Interviews
Interviews
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Storaro Talks Shop
Originally published in our Web Exclusives section on June 8, 2007. It is entirely without hyperbole to introduce Vittorio Storaro as one of the most singular and influential cinematographers in the progression of modern motion pictures. His color palette on films such as The Conformist and Apocalypse Now is without peer, and long-lasting collaborations with directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola and Warren Beatty have been recognized with three Oscars for Best Cinematography (Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981) and The Last Emperor (1987)). Storaro’s latest film is Caravaggio, screening this week as part of Lincoln Center’s series “Open Roads: New […]
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Werner Herzog on Into the Abyss
In his films, Werner Herzog has traveled the Amazon, journeyed to Antarctica and, most recently, descended through time into the caves of France to uncover centuries-old cave paintings. So, his trip to a small town in Texas awaiting the capital punishment of a young murderer might have been less epic were it not for the moral dilemmas, lingering anguish and genuine strangeness he finds there. Eschewing the tropes of typical capital punishment documentaries, Herzog, with his German-accented voice jutting from behind the camera, lends an empathetic ear to the words of not only the killer but his accomplice, the victims’ […]
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DOC NYC: Interview with Festival Directors Thom Powers & Raphaela Neihausen
The living room-sized lobby of the IFC Center was teeming with people over the past two weeks as DOC NYC concluded its second year. With more days, more films, more panels and more filmmakers in attendance, the festival was a veritable feast of documentaries. Among the faces passing through the crowd — including Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple — were those of festival directors Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen. Wearing the titles of artistic director and executive director, respectively, the husband and wife team conceived DOC NYC from their Manhattan apartment. Though involved in their own […]
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Karen Mintz and Simon Egleton on Their Frank Bender Doc
Karen Mintz has just finished shooting her documentary, The Recomposer of The Decomposed, about the forensic artist Frank Bender, who died recently. She is about to move into the post-production phase. I had the opportunity to meet with her and her producer Simon Egleton and talk about her film, the pros and cons of no-budget filmmaking, and the friend that she made, and also lost, during the process. Filmmaker: Can you start by telling me a little about how you became a filmmaker and what your background is? Mintz: I started working in production 15 years ago. I just kind […]
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Director Matt Osterman on Ghost From the Machine
When Matt Osterman attended the IFP Narrative Lab a few years ago, his $25,000, science fiction/supernatural thriller, about a grief-stricken man who builds a machine to communicate with the dead, was titled Phasma ex Machina. But when the film was finished and released this summer on DVD and, later, iTunes and Netflix by Screen Media, it went under the less obscure title of Ghost from the Machine. Now, however, another name change is in the works. This August Universal Pictures acquired the remake rights, attaching Gary Shore and Nathan Parker to write and direct. The new film will be called […]
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Director Jarred Alterman on Convento
Since I spend part of my year in Amsterdam I’m always on the lookout for interesting Dutch folks to write about. Kinetic artist Christiaan Zwanikken fit the bill and then some. Zwanikken lives most months at his family’s retreat in Portugal, which was once a monastery but now serves as the laboratory for his Frankenstein creations, robots crafted from servomotors and the remains of wildlife he finds on the ancient grounds. American filmmaker Jarred Alterman is also fascinated by Zwanikken’s work – so much so that he crafted Convento, an “art/doc” that follows not just the Dutch artist and his […]
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Director Jesse Baget on Cellmates
Jesse Baget’s Cellmates (originally titled White Knight) was one of my top picks at this year’s Arizona Underground Film Festival – and the biggest surprise of the fest simply because when I read the feature’s synopsis in the program my first thought was there’s no way this film would work. When one sees the phrase “buddy comedy” the names Tom Sizemore and Stacy Keach just don’t come to mind. Add in Héctor Jiménez of Nacho Libre and we might be getting closer…but still. Sizemore as a former Klansman meets Keach as a potato-obsessed warden meets Jiménez as an activist immigrant […]
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Cave Dwellers: 127 Hours DPs Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak
This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song. When director Danny Boyle first got in touch with d.p. Anthony Dod Mantle about 127 Hours, the film following their Academy Award-winning collaboration Slumdog Millionaire, Dod Mantle remembers him saying that “he was convinced that the only way to get through this [movie] would be to subject an actor to a pretty extraordinary physical experience in as intense […]
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DOC NYC: Directors Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler on Flat Daddy
In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy, premiering at DOC NYC this Sunday at 4PM and screening again on Nov. 8th at 1:30, sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on hold or torn apart by the absence of their […]
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Editor Tariq Anwar on the Art of Postproduction
Thursday night EditShare sponsored a seminar with Oscar-nominated film editor Tariq Anwar at the Florence Gould Hall on East 59th Street in Manhattan. Despite rain the evening was well attended by writers, directors, and especially editors, and Anwar’s presentation — basically a low-key Q&A session moderated by Manhattan Edit Workshop’s Josh Apter — was fun and informative. Here are a few thoughts he shared. Anwar got into filmmaking somewhat accidentally, starting by driving a truck then getting work as an assistant director. After doing a great deal of yelling at crews, he decided “the cutting room was the most civilized […]
