Interviews
Interviews
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Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Monster Mash
In the opening beats of The Bride!, the second feature written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) mutters to herself from some dark corner of the subconscious ether. She rasps about the sequel to her most iconic work, Frankenstein, that she never got to write before she died in 1851. What would this hypothetical book be, she wonders: “Is it a horror story, a ghost story, or, most frightening of all, a love story?” What follows is a cat-and-mouse road movie, a jewel-toned Jazz Age thriller, a romantic caper following Frankenstein’s monster—who goes by […]
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“A Trippy, Psychedelic Musical Odyssey”: Josef Gatti on Phenomena
“I found a way to look into the universe,” says non-fiction Australian filmmaker Josef Gatti in his feature debut Phenomena. Paradoxically, it turns out that the wonders of the universe are perceptible right here on Earth—so long as one has a laissez-faire approach to homemade (and often dangerous) science experiments and access to high-tech camera equipment capable of capturing molecular reactions in real-time. These reactions, subatomic as they may be, possess a staggering beauty. Guided in part by his father, a physics professor, Gatti trains his cinematic eye on the hypnotic (and yes, most would say downright “trippy”) visual effects […]
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How The Secret Agent Became Brazil’s Reluctant Political Rorschach Test
Thursday, March 5 marks the voting deadline for Oscar voters. For The Secret Agent, it’s the end of a long road. The Brazilian Oscar contender is a contender in four major categories, including Best Picture, a stunning outcome for the unique period drama set in the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Meanwhile, another voting deadline looms around the corner in the movie’s home country. In October, Brazilians will vote in the first round of presidential elections for the first time since their previous president, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, lost to the Workers’ Party candidate Luis Inácio Lula da Silva […]
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The Sommelier’s Amulet: Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman on The Napa Boys
“The Napa Boys—you’ve always known them, and they’re back.” It’s the kind of premise you could imagine only a very tired person nodding along with, but the way The Napa Boys—the new comedy from comedians Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman, the former directing and both serving as co-writers—went from this vague concept to a wide release with Magnolia Pictures somewhat beggars belief. “I don’t know if [Magnolia] lost a bet…” Weitzman laughs in our interview. The most concise description of The Napa Boys might run something like “Sideways 4: Beta House,” with all the various and contradictory associations—Fox Searchlight dramedies, […]
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“I’m a Reactor”: Stellan Skarsgård, Back To One, Episode 382
Stellan Skarsgård is a celebrated Swedish actor whose career spans more than five decades across European and Hollywood cinema. He first gained attention in Scandinavia before becoming an international screen presence in films such as Breaking the Waves and Good Will Hunting. He went on to deliver acclaimed performances in movies like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Dune, Dune Part 2, and television series like Andor and Chernobyl. In his latest, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Skarsgård gifts us with perhaps his most robust and richest work in the form of Gustav, a once-prominent filmmaker struggling to mend fractured ties with his daughters. On this episode, he details the environment […]
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“I Wanted the Film to Have the Vignetted Existence of a Fable”: Sarmad Sultan Khoosat on his Genre-bending Berlinale Premiere Lali
A bullet grazes the shin of matriarch Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed) at her beloved son’s wedding. It was a celebratory bullet; shooting guns into the air replaces fireworks in this part of provincial Pakistan. Even though Sohni Ammi just needed stitches, the groom’s family blamed the freak mishap on the ongoing curse of Zeba, the bride (Mamya Shajaffar), whose previous two marriages never materialized because the grooms-to-be died under mysterious circumstances. Her last fiancé was stung by a scorpion when the couple was making out on a dune, Zeba would later admit to her new husband, Sajawal (Channan Hanif), who […]
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The Passion of Amir Naderi
Amir Naderi is on the move. I connected with the Iranian filmmaker over WhatsApp on a chilly February morning, or at least morning where I am. He’s calling me from Rome, which is the second stop on his tour through Europe teaching classes on filmmaking. In every country he visits, he tells me, he shapes the curriculum around that nation’s cinema history. It’s a pedagogical approach that aptly reflects the cosmopolitanism of a filmmaker who has shot films in the United States, Japan, and Italy, and who hopes to potentially make a film in Australia. “If I can do it,” […]
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“I Really Wanted to Create a Chekhovian World”: Kornél Mundruczó on the Amy Adams-starring Berlinale Competition Film At the Sea
Drumroll: Amy Adams stares at you. It’s intense—not haunting, but certainly not inviting. The camera pulls away, and it’s her character Laura who’s playing the drums. It’s daytime, there’s unremarkable company around. Music, no dance. Soon, she will leave the facility. Soon, she will return to her Cape Cod home, to her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), to her barely tolerant teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), to her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) who scurries away from her embrace, to her dance company that made her famous but which she now wants to quit, and to the forbidden […]
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“The Underbelly of Lagos”: Olive Nwosu on Lady
Lady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu’s neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver’s gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She’s not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of revolution around eradicating gasoline subsidies. Played with fiery commitment by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Lady doesn’t even necessarily care that she’s a “woman in a man’s world,” or if […]
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“What Does a Thing Provide You With?”: Amanda Kramer on the Props and Interiors in By Design
“I have never seen the problem with fetishizing objects and fetishizing people as though they were objects,” director Amanda Kramer tells me in a conversation ahead of the release of her latest film, By Design. “It doesn’t mean we don’t also see the person for their soul…They elicit romance. They elicit seduction. There’s something drawing you in, compelling, alluring, and the object itself is not necessarily lesser-than because it’s looked at in this way.” Kramer’s provocative theory is instructive. Her latest film, By Design, about a lonely woman named Camille (Juliette Lewis) who swaps bodies with a beautiful chair and […]
