Interviews
Interviews
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Things Fall Apart: Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s The Unity of All Things at BAM’s Migrating Forms
The Unity of All Things, the first feature by artist Alexander Carver and filmmaker Daniel Schmidt, is an erotic queer sci-fi with an experimental narrative that combines particle physics, critique of global capitalism, various existential quandaries, and playfully perverse digressions into gender politics. It’s an unclassifiable micro-budget film shot on Super 16 and Super 8 in locations ranging from China, Switzerland, Chicago, and the Arizona desert, and has dialogue in at least three different languages. As its title might imply, the film’s ambition is undercut by a generous serving of self-aware humor. The film receives its New York premiere tonight […]
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Kristoffer Gansing on transmediale 2014
In 1988, VideoFilmFest launched as part of the Berlinale. It gradually evolved until it was rechristened the transmediale in 1998, and today it’s one of the premier festivals for film, art, video, and digital work. Kristoffer Gansing has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011, and for this year’s theme he’s selected the “afterglow,” an exploration of how media technologies and practices are turned into trash. As the festival’s website explains, “As media technologies have now become completely integrated into everyday life, they function similarly to natural resources, producing physical and immaterial waste products that get appropriated in such diverse contexts […]
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D.P. Phedon Papamichael Talks the B&W Imagery of Nebraska, Lighting Movie Stars and his Online Film School
Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael is finding a new audience of fans with his striking black-and-white camerawork in Nebraska, a father-and-son road trip starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte. With this third collaboration with director Alexander Payne, following Sideways and The Descendants, Papamichael is on a list of potential Oscar nominees. He was recently included in a Hollywood Reporter roundtable of five top cinematographers, a series that often portends year-end award winners. His other work includes James Mangold’s Walk the Line and Oliver Stone’s W. He just completed Monuments Men with George Clooney. Papamichael was born in Athens and studied photography and art […]
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Hoop Dreams: Josh and Benny Safdie on Lenny Cooke
An intimate portrait of a near-forgotten high school basketball phenom turned undrafted afterthought, Lenny Cooke is the first documentary from the young New York wunderkinds Benny and Josh Safdie. Given that their previous films, The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs (I miss its original title, Go Get Some Rosemary), were intimate, 16 millimeter throwbacks to another era of rough and tumble New York independent filmmaking, this film comes as a surprise in a way. Made by self-professed basketball fanatics in the midst of a season of discontent (poor Knicks), Lenny Cooke is a project that predates any of the Safdies narrative efforts. An emotionally […]
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“That’s the Movie, That’s the Kind of Overlapping Mess That Bob Loves:” Joan Tewkesbury on Writing Nashville
Robert Altman’s Nashville is one of the towering achievements of 1970s New Hollywood Cinema, a portrait of the hub of the country music scene by juggling a myriad of characters, from self-appointed king of the community Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) to its biggest star, Connie White (Karen Black), from the emotionally fragile Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) to comically intrepid BBC reporter Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) and campaigning politician Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips), a presence seen but never heard. A huge, highly accomplished cast — which also includes Ned Beatty, Shelly Duvall, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Barbara Harris and a very young Jeff […]
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Children of the Revolution: Director Narimane Mari on her Award-Winning Bloody Beans
The focus this year’s edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (commonly known as CPH:DOX) was squarely on the political, with programs exploring the intersection of art and activism. Guest curators Ai Weiwei and The Yes Men programmed eclectic sidebars under the festival’s theme “Everything is Under Control.” A section devoted to Chinese documentaries emphasized the medium’s vital role in surveying the state, and the festival added a new award explicitly addressing the recent crop of documentaries that operate between investigative journalism and activism. Taking the festival’s top prize was Bloody Beans, the first feature by French-Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, […]
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“I Can’t Hate Anyone Unless I Love Them:” Drew Tobia, Eleanore Pienta and Rachel Wolther on See You Next Tuesday
Once in a while, a film comes across your radar that plays so perfectly to your sensibilities, it seems someone handcrafted it with you in mind. These sorts of films are usually small, personal endeavors, that — preference-pending — are too niche for mass audiences, and struggle to find the complimentary festival or forum that will realize their loaded potential. Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday is the lastest entry in this unjustly underground canon. A cult hit in the making if there ever was one, See You Next Tuesday concerns Mona, a pregnant, loudmouthed, lonesome and unhinged grocery store cashier, inhabited by the utterly uninhibited […]
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Five Questions with Breakfast With Curtis Director Laura Colella
The following interview first appeared on the Filmmaker website in June 2012 to coincide with the world premiere of Breakfast with Curtis at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Laura Colella’s movie goes on theatrical release through BOND360/Abramorama from today. 25 New Faces alum Laura Colella’s Breakfast with Curtis unfolds at its own pace, not unlike the leisurely chats it spends so much time documenting. Colella, who wrote, directed, and acted in the film, used her own home as a shooting location and cast her real-life neighbors and housemates in prominent roles. Centered around a bookseller named Syd (Theo Green) who enlists […]
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Director Ryan Lightbourn shoots Sleepwalkers with the RED Scarlet and a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera
Ryan Lightbourn grew up in the Bahamas, but went to business school in the U.S. Becoming interested in music, Lightbourn transferred to Full Sail University after graduating. He wanted to become a music producer, but after playing with Final Cut Pro he started making “goofy little short films and music videos with my friends.” Switching to the film program he quickly decided that he could learn more by going out and actually shooting things than by going to class, so he dropped out and bought some gear. He continued shooting music videos, but always wanted to make films, and in […]
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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Editor Alan Bell on Editing for Performance
The day before its release, Alan Edward Bell A.C.E., the editor of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, as well as The Amazing Spider-Man and 500 Days of Summer talked about his career and his editing philosophy at a meeting of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bell’s father worked in the film industry, and Bell was sure he didn’t want to do that; he wanted to be a rock climber. He became, he said, pretty good at it. But to pay rent he took people out rock climbing, and most of them were from the […]
