Interviews
Interviews
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5 Questions for Ne Me Quitte Pas Directors Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koeverden
Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koeverden’s Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Forget Me) takes its name from a Jacques Brel song whose fervid tone fits its disheveled subjects well. Marcel and Bob are best friends: deep in rural Belgium, they wile away their hours in a drunken haze, footage that straddles a productively uncomfortable tragic-comic line. Marcel’s wife leaves him at the beginning, which gives him more time to spend with older, more grizzled, seemingly more resigned Bob: their epic drinking bouts regularly punctuate the film, getting into more and more dangerous territory as spiral downward and, unnervingly, take […]
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Last Hustle: John Turturro on Fading Gigolo
John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo has a title that sounds both more elegiac and salacious than the movie ultimately is. The dynamic 57-year-old character actor’s fifth feature as a director features a rare Woody Allen performance outside of his own movies as beleaguered Murray, who’s been forced by the choppy economic winds to shutter his elegant little Manhattan bookshop. Turturro plays Fioravante, one of Murray’s employees and seemingly his best friend. When the store closes, Fioravante takes a job in a flower shop, while Murray spends most of his days looking after a gaggle of black children that are ostensibly the […]
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Five Questions With Fishtail Director Andrew Renzi
After serving as a producer on films including Afterschool and Two Gates Of Sleep and directing three shorts, Andrew Renzi is transitioning to directing features with not one but two films in 2014. First up is Fishtail, a portrait of life on a Wyoming cattle farm shot in a mere four days. Speed doesn’t mean sloppy haste: Fishtail makes full use of its 16mm widescreen frame, carefully capturing agricultural processes that connect the present to the old American West. Later this year, expect Renzi’s Richard Gere-starring drama Franny; his documentary premiered yesterday at the Tribeca Film Festival. In an email […]
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Five Questions With Intramural Director Andrew Disney
Take a look at Andrew Disney’s website — with his commercials, music video work et al. neatly assembled in their own sections — and you’ll see a very well-organized director adept at representing himself. An NYU alum, Disney (yes, he’s related, though not closely) made his feature debut with 2011’s Searching for Sonny, shot in his hometown of Fort Worth. Now an Austin resident, Disney returns with Intramural, a comedy of arrested development about a group of friends who get their fifth grade football team back together. Pitched as being in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer and Hot […]
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Life of the Mind: An Interview with Screenwriter Cliff Dorfman
A bit player since 1993, Cliff Dorfman was instantly drawn to the movie business. “I started out scamming my way into whatever premieres were happening in NYC however I could,” he said. “I just wanted to be around it and absorb it. That attitude blossomed into connections that valued my work, which ultimately led to Entourage.” As we sat down for coffee, Cliff talked candidly about his journey and the writing process. After transitioning from acting to writing on HBO’s hit show, Cliff picked up a nomination from the Writers Guild of America and finally found his calling. “Thought I […]
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Hot in Cleveland: Ivan Reitman on Draft Day
Pulling the curtain back on the process through which the National Football League invites new players into its ranks, Draft Day stars Kevin Costner as the embattled general manager of the Cleveland Browns, a beleaguered franchise whose owner (a sly Frank Langella) wants his employee to make a “big splash” at the upcoming NFL draft. Persuaded by the front office of the Seattle Seahawks to acquire the first pick in the draft, Costner’s Sonny Weaver spends the day on the phone talking to his staff, prospective draftees, their agents (one of whom is memorably played by Sean Combs in an […]
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Tilda Swinton’s Best Interview Ever
Last fall Jamie Stuart was conducting interviews for his NYFF51. He ran into the publicist handling Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and asked if he could get a sit down with Tilda Swinton. The answer: yes, but time was tight. The result is the following short interview in which Stuart asked Swinton to just… well, you’ll see. At the end, she did indeed say it was her best interview ever. Cage by way of Glazer? Only Lovers Left Alive opens this Friday from Sony Pictures Classics. Camera: Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera, 2.5k RAW, ProRes 422 post conversion Lens: Canon […]
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“A real sense of intimacy”: Anthony Chen on Ilo Ilo
Anthony Chen has been promoting Ilo Ilo for 10 months and isn’t finished yet: after the UK release in May, a year’s worth of constant interviews and promotional travel may finally be over. Launched at Cannes, Ilo Ilo garnered the Camera d’Or for best first film; a little over three months later, it opened at home in Singapore and became the country’s highest-grossing film of the year. That’s an unusual feat for an emotionally harsh family drama in the arthouse vein. “In Singapore we make about ten films a year,” Chen explained over Skype. “Nine out of ten are usually […]
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Battle Cry: Chris Eska on The Retrieval
Low-budget period indie films are rare in and of themselves, but to find one which inhabits the war-torn south with such authenticity and veracity as Chris Eska’s The Retrieval is rarer still. Set towards the end of the Civil War, the picture follows young Will (Ashton Sanders), a former slave. Along with his uncle Marcus (Keston John), Will has fallen under the sway of brutal bounty hunter Burrell (an eerily effective Bill Oberst Jr.), who threatens to kill them unless they can retrieve escaped slave Nate (Tishuan Scott). Crossing lush forests that double as battlefields, Will and Nate struggle to survive […]
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“The only place to execute some kind of power was the film set”: Agnieszka Holland on her career
Agnieszka Holland’s first taste of Hollywood was a roller coaster ride. Literally. It was 1986 and her war drama Angry Harvest was up for an Oscar. “When you’ve been nominated for a foreign Oscar in those times,” the 65-year-old Polish-born director recalled, “one of the attractions that the American Academy gave the nominees was a free trip to Disneyland.” It was an unexpected reward after toiling on a film that she and her crew made for “no money, no money,” she explained to an appreciative audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox earlier this week. The shoot was so difficult that Holland […]
