Interviews
Interviews
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“Trojan Horse Filmmaking”: Adam and Zack Khalil on Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
In 1990, a federal law was passed requiring the return of Indigenous human remains and sacred items to their rightful communities. More than three decades later, most of those ancestors are still waiting—boxed, catalogued, and stored in museum basements and university archives. In Aanikoobijigan, filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil turn their attention to that unfinished work, following the long, often painful effort to bring ancestors home for proper burial. The film centers on a group of tribal specialists in Michigan who carry out this work day to day, navigating institutions built to hold on to what was never theirs. For […]
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“I Want To Be More Honest and More Authentic, Both With Myself and With My Roles”: Ben Mehl, Back To One, Episode 378
Ben Mehl is most recognized for his role as Dante on the hit Netflix show You. Other TV credits include The Good Wife, Supernatural Investigator and films like My Christmas Guide and Viral Beauty. On stage he has performed with The Public Theater and Williamstown Theatre Festival. He’s also a passionate acting teacher and volunteer at the 52nd Street Project. On this episode he tells us the story of finding out he had Stargardt disease, coming to the decision to go ahead with his dream of being an actor despite being legally blind, and the piece of advice a teacher gave him that miraculously made this mountain much […]
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“The Psychological Horror of Being a 13-Year-Old”: Charlie Polinger on The Plague
The awkwardness of puberty is exacerbated by a cruel social game in The Plague, the feature debut from writer-director Charlie Polinger. Set in 2003, Ben (Everett Blunck), a shy yet precocious kid, finds himself shipped off to a water polo camp very far from his childhood home in Boston. His young teammates can practically smell Ben’s desperation for belonging; luckily for him, there’s already someone cemented at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Eli’s (Kenny Rasmussen) reputation as a maladroit athlete and for inept conversationalist make him an easy enough target for bullies, but the kids have added an additional […]
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“These Guys Don’t Miss”: Padraic McKinley on Directing Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe in The Weight
When Padraic McKinley first received The Weight screenplay from producers Nathan and Simon Fields, he loved the atmospheric world it summoned forth. Original screenwriter Matthew Booi, along with Leo Scherman and Matthew Chapman, had created something special with this Western-adjacent Depression-era crime-thriller. But as a longtime editor across film and TV (Igby Goes Down, Dexter), as well as a producer with strong instincts about story and pacing, McKinley knew the screenplay still needed work. Ethan Hawke had a similar feeling about the original script. McKinley asked him to play lead character Samuel Murphy, an incarcerated man desperate to reunite with […]
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“We Can Keep Living in a Glacial World”: Sara Dosa on Time and Water
A splendid yet elegiac homage to dying, receding, failing, yet magnificent glaciers, Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, a documentary produced with National Geographic and Sandbox Films, is awe-inspiring precisely because it makes you feel helpless to move. That’s what awe is, after all. The film makes use of a treasure trove of archival materials, some of it supplied by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his family, who lived a lot of their lives recording them and raising posterity alongside the glaciers. Standing still with these images and sounds (in front of the largest screen only, please) and catching snippets of […]
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“Knowing Yourself Is a Big Part of Your Package as an Actor”: Astrid Rotenberry, Back To One, Episode 377
Astrid Rotenberry has had roles on Law & Order SVU, The Four Seasons, and American Sports Story. Now she plays Catherine Kelly in the Netflix limited series His and Hers, and her performance is so authentic and affecting it runs the risk of being taken for granted. On this episode, she details what excited her about the role, and why trust is so important to her. She takes us back to her childhood and how parental encouragement impacted her, talks about some of the valuable nuggets she learned as an intern in a casting office, expounds on ways she combats self-doubt, and much more. Back […]
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“What Is a Golf Course but the Gentrification of Land?”: Rafael Manuel on Filipiñana
In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay. Rafael Manuel’s debut feature expands on his 2020 Berlinale-winning short (which is streamable courtesy of The Criterion Channel) to offer an extended yet precise parable about class, memory, and quiet violence in his home country, the Philippines—filtered through the microcosm of a golf course on the outskirts of Manila during a scorching summer day. The film follows Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a new tee girl, as she acclimates […]
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“A Lot of Disabled People Don’t Get to Take Big Risks”: Liz Sargent on Directing Her Sister in Take Me Home
Take Me Home is a film about a caregiver, and the spirit of caregiving infused the entire production. Writer-director Liz Sargent based the feature, her first, on her short of the same name, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. It stars Anna Sargent, her sister, as a woman with a cognitive disability who is the caregiver for her aging adoptive parents. In fact, this is a family of mutual caregivers whose routines are shattered during a central Florida heatwave. How Anna navigates her new emotional reality forms the story’s core, and in striving to locate her character’s need for autonomy, Sargent […]
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“It’s Like Funny Ordinary People”: Jay Duplass on See You When I See You
Twenty three years have passed since Jay and Mark Duplass made a seven-minute short titled This is John for $3—yes, three dollars—that premiered in Sundance in 2003 and effectively launched their careers. This year, Jay (who recently directed the intimately sweet The Baltimorons) is back in Park City as a director with See You When I See You, a darkly funny dramedy about coping with PTSD—and your family. “It feels excellent,” Duplass says about his return to the Utah mountains that’s hosting the Sundance Film Festival for the final time, before next year’s move to Boulder, CO. “Some of my […]
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“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine
Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited […]
