Interviews
Interviews
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“Significant Portions of the Movie Were Literally Just Lit by the Television”: Kyle Edward Ball on Skinamarink
The primordial fear of being watched, stalked and caught by an unknown entity lurking in the dark is the basis of Skinamarink, the microbudget feature debut from writer-director-editor Kyle Edward Ball. The incredibly loose narrative follows young siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) as they patter around their family’s strikingly ordinary middle-class house in the dead of night circa 1995. Their parents are nowhere to be found, all of the doors have mysteriously vanished and the lights eventually stop working. While this phenomena is enough to chill any child, their well-being is most threatened by a supernatural […]
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“If We Wanted To Visualize This at All, We’d Have to Do It Ourselves”: Steve James on A Compassionate Spy
Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy is an unexpectedly charitable portrait of a man who betrayed his country for a higher cause. Specifically in the case of physicist Ted Hall—still a teenage undergrad at Harvard when, in 1944, he was tasked to help develop the atomic bomb—the greater cause of world peace. But unlike far more famous contemporaneous “traitors” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953, Hall managed to do something even more remarkable than simply smuggle secrets to the Soviets—he escaped accountability for his actions. FBI surveillance aside, he went on to enjoy a surprisingly normal life with his adoring […]
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“Cameras are Like Film Stocks Now”: DP Peter Deming on The Menu
In The Menu, entitled dinner guests get more than they bargained for when they travel to a remote island to feast upon the culinary delights of a disillusioned celebrity chef (Ralph Fiennes). Despite being surrounded by exquisite works of gastronomical artistry during the shoot, cinematographer Peter Deming did not partake. “I didn’t taste any of it. I’m not a big food person,” said Deming. “I’ve actually talked to a number of people who said the first thing they did after seeing the movie was go have a cheeseburger.” While Deming may not have an appetite for ornate cuisine, the cinematographer certainly knows […]
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“Being an Outsider to Palm Springs Was an Asset”: Sara Newens, Mina T. Son and Courtney Parker on Racist Trees
Sara Newens and Mina T. Son’s provocatively titled Racist Trees begins as an innocent investigation into the root (no pun intended) of a half-century dispute over a line of 60-foot tamarisks separating a historically Black section of Palm Springs from its historically white (and now overwhelmingly gay cisgender male) neighbors on the other side of a city-owned golf course. The film morphs into something much more shocking than merely another example of systemic inequality and the longstanding “polite” racism of white liberals who prefer gaslighting to admissions of culpability. Indeed, in the slyest and boldest of moves, the white and […]
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“The Stage Show Would Make for a Terrible Film if I Were to Directly Translate It”: Matthew Warchus on Matilda the Musical
An Olivier Award-winning success in the West End and a Tony Award-winning one on Broadway, the musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda now arrives as a toe-tapping motion picture, with addictive song-and-dance numbers meant to be streamed over and over again. The key plot details from Dahl’s book (and Danny Devito’s 1996 crack at the material) and characters remain: the title character (Alisha Weir) is a charming young girl with a great imagination and special powers, something that comes in handy once she’s sent to a grade school run like a military bootcamp by the demonic Miss Trunchbull (Emma Thompson). Disavowed […]
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Short Film Premiere: Nat Gee, Lily Baldwin and Joshua Echevarria on Waves
The abstract yet oppressive sensation of an anxiety attack is captured through intense corporeal movement in Waves, the latest from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Nat Gee. The film stars Lily Baldwin as a woman in the throes of an anxious episode, her oft-idyllic surroundings transformed into hostile environments. A well-manicured flower garden becomes a frightening, frenzied feast (and viny prison); gentle waves crashing upon a sandy shore morph into a violent assailant; a stroll in a verdant, tranquil park turns into an uneasy exercise in losing bodily autonomy. Yet as fascinated as Gee is in conveying the unsettling feeling of being consumed […]
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The Real and the Poetic: DP Darius Khondji on Bardo
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has labeled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most difficult film of his career—a bold categorization, considering the intricate single-take illusion of Birdman and the famously frigid filming conditions of The Revenant, both of which earned Iñárritu Oscars as Best Director. But for Bardo cinematographer Darius Khondji, the lure of the project wasn’t the technical challenges, though they were plentiful (including shooting in Mexico City at the height of COVID with long takes, deep focus photography and surrealistic imagery), but the emotional pull of the material. “Almost every single scene in Bardo was a […]
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A Collective Voice: Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Women Talking
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So, when she was approached to score Sarah Polley’s drama Women Talking, “after the Oscars were over and I had already given that speech,” the Icelandic composer and cellist remembers being taken aback by her own “knee-jerk reaction” to the project: “Who wants to sit through two hours of women talking?” “I stood up on that stage, urging women to talk, […]
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A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results for them both. The film is set on a fictional Irish island in 1923, and the combination of wide-open spaces and unfussy but handsome costuming adds visual dynamism to a film whose appeal is largely rooted in whip-smart dialogue. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s filmography includes works by Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto) and Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship), which […]
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Unimaginable Acts: Writer/Director Mark Jenkin and Actor Mary Woodvine on the 16mm-Shot “Folk Horror” Picture, Enys Men
Enys Men—British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight-premiering follow-up to his 2019 BAFTA-winning breakthrough, Bait, for which he hand-processed the film—is set in coastal Cornwall at the extreme southwestern tip of England, amid jagged cliffs and crashing waves. On a rocky and profoundly isolated island (the Cornish title means “stone island”) is its lone human occupant (Mary Woodvine, in a spellbinding performance), a woman of obscure purpose whose daily routine the camera dutifully catalogs—the monitoring of soil temperature at a specific site and the ritual drop of a pebble into an abandoned mine shaft, along with less cryptic activities—until semblances […]
