Interviews
Interviews
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Nicole Kidman: Hollywood’s Unlikely Rebel
While other A-List actresses have chased the kind of star vehicles that kill on opening weekend, Nicole Kidman has been quietly becoming Hollywood’s most unlikely rebel—a statuesque leading lady with a snowballing penchant for bold auteur partnerships. It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the gal from Days of Thunder began her metamorphosis into the daring muse currently drawing viewers to The Paperboy (above), but many would likely cite Gus Van Sant’s To Die For as the pivotal work in Kidman’s filmography. The sheer unlikeability of the delusional, cradle-robbing viper Suzanne Stone screams of Tinseltown-bombshell repellant, but Kidman executed the role […]
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Interview with Gayby Director Jonathan Lisecki
Gayby might be the first feature from writer/director Jonathan Lisecki, but its ace comic timing and deft depiction of physical humor suggest a seasoned comedic maestro. Expanded from a short that Lisecki shopped around the festival circuit in 2010 (it debuted at Slamdance and went on to hit more than 100 venues), the film is easily one of the year’s funniest, much thanks to its maker’s classic instincts for drumming up laughs. A veteran of independent theater, Lisecki couples a sharp, knowing wit with a mature sense of benevolence, yielding a well-rounded comedy for a demographic that desperately needs it. […]
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Five Questions with Excuse Me for Living Director Ric Klass
Ric Klass was a teacher. A student. A financier. A consultant. An entrepreneur. A writer. Not necessarily in that order. Now, he’s a director, who, for his second feature, returned to the annals and decided to adapt his novel Excuse Me For Living for the screen. With an ensemble featuring the likes of Christopher Lloyd and Jerry Stiller, the black comedy follows a trust-funded, pill-popping megalomaniac as he wades through treatment, his psychologist, his dysfunctional parents, his paramours, and the group therapy sessions he’s been snookered into managing. Klass speaks about his career transitions, craft, and Excuse Me For […]
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Daniel Raim on Something’s Gonna Live
The Man on Lincoln’s Nose (2000), Daniel Raim’s short documentary about legendary production designer Robert Boyle (North by Northwest, The Birds), was nominated for an Oscar; Boyle himself received an honorary Oscar in 2008 at the age of 98. Over the course of several years, Raim continued to film Boyle in candid interviews and conversations with his production design colleagues (Henry Bumstead, Albert Nozaki, Harold Michelson) and cinematographers Haskell Wexler and Conrad Hall, and produced an equally engaging follow-up feature, Something’s Gonna Live (2010). The film is a warm and contemplative portrait of the aging Boyle and his friends as […]
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Five Questions with Damsels in Distress Director Whit Stillman
Thirteen years is a long time for any voice to stay silent, let alone one as distinctive and intrinsic to the American independent scene as Whit Stillman’s. Yet well over a decade has gone by since The Last Days of Disco – the final part in Stillman’s self-described “Doomed-Bourgeouis-in-Love” trilogy and his last feature film outing. But this past spring, audiences were reintroduced to Stillman’s idiosyncratic wit with Damsels in Distress (out now on DVD and VOD), a whimsical, literate, and classically hilarious college-set comedy. Starring Greta Gerwig as Violet, the leader of a clique of women at the fictional Seven […]
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Dreams from a Petrified Head Director Dan Ouellette
Dan Ouellette has had a long career in the New York independent film community, starting with his work as a production designer for Hal Hartley in 1990 with Trust and then, in 1992, with Simple Men. He’s also an accomplished visual artist (examples of which can be seen at his Neurotica Divine site) and has directed stylish music videos for the bands Android Lust and The Birthday Massacre. Dan is also, full disclosure, an old friend who I’ve also worked with professionally many times. (Films he’s production designed that Robin O’Hara and I produced include What Happened Was…, Saving Face, […]
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Five Questions with Photographic Memory Director Ross McElwee
When Ross McElwee heeded the call to become a filmmaker in the mid 1970s, he enrolled in M.I.T.’s film program and studied with pioneering cinéma vérité documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. Lighter, smaller cameras and advancements in sync-sound made it possible for one man to do what a film crew did not too many years before. McElwee would synthesize the lessons learned and use the new technology to create a distinctive kind of cinema. McElwee’s films are often filed in the “personal documentary” category. Like many labels, personal documentary seems inadequate, if not downright misleading. Yes, his family, friends, […]
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James Ponsoldt, Smashed
Kate Hannah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a devoted elementary school teacher who, early in James Ponsoldt’s new film Smashed, shows up for work with a wicked hangover and vomits in front of her students. Forced to explain her behavior, she tells her class and colleagues that she’s pregnant. The lie leaves her feeling awful, and it’s soon clear to Kate that she needs to back away from the bottle. After all, this isn’t a one-off incident. She and her husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) are almost constantly drunk, and it’s pretty clear to her that they live for booze as much […]
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Five Questions with Least Among Saints Director Martin Papazian
Martin Papazian has been a working actor for nearly two decades, supporting a list of heavyweights in projects like Jarhead and 24. For Papazian, learning on the sidelines from his colleagues and directors became an essential task, and ultimately has prepared him for his most pivotal role yet — a filmmaker. Working at break-neck speed for a total of 19 shooting days, Papazian made his feature debut as a writer/director with Least Among Saints. The film, in which he is also the lead actor, begins with a soldier returning from war and a boy who’s had to grow up in […]
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Ursula Meier and Agnes Godard on Sister
Switzerland’s submission for the best international picture is Ursula Meier’s Sister, starring the stunning and earthy Léa Seydoux as a Swiss hot mess and Kacey Mottet Klein as her weedy 12-year-old brother who supports them both through petty thefts. It’s a subtle, complex film that avoids obvious polarities of class, family, even landscape. As director Meier said to me recently of the mountain resort setting, and about finding her way into the script by focusing on the location of the ski lift cable cars, “It’s the place where he belongs, between two worlds. And it’s also the rhythm of the […]
