Interviews
Interviews
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“I Feel Like It’s Very Sacred, What Happens Between the Camera and You”: Samantha Smart, Back To One, Episode 380
Samantha Smart is the lead actress, writer and producer of Charliebird, the feature debut of director Libby Ewing, which won the top prize at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, calling it “a deeply affecting portrait featuring grounded and complex performances.” On this episode, Smart describes the process of writing it, getting to a crisis point of wondering if she could still play the character she was creating for herself, and miraculously finding young Gabriela Ochoa Perez who skillfully plays Charlie. She details the fine-tuning that needed to happen with the central scene, how the camera operator’s energy affects actors, talks about her […]
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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s Matt Johnson Shares His Secret to a Good Life
Matt Johnson is the center of attention wherever he goes. He’s especially popular in his hometown of Toronto, where his advocacy for young Canadian filmmakers and warm, self-referential humor have made him one of the city’s most favored sons. Mayor Olivia Chow was in attendance when Johnson and his co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol brought their film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie back to Toronto for a TIFF Midnight Madness screening that Jonson calls “one of the foundational moments of my adult life.” After years of attending the festival, he “wanted so badly to share that same kind of joy […]
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“Trying to Make a Psychotic Opera”: Gore Verbinski on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
It’s been nearly a decade since Gore Verbinski’s last feature film A Cure for Wellness hit theaters, but the director best known for creating the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise hasn’t been slacking. “I’ve worked every day of those years,” the Oscar-winner behind Rango tells Filmmaker over Zoom. “We developed an animated musical. We recorded the entire soundtrack for an animated musical. We’ve developed multiple screenplays. I just find that sometimes the stories I’m most passionate about perhaps don’t satisfy the green-light committees’ process, and that’s fair. But I got to do what I do, and they do what they […]
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“A Calculated Exercise in Squeezing Blood From a Stone”: Director Aidan Zamiri and Composer A.G. Cook on Charli XCX’s The Moment
Brat summer is decidedly over. The mechanics of its disintegration are lampooned in The Moment, a mockumentary cum critical commentary of the hype that propelled Charli XCX’s 2024 album into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Charli plays an exaggerated version of herself, plagued by funhouse mirror distortions of the anxieties that besieged her during the extended press and stadium tour that ostensibly signaled the peak of her pop stardom. It’s appropriate that Aidan Zamiri, one of Brat’s key visual collaborators, stepped up to direct The Moment, which marks his feature film debut. Though he previously helmed music videos for Charli (notably […]
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“Anything I’ve Enjoyed Doing in My Career I Can Trace Back to a Little Thing That I Did, a Little Step That I Took”: Sarah Coffey, Back To One, Episode 379
Sarah Coffey starred as Eva Shapiro in the feature film 31 Candles, and instantly made her an iconic romanic comedy character. She can also be seen in Queens Of The Dead, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. And her viral success as a comedian led to a role in Stapleview, the first-ever fully produced live sketch show on TikTok. On this episode, she talks about the blessings and drawbacks of finding a spotlight through her own online content. She takes us back to her early days, discovering an early love of singing, and talks about how that […]
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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 […]
