Interviews
Interviews
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“I Don’t Have to Pick Up a Gun, I Can Just Pick Up a Camera:” Jia Zhangke on A Touch Of Sin
“I really want to say that we are all connected,” Jia Zhangke said Monday night. “This is our issue.” If that makes his latest film, A Touch Of Sin, sound like some sort of Chinese Crash redux, it’s just a quirk of phrasing: the connection Zhangke’s thinking of is an epidemic of violence in China, which he describes as a response of the economically dispossessed trying to reclaim some form of dignity. Viewed as isolated actions, the four violent incidents dramatized in A Touch Of Sin might seem like singular occurrences; stitched together, they’re obviously connected symptoms of Chinese society […]
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Andrea Arnold on Honing Her Next Project as Film Society of Lincoln Center’s First Filmmaker in Residence
Andrea Arnold is still a little jet-lagged. Meeting me at Indie Food & Wine, the restaurant inside Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center, the Oscar-winning director of the short film Wasp, and the acclaimed features Red Road, Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, has barely settled after flying into New York a day earlier. It’s four days before the start of the 51st New York Film Festival, and Arnold hasn’t even gotten a chance to look over the main slate. “All I’ve done is put a lot of food in my freezer,” the English filmmaker says. Arnold has good […]
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Strange Fruit: Jim Mickle on We Are What We Are
Jim Mickle, whose 2010 post-apocalyptic monster picture Stake Land launched him into the top tier of filmmakers making artfully rendered low-budget horror pictures, is back with a lyrically photographed, deeply felt family drama that also happens to be about people that eat other people. In his remake of Jorge Grau’s fabulous 2011 Mexican shocker/political satire/cannibalism-themed exercise in existential miserablism We Are What We Are, Mickle moves the action from a hideously corrupt Mexico City to the rainy forests of the rural Catskills. It opens with the sudden and distressing death of a mysteriously stricken woman, Emma Parker (Kassie DePaiva). Her family, […]
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Elaine McMillion and Jeff Soyk on Hollow
Elaine McMillion, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2013, has been keeping busy since launching her interactive doc Hollow, about life in the hard-hit county of McDowell in south-western West Virginia, in June at http://hollowdocumentary.com. It immediately earned praise and a sizeable audience; she’s since presented for events and organizations like StoryCode and Independent Film Week, and Hollow continues racking up the positive reviews. The project includes an html5 site with dozens of short videos, photographs, text, user-generated content on Instagram, and content such as videos produced by the film’s subjects, many of whom the Hollow […]
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Seed&Spark’s WestFest: Streaming to Theaters
Both a selective crowdfunding site and curated streaming platform, Seed&Spark has proven itself a unique enclave for filmmakers and viewers since its inception in 2012. From October 1-3, the hybrid will fully realize its “Cinema” component with a three-part film program at The HUB LA. Screening a total of six films from the recently launched Conversation series, the festival calls upon S&S founder Emily Best, Sundance programmer Christine Davila, and Twitch Film editor Ben Umstead to bring their selections to a live format. Filmmaker spoke with Seed&Spark’s director of content, Amanda Trokan, about the unprecedented event, and bridging the gap between online and […]
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Filminute @ Filmmaker: Fredrik Thelander’s Thursday
Throughout the month of September, Filmmaker is partnering with the online short film competition Filminute, hosting five of its nominated titles and running interviews with the director’s of these one-minute movies. Tell us who you are (where you’re from, background, previous credits as a filmmaker) I am a film director from Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve been working as a director for the past ten years and I am currently running my own production company, Notre Dame Film. I started in the business as editor and motion graphics artist. After some time I found interest in directing and went to study film […]
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Filminute @ Filmmaker: David Stevens’ M22
Throughout the month of September, Filmmaker is partnering with the online short film competition Filminute, hosting five of its nominated titles and running interviews with the director’s of these one-minute movies. Tell us who you are (where you’re from, background, previous credits as a filmmaker) My name is David Stevens and I live in Breda in the Netherlands. I currently study film at art academy AKV|St.Joost and prior to that I studied photography at Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam. I am now the owner of my own photography and film production company davidstevens.nl. In my work, I strive to bring a world […]
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C.O.G.’s Kyle Patrick Alvarez on the Art of Indie Adaptation
Kyle Patrick Alvarez has carved out an unusual niche for himself within American independent cinema; as he himself comments, “Everyone keeps on joking I have This American Life authors named David cornered now.” Alvarez made his feature debut in 2009 with Easier with Practice, a poignant, heartfelt drama about a young man who begins a phone relationship, initially sexual and then later also romantic, with a woman (or is it?) who randomly calls a motel room he’s staying in. Based on an autobiographical essay, “What Are You Wearing?”, written for GQ by This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart, the film debuted at CineVegas, had a small theatrical […]
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High in Bed-Stuy: Shaka King on Newlyweeds
The lovers at the center of Shaka King’s Newlyweeds are young Brooklynites whose romance more or less revolves around their love of marijuana. King’s often outrageously funny and wistfully bleak movie is a black stoner answer to James Ponsoldt’s Smashed; with genre-bending humor and style to burn, the movie asks delicate questions about the nature and sustainability of their relationship and fissures that may pull them apart. Amari Cheatom’s Lyle is a repo man for a rent-to-own electronics and appliance store while Trae Harris’ Nina is a museum tour guide. He’s a little angry and brighter than his job title would indicate […]
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“We Treat the De-Aging Process Like Plastic Surgery”: Edson Williams on +1‘s Visual Effects
You may not know Edson Williams’ name, but odds are you’ve seen his work. Since the mid-’90s he’s built his career not behind the camera but behind a monitor, creating special effects for well over 100 of the most visually arresting films of the last twenty years, from high-concept films like Titanic, Avatar, Hugo, Prometheus, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Iron Man, Skyfall, and J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot to just as many films where the visual effects are much more subtle, including Cruel Intentions, The Princess Diaries 2, The Devil Wears Prada, J. Edgar, and […]
