Interviews
Interviews
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on Image and the Roles of a Filmmaker
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, is being aired as part of the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and Sin País (below) director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of […]
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on Documentary Filmmaking and Photography
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, is being aired as part of the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and Sin País director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of their craft. […]
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Writer/Director Stephen Chbosky on The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky has been influenced by a lot of angsty classics, like The Graduate and Catcher in the Rye. In 1999, he made his own contribution to the canon, releasing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a young-adult novel whose tough themes helped make it a formidable word-of-mouth success, becoming the best-selling title from MTV Books by 2000. Within seven years, it sold nearly 800,000 copies, while also getting regularly challenged by the American Library Association for its exploration of drug use, homosexuality, and adolescent suicide. A film version seemed inevitable, but Chbosky wasn’t ready to hand over his polarizing […]
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Steve James, Head Games
In my early teens, I played football at Moeller High School. Like most of the children who sought to play for the school that had for decades fielded one of the country’s preeminent high school football teams, the game consumed my life. For a brief period, I would have sacrificed anything to be a starting Crusader footballer. For a time, on the freshman team, I was. A mammoth child (I’ve slimmed a bit since then), although not nearly as mammoth as some of my peers, I played offensive line, where one’s head normally rams, time after time, against that of a […]
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Five Questions with Radio Unnameable Directors Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson
Today Kino Lorber releases Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s documentary Radio Unnameable, starting with an exclusive run at Film Forum in New York City. The following interview was originally published on the eve of the film’s screening at BAMcinemaFest. For decades, Bob Fass has been a unique voice on the airwaves of New York City’s freeform radio station WBAI with his show “Radio Unnameable.” From hosting a young Bob Dylan to organizing spontaneous youth gatherings with the Yippies, Fass has come to define an era of radio that had a profound influence on our culture. In their new documentary film […]
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Five Questions with Backwards Writer/Actress Sarah Megan Thomas
Sarah Megan Thomas recently returned to her hometown of Haverford, Pennsylvania, with a script and a camera crew in tow, to shoot her screenwriting debut Backwards, which she also produced and stars in. Thomas plays competitive rower Abi Brooks who, after she fails to win a seat on the US Olympic boat, must steer her life in a new direction, ultimately landing a coaching job for the rowing team at her old high school. Just as in rowing, Abi has to look backwards — to old places and ex-boyfriends — in order to move forward, with her sport and her […]
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Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best Writer/Director/Star Ryan O’Nan
No one can say actor/musician Ryan O’Nan didn’t pull his weight in his directorial debut, Brooklyn Brothers Beat The Best, which makes its theatrical debut on September 21 via Oscilloscope Laboratories. Besides directing, writing, and starring in the film, O’Nan wrote and sang most of the songs on the soundtrack (album out 9/18 on ATCO Records). A 2011 IFP Narrative Labs project that premiered at Toronto last year, Brooklyn Brothers is the story of two ne’er-do-well musicians who make an unlikely alliance, embarking on the kind of quixotic journey that’s tailor-made for a buddy movie. But O’Nan’s film finds itself […]
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Born Out of Grief: Kathy Leichter’s Here One Day
I first found out about Kathy Leichter’s documentary, Here One Day (above), via an email announcing the film’s Kickstarter campaign. Like many independent filmmakers, I receive many such emails. But what set this one apart from the others was the sender, filmmaker/editor (and friend) Pola Rapaport, whose work I greatly admire – and the film’s subject. Here One Day (screening at IFP’s Independent Film Week, Spotlight on Documentaries) is about Kathy’s mother’s bipolar disorder and suicide. It’s a story about what a person with mental illness does to a family — a story many of us can relate to — and […]
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Five Questions with Knuckleball! Directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
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Angela Davis on Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners
“When the doors slid open, furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That’s why they had cuffed by hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers were crowded into the lobby. Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back and between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.” These lines from Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, written at the age of 28 and edited by Toni Morrison, describe the way she remembers a humiliating perp walk four […]
