Interviews
Interviews
-
Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men
Shirin Neshat doesn’t shy away from complexity. Her internationally lauded photography and video installation work takes as its primary subject matter the epistemology that informs how we view Muslim women and the real world forces which shape there lived experiences. She challenges stereotypes and received knowledge in all of her works, a quality that has not gone unnoticed by the international art world. A pair of major installations in the late 1990’s, Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), both of which received prizes at the Biennial of Venice, long ago cemented her place as one of the world’s most compelling visuals artists. That claim […]
-
Don Hahn, Peter Schneider on Waking Sleeping Beauty
As filmmakers, we are genetically programmed to look to the future. The next script, the next movie, the next deal. After all, the films — on DVD, on hard drives, in canisters stacked in our closets — are their own memories. Except, of course, that a film only tells part of the story. They are the ends of their tales, not the beginnings, and they only tell their own stories, and not the dramas of their making. If at all, those stories that circle around a film are only sometimes relayed in magazine profiles or in books written by people […]
-
A Night at the Movies: Quentin Tarantino on Inglorious Basterds
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
-
Michael Tucker on His and Petra Epperlein’s How to Fold a Flag
With their latest film, How to Fold a Flag, documentary filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have come full circle. Their first feature was 2004’s Gunner Palace, which told the story of soldiers in the Army’s 2/3 Field Artillery as they patroled the streets of Baghdad in late 2003 and early 2004. Told in a gritty style that threw viewers right into the midst of conflict, the film resisted an overt political agenda, focusing instead on the daily lives of the troops. The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair followed, a chillingly Kafkaesque story of an Iraqi […]
-
Director George LaVoo on A Dog Year
In A Dog Year, the feature film directed by George LaVoo from Jon Katz’s memoir, Jeff Bridges plays Katz, a midlife crisis-stricken writer who, impulsively and in an act of near-deliberate emotional self-destruction, adopts a rambunctious and unsocialized border collie, flying him cross country to his family’s split-level home and their two other dogs. And while Lavoo’s movie has its share of Beethoven-esque moments as the collie sprints down suburban streets or mischievously jumps rides on passing automobiles, the film is less about canine hijinks and more about the complex and unexpected emotional roles that dogs play in our lives. […]
-
Hirokazu Kore-eda on Still Walking
A connoisseur of longing and remembrance who brings great sensitivity to each of his reflective fables, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda should be better known in the States, as his films extend the tradition of world-class artists like Naruse and Ozu. Enthralled with the operation of memory and the impact of grief on the lives of everyday people, Kore-eda has created a body of work that’s as rich with feeling as it is modest in tone. In Maborosi (1995), Kore-eda told the story of a quietly devastated young widow struggling to move on after her husband commits suicide. He then departed from […]
-
Director Chris Fuller on Loren Cass
There’s something to be said about not being eager to please. Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass is an aggressively confrontational debut, all the more so because it is so resolutely restrained in its approach. So seemingly oblique is Fuller’s approach that one feasibly could make it through the entire film and not realize that its subject matter is the aftermath of the 1996 St. Petersburg riots; but on the other hand, that subject matter is so deeply ingrained in the film’s form that it doesn’t matter. Loren Cass doesn’t so much deal with its themes as it ingests them, and then […]
-
Tony Stone on Severed Ways
A graduate of Bard College, filmmaker Tony Stone’s first feature, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, unleashes an almost-new genre – the indie historical drama. It might also be the ultimate heavy metal video. Based on historical research, Severed Ways follows two Vikings stranded in medieval America, encountering both Native Americans and monks, everyone trying to survive. It is deeper than an action film as the Vikings are complete characters, violent but missing their girlfriends. In a way, Old Joy with Vikings. Shot on mini-DV, the result is stunning, a period piece that looks like a painting but feels […]
-
In Conversation with Postif Editor Michel Ciment
In connection with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new series “Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema,” Jamie Stuart spoke recently with Positif‘s editor, the noted French film critic and author Michel Ciment. FILMMAKER: I probably know you best from your Kubrick book. What was that like, having the ability to interview him over the years? CIMENT: Well, it came very naturally. I don’t know why. I think he had a piece of mine translated from 1968 — a long essay I did on the work of Kubrick. It was probably the first essay in France to try to […]
-
Of Time and the City: Terence Davies On His Lyrical, Melancholic Memory Piece, Of Time and the City
For Terence Davies, his youth — his early years in Liverpool, his relationship with his mother, and his feelings about being gay in that working-class town — have always provided the raw material for his filmmaking. His celebrated “Terence Davies Trilogy,” a collection of shorts, and later features like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes summon up for the viewer an interior life with a rare combination of lyricism and heartache. These films cemented Davies’s international reputation, but after two more, non-autobiographical features (The House of Mirth and The Neon Bible), he became less active, a development […]
