Interviews
Interviews
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We Are the Night: Interviewing the Team Behind Myth of the American Sleepover
The Myth of the American Sleepover has seduced audiences from Austin to Cannes with the intimacy of its look at a group of teenagers during one long, magical summer night. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell and his team discuss the film’s journey to the screen. By James Ponsoldt
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Writer/Director Janet Grillo on Fly Away
Emotional and involving yet also clear-eyed and with a cool wisdom, Janet Grillo’s Fly Away is a sharply observed and strongly acted tale of a mother learning to allow her autistic teenage daughter to transition into the adult world. Beth Broderick plays Jeanne, a single mom with her own home-office corporate consulting business. Ashley Rickards is her daughter Mandy, and the two have a tight, well-ordered relationship, with Jeanne trying to grow her business during the day while Mandy attends a special needs school. But when Mandy begins a series of violent outbursts at that school, Jeanne’s almost preternatural composure […]
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Zeina Durra and Elodie Bouchez on The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
In the opening scene of Zeina Durra’s debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Asya, a young artist, poses naked for the camera. A hijab on her head, a machine gun in hand, she explains to an off-screen assistant her rationale for why the religious freedom fighter she’s portraying might have waxed her pubic hair. It’s a scene that is as funny as it is politically loaded, much like the movie that follows. Although its milieu — the young, privileged and the artistic — is the stuff coming-of-age movies are made of, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! is more than just another […]
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Josh Radnor, happythankyoumoreplease
Josh Radnor, the writer-director-actor of, happythankyoumoreplease, has a day job: he stars on the hit CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. (Radnor plays the titular “I”— perhaps the most famous “I” in pop-culture since Withnail & I.) happythankyoumoreplease is an immensely likeable New York ensemble film about young people trying to negotiate love and responsibility, and its Audience Award win at Sundance in 2010 marks Radnor, who makes his directorial debut with the movie, as a filmmaker to watch. happythankyoumoreplease features a number of outstanding performances by actors including Malin Akerman, Tony Hale, Zoe Kazan, Kate Mara, Pablo Schreiber, […]
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Uncle Kent Director Joe Swanberg
Since Joe Swanberg’s first feature film, Kissing on the Mouth, premiered at SXSW in 2005, he’s managed to make at least a feature a year, multiple web-series, and found regular launch-pads at SXSW and IFC Films. When Swanberg directs a film, he really functions as a craftsman of the entire work: while he eschews screenplays in favor of improvisation, he works as cinematographer, editor, and usually acts in the film. As the nexus of a low-budget film movement stressing honesty, stories chronicling the lives of people in their twenties, and improvisation (this movement begins with an “M,” ends with “core,” […]
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The Future Director Miranda July
Known as a West coast performance and video artist in the decade before her 2005 award-winning debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July seems to jump effortlessly from one medium to another. Her collection of short stories — No One Belongs Here More Than You — won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2007, and more recently she designed an interactive sculpture garden that was on view in the 2009 Venice Biennale before moving to Union Square this past summer. At this point, there are very few career moves for Miranda July that would […]
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Here Producers Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen
Originally printed in our Fall 2010 issue, we asked a number of leading independent producers about their producing models and how they’re finding everything from financing to material to office space. Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudsen’s latest film, Braden King’s Here, premieres at Sundance on Friday. For Parts and Labor’s Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen, independent film success is all about work. Very hard work. Midway through our conversation about their recent producing successes, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen realized that they hadn’t had a day off in 18 months. “You did seven-day weeks for a year-and-a-half?” […]
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21st Century Man: Abel Ferrara
In person, Abel Ferrara is a whirlwind of gestures and jokes, of quick smiles and vulgar asides, digressions piled upon digressions, even if he’s much sharper and in control of his staccato New Yorkese vernacular than he lets on. Ferrara, who will turn 60 this year, has had one of American indie cinema’s strangest and most fascinating careers, one which has taken the Bronx native from the old 42nd Street’s row of exploitation and porn cinemas to the Croissette in Cannes. Often we talk of middle-aged artists mellowing, but Ferrara maintains a manic, youthful energy that is both infectious and […]
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Director Zachary Oberzan on Your Brother. Remember?
One of the great joys of being a critic is the childlike sense of wonder that comes with being the first to discover something new (that, and as the esteemed music critic Lester Bangs once put it, getting free shit). I first met Zachary Oberzan after seeing his one-man show Rambo Solo, developed with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, in early 2009. (Yes, for the record the tickets were comp since I was reviewing for Theater Online.) At the time I wrote, “I have seen the theater future and its name is Rambo – or more accurately, one fearless thespian named […]
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The Mourning After: Tom Ford on A Single Man
The following first appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter 2010 edition. —Editor Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its story, a melancholy tale of a day in the life of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) who is still mourning the unexpected death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), is a far cry from the sex-saturated tableaus that Ford created for […]
