Interviews
Interviews
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Houses in Motion: Production Designer Rick Carter on The Fabelmans
Production designer Rick Carter caught the eye of Steven Spielberg when he was art director on The Goonies and first worked with him directly on the pilot of Spielberg’s anthology series Amazing Stories. Spielberg told him the minimal amount of train he needed for the episode; Carter ended up giving him more without increasing the budget. “I think I have an ability to prioritize what’s important so that I can put the resources into [those] elements, whether it’s the set or visual effects or any other aspect of the movie,” says Carter. Starting with Jurassic Park, Carter has served as […]
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An Interview With Glass Onion Producer Ram Bergman
In the early 1990s, the playbook for beginning independent producers used to be this: Find a budding auteur, make their first ultra-low-budget film, sell it at a festival, then partner with the director on larger, increasingly successful projects, allowing both careers to grow symbiotically. Independent film does contain such partnerships—Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes is a notable one and, more recently, the producing team of Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston and director David Lowery—but countless others fizzle out. Sometimes, the stress of a first feature generates behavior from either party that shuts down any thought of future collaboration. Other […]
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Kept in Sync: Paul Rogers on Editing Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once editor Paul Rogers first met co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, or the Daniels, at OMG CAMERAS EVERYWHERE, a free filmmaking summer camp pairing kids with established filmmakers to shoot videos for musicians like Daft Punk, Diplo and Benny Blanco. When I called Rogers via Zoom to interview him, Scheinert sat beside him with a guitar and occasionally chimed in: “The first thing we worked on together was a silly music video with kids—no rules, directions or studio notes. We just had to make something that would make the kids excited about what they did […]
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Within the Silences: The Sound Team Behind TÁR
TÁR opens with its namesake, played by Cate Blanchett, being interviewed in front of a packed audience at The New Yorker Festival. The chat serves multiple functions. It delivers the character’s backstory as an EGOT-winning classical composer and conductor, establishes the film’s immersive, observational style and lets the viewer experience sound the way that Lydia Tár experiences it. During the interview, the festival’s audience is only heard as a communal mass. It laughs together. It applauds together. There is no ambient chatter, no whispered asides, no rustling clothes or shuffling feet. It’s only when the interviewer asks about the influence […]
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“Blue Screen? Process Trailer? LED Screens?” DP Lol Crawley on White Noise
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise was for years considered too difficult to bring to the screen. With its jaundiced view of academia, intimate domestic melodrama, obsessions with cults and an eerily prescient pandemic, the novel spans genres and styles. Working for the first time in his career on an adaptation, writer and director Noah Baumbach started shooting primarily in the Midwest in June 2021. Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, White Noise premiered at Venice and opened this year’s New York Film Festival. This is the first collaboration between Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley, BSC. They faced enormous […]
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Stage to Screen: Theater Director Lila Neugebauer on Her Feature Film Debut Causeway
On the rare occasion a theater director receives an opportunity to direct for the cinema, it’s typically due to the project in question being a play adaptation (some, like John Patrick Shanley, toggle between adapting their own plays and directing original material). It was, then, noteworthy to me when Causeway (originally titled Red, White, and Water) was announced as the first feature for New York-based director Lila Neugebauer, whose Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Wavery Gallery, with Elaine May starring in a Tony Award-winning performance, had recently concluded in early 2019. Not based on pre-existing material, Causeway was to be […]
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Martha Coolidge on Reconstructing Sexual Assault in 1976’s Hybrid Documentary Landmark Not a Pretty Picture
[Editor’s note: the newly restored Not a Pretty Picture opens at Anthology Film Archives this Friday.] “This film is based on incidents in the director’s life. The actress who plays Martha was also raped when she was in high school. Names and places have been changed.” Thus begins the harrowing and uniquely personal 1976 16mm feature Not a Pretty Picture by director Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl). A narrative/nonfiction hybrid in which the filmmaker casts actors to dramatize the sexual assault she experienced as a high school student in the 1960s, Picture toggles between semi-scripted scenes of Martha (played by Michelle Manenti) with […]
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“All These Mythologies, They Don’t Really Help Me”: Marc Maron (Back to One, Episode 231)
Marc Maron is a stand-up comedy veteran and the host of the popular WTF podcast. As a screen actor, he cut his teeth playing a version of himself in the series Maron. Lately the Netflix series Glow and Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust put more of his range on display. And now he delivers the epitome of “supporting” performance in the incredible new film To Leslie, opposite Andrea Riseborough. On this episode, he talks about his apprehension with accepting the role, his impatience with the process of acting in general, the importance of making himself emotionally available in his scenes, […]
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“Copaganda,” Herzog and Punisher Comics: Ramin Bahrani on 2nd Chance
Richard Davis achieved redneck nirvana. The crude and quotable subject of 2nd Chance, Davis transformed in the 1970s from bankrupt pizzeria owner to small-town kingpin after inventing the bulletproof vest. The phrase “redneck nirvana” had a particular meaning for him: It meant he could suddenly afford to buy anything at the local KMart. Success soon unleashed his inner manchild. Davis devoted his leisure time to blowing shit up, burning through wives and producing straight-to-VHS movies that valorized police violence. “Redneck Nirvana,” it turns out, could serve as an alternate title for a film about Davis, a larger-than-life figure whose story […]
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“Pretend Sonic Youth Composed the Score to Jaws“: Deakin and Geologist of Animal Collective on Scoring The Inspection
22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]
