Sennott’s sensibility since launching her highly popular, if now infrequent, Twitter presence. Coupled with Seligman’s directorial desire to “always do […]
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“You Are Enough”: Ron Cehpas Jones on Back To One (Expanded Re-Release)
The great actor of the stage and screen, Ron Cephas Jones died on August 19, 2023, at the age of 66. On this episode from 2020, he details the value of a true collaborative relationship with the director, why the script never leaves his side in preproduction, talks about what it was like to slowly build “William” on This Is Us through many seasons of that show, and takes us back to his early days at LAByrinth theater in New York City to explain how Philip Seymour Hoffman forever changed his approach to work, plus much more! This is an expanded version […]
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“What ‘Motherhood’ Really Means”: Laura Moss on birth/rebirth
The following interview was originally published during our Sundance 2023 coverage and is being republished today ahead of birth/rebirth hitting theaters via IFC Films and Shudder this weekend. — Editor The narrative kernel of birth/rebirth, Laura Moss’s debut feature, was originally planted in the writer-director’s mind 20 years ago. The filmmaker (and former EMT) was creatively stirred after reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and feeling that its interest in unnatural procreation could translate well to an all-female retelling. As the decades passed, Moss began negotiating integral facets of their identity—namely coming out as non-binary and becoming increasingly convinced they would never have […]
