Interviews
Interviews
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“It’s Not Funny if It’s Not Bright”: Greg Mottola on Confess, Fletch
I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]
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19 Months from Conception to Completion: Daniel Goldhaber on How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Daniel Goldhaber’s second feature, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, takes its title and broader inspiration from Andreas Malm’s non-fiction manifesto, published by Verso. Malm’s book is heavy on the language of comrades and cadres, an exhortation to ecoterrorism to the already sympathetically inclined—and, as a friend pointed out, it’d be more accurately titled Why to Blow Up a Pipeline, as instructions aren’t provided. While Goldhaber’s version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t a manual as such, its commitment to depicting the means by which one might achieve its title goes much further than most. Eight protagonists from all over the country […]
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“My Social Location as a Member of a Fraternity Makes My Voice a Credible One”: Byron Hurt on His PBS Independent Lens Doc Hazing
As someone who never understood (okay, downright loathed) the conformist culture of so-called Greek-letter organizations, I didn’t bother to catch Byron Hurt’s (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Soul Food Junkies) latest doc Hazing when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival back in the spring. But fortunately, the film—which takes a deep historical, as well as personal, dive into what Wikipedia defines as “any activity expected of someone in joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate”—will now be launching the new season of PBS’s Independent Lens, which […]
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“I Believe in a Holistic Approach to World Building”: Sophie Jarvis on her TIFF-Debuting Psychological Drama Until Branches Bend
Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]
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Duration and Velocity: An Interview with Larry Gottheim
Despite making decades of fascinating film work and playing a pivotal role at Binghamton by founding the film department and bringing Ken Jacobs onboard, Larry Gottheim remains an under-celebrated figure in the American avant-garde. With Fog Line (1970)—an 11 minute single-take of fog slowly rising in a meadow, trees asymmetrically clustered, framed by telephone wire—he found a semblance of universal acclaim in the underground. The “first period” of Gottheim’s work (of which Fog Line is a crucial part) takes an approach largely inspired by the stoic film observations of Andy Warhol, a rubric of silence and static framing which trains […]
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“We Were Filming at a Time When Putin Was Arresting Opposition”: Sarah McCarthy on Her Telluride-Premiering Doc Short Anastasia
Sarah McCarthy is no stranger to navigating the myriad challenges posed by authoritarian states. Indeed, the Australian doc-maker has shot in precarious political places throughout the world, from the Philippines, to Saudi Arabia to Russia—where she’s returned time and time again. Nor is she a stranger to the Toronto International Film Festival, where following on the heels of feature-length works (The Sound of Mumbai, The Dark Matter of Love) she now debuts her latest short Anastasia; and the innocuous title, much like the film’s titular character, belies one powerful punch. Anastasia Shevchenko is a Russian civil rights advocate who’s been arrested […]
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“Directing When You Are an Editor Feels Like Cheating”: Cinque Northern on His Telluride Doc Short Angola Do You Hear Us?
Having already made the prestige fest rounds to great acclaim this year—from Tribeca to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage outdoor film series just this summer—Cinque Northern’s Angola Do You Hear Us? is now a must-catch at Telluride. The documentary short follows the incomparable actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson on her artistic and spiritual mission to bring her one-woman show The Peculiar Patriot to none other than the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The film also explores all the baggage, bureaucracy and ultimate blocking that was met with a work centered on racial injustice (that deftly connects the capitalistic dots […]
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“I Believe Her Experience of Love Was a Brutal One”: Director Eva Vitija on Her Patricia Highsmith Doc, Loving Highsmith
With their pronounced and callous violence, their serpentine studies of obsession, delusion, and identity, Patricia Highsmith’s hypergraphic body of work has by now become as much a part of the culture of literary fiction and cinema as that of her lionized male counterparts. But where the personas of Hammett and Chandler have been crafted into legend, the Fort Worth-born Highsmith has stayed a cipher. While in recent years a pair of biographies and the release of her excerpted private diaries have let some light into the picture, Highsmith’s peripatetic nature remains elusive and secretive. Expatriated from the States and then […]
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“Making These Documentaries Is Like a Wild Goose Chase All Over the Globe”: Chapman and Maclain Way on Untold Volume 2
Now in its second season, Untold—the Netflix documentary series executive produced by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way (Wild Wild Country)—continues to offer an intriguing selection of sports-centered stories. From covering the world’s most successful female boxer to the infamous “Malice at the Palace” brawl, Volume 1 of the series became popular for choosing to tell a side of a notable story you thought you knew—essentially a nonfiction offering of feature-length episodes packaged under the Untold umbrella. As a basketball fan, I was curious to see what Volume 2 would include. Having premiered on August 16th and rolling out an episode […]
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Magic, Misdirection and the Amazing Kreskin: Michael Bilandic and Owen Kline on Funny Pages
Director Owen Kline texted me recently to let me know he was in my neighborhood, so we linked up in Washington Square Park to see what was good. He’d just gotten back from Cannes where his debut feature, Funny Pages, was a smash hit. I was excited to hear some glamorous, and hopefully debaucherous, tales from the Croisette. Instead, the very first words out of his mouth were, “Pick a number between between one and a thousand. And don’t tell me what it is!” He looked me dead in the eyes, on some mentalist shit, scribbled furiously on a clipboard for […]
