Interviews
Interviews
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Panos Cosmatos, Beyond the Black Rainbow
It’s a strange paradox of today’s cinema that so many films feature lavish and eye-popping special effects yet are such ordinary viewing experiences. Sure, today’s VFX and surround sound are capable of overwhelming you, of beating you into submission, but, with a handful of exceptions, they seldom take you further. One film that does is Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow, an astonishingly ambitious debut feature that is as much an elegant art object as it is a science-fiction head trip of the highest order. Set in 1983 — and feeling as if it was actually made in 1983 too […]
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Marks Elijah Rosenberg Talks Rooftop Films
As a writer and filmmaker just beginning to branch out into indie festival programming, I’ve been looking for an excuse to chat with Mark Elijah Rosenberg for quite some time. The man behind the granddaddy of open-air cinema (hard to believe Rooftop Films is now in its 16th year!) has seen his DIY endeavor expand from avant-garde shorts shown on a roof above his humble apartment to Academy Awards-destined features screened in diverse outdoor venues throughout NYC’s boroughs (and beyond). But what’s most impressive to me is that he’s managed to accomplish all this while staying firmly grounded in his […]
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Alex Holdridge: “I’ll Never Go to Los Angeles Again”
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
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Steve Collins, You Hurt My Feelings
Steve Collins’ You Hurt My Feelings is the story of emotionally remote and unavailable people, a trio of wounded individuals who fail to connect with one another. Though Collins’ film deals with familiar subject matter, its tale is told with such clever minimalism and discernible sweetness that it goes down rather smoothly. While the characters may not be able to express themselves emotionally, Collins and his director of photography, Jeremy Saulnier (Septien, Putty Hill), find real poetry in the changing of the New England seasons, the passage of time providing an even greater window in the the failed lives on display. John […]
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Using R/C Helicopters to Fly Your Camera: Part Two
In this second part of an interview with Eric Austin of HeliVideo, Eric talks about camera control, future cameras, and the most amazing sequence he’s shot so far: What camera control are you doing remotely? We have remote record-on, off from the ground, and we can also punch-in. The lens we are currently using on the Sony is actually the kit lens, usually the 18 to 55. Are you using that because of the image stabilization? Yes, in part. The gimbal is stabilized, and with the extra little stabilization in the lens it just takes out the little nicks […]
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Using R/C Helicopters To Fly Your Camera : Part 1
Eric Austin of HeliVideo has been flying RC aircraft and helicopters for about ten years, but it was two years ago that he first put a DSLR camera on a helicopter and started shooting aerial footage. Two years on and his company is shooting material for the Discovery Channel, ABC and others, primarily using the Sony NEX-FS100. I spoke to Eric recently about how he got into the business, and what’s involved in using RC helicopters. The first half of the interview covers his beginning, the cameras he’s been using, and operating considerations. The second half of the interview covers […]
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Damon Russell, Snow on tha Bluff
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about. Easy to dismiss as “Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent — and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black […]
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Five Questions with Nancy, Please Director Andrew Semans
Sometimes the simplest premises can be the most devastating. Andrew Semans’ debut feature Nancy, Please follows Paul (Will Rogers), a Yale PhD student as he tries (or, kind of tries) and utterly fails to complete his dissertation. His excuse for this lack of productivity? He’s accidentally left an essential annotated copy of Dickens’ Little Dorrit at his old apartment. Worse still, the book is now in the care of his ex-roommate Nancy (Eléonore Hendricks), a woman who he views as something of a sociopath. As Paul’s attempts to get the book back grow more and more desperate, Semans plumbs the […]
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Five Questions with Rubberneck Director Alex Karpovsky
Over the last few years, actor Alex Karpovsky has slowly grown into one of the most recognizable faces in American indies. And with a recurring role on Girls, Lena Dunham’s upcoming HBO series, he stands poised to break through to a wider audience. As if he wasn’t busy enough, Karpovsky has found time to migrate behind the lens for Rubberneck, his directorial followup to 2009’s Second City improv documentary Trust Us, This is All Made Up. A psychological thriller about an unhinged scientist (Karpovsky, directing himself) who grows increasingly obsessed with a co-worker he’s recently had a one-night stand with, […]
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A Conversation with Cabin in the Woods Director Drew Goddard
They say you have to know the rules to break them. And Drew Goddard is a man very familiar with how to write for genre, collaborating over the last decade with some of the biggest names in American horror and sci-fi. In 2008 Goddard penned the screenplay to J.J. Abram’s found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, and before that he served as a series writer on television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, and Alias. So it should come as no surprise that his directorial debut, Cabin in the Woods, not only pays homage to the genre tropes implied in […]
