Interviews
Interviews
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Tone and Rhythm: Editor Hilda Rasula on American Fiction
Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a satire of the publishing world and modern race relations, stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and novelist frustrated by what he sees as the literary establishment’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit. To prove a point, Monk adopts a pseudonym, writes a book steeped in tired and offensive tropes and jokingly sends it off to publishers. Much to his chagrin, the book becomes a massive hit. But before Monk can unmask himself, a family tragedy leads him home, where the financial needs of his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) compel him to […]
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Inner Soundtrack: Composer Jerskin Hendrix on Poor Things
Jerskin Fendrix’s 2020 album Winterreise wends through a bog of squelchy pop textures—discordant bursts of rubbery noise, percussion lines that sound banged-out rather than played, synthesizers overextended to within an inch of their lives. Upbeat melodies and Dada sloganeering are punctuated by dirge-like ambient burbles. Speaking from his home in England, the Brixton-bred Fendrix still seems surprised that Yorgos Lanthimos “just happened to hear” it when seeking a composer for his fantasy/sex comedy/road picture/existential bildungsroman Poor Things. For his first screen credit, Fendrix builds on those tonal disjunctures, translating cinematic themes into musical ones. Supplied with a script and a […]
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The Passionate Epicures: The Taste of Things Director Tran Anh Hung Interviewed by Frederick Wiseman
A long-gestating passion project for Tran Anh Hung, The Taste of Things takes as its starting point Marcel Rouff’s eccentric, echt-French novel The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, which follows Dodin-Bouffant in the wake of the death of his longtime cook and occasional sexual companion Eugénie. For his adaptation, Hung retains a few of the book’s incidents but otherwise chooses to tell the story of Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie’s life before the novel starts. A period romance set in 1889, Taste begins with a lengthy sequence of pure cooking—when I saw the film at Cannes, a woman behind me moaned […]
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At Home With His Memories
In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about a simple psychological test used on children, “the house test.” He quotes the critic Anne Balif: “Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house, which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.” If he is sad, however, writes Bachelard, “The house bears traces of his distress.” For Bachelard, the home, and particularly the childhood home, is a place where “a great many […]
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Sounds that Cannot Be Unheard: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on The Zone of Interest
When director Jonathan Glazer first pitched Johnnie Burn his dramatic vision for The Zone of Interest, the sound designer took a deep breath. Over the past two decades, the pair had developed a strong rapport, collaborating on a variety of commercials, music videos and long-gestating movies (most recently, 2013’s Under the Skin), experiences Burn remembers taking a physical and mental toll on him. But this rigorous new project—a Holocaust drama in which hellish audio is layered over otherwise idyllic imagery—promised to be the most challenging, counterintuitive and audacious job of his career. “To be honest,” Burn says, “I was really […]
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Clothes Tell the Story: Costume Designer Stacey Battat on Priscilla
From the wan pastel prairie dresses of The Virgin Suicides to the candy-colored 18th century finery of Marie Antoinette to the aughts logomania of The Bling Ring, the style in Sofia Coppola’s movies is always brilliantly cohesive, capturing a distinct, ultrafeminine vibe like no other. Coppola’s latest, the impressionist biopic Priscilla, follows Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) from timid ’50s teenager to wife of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) to, finally, a liberated woman, using gorgeous midcentury fashions to capture an often painful journey into the heady world of celebrity. Spanning from 1959 to 1972—one of modern fashion’s richest transitional eras—Priscilla’s wardrobe alternately […]
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“Let’s Make It Feel Like You’re Watching TV During Y2K”: Directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald on Time Bomb Y2K
Where were you on December 31, 1999? Despite years of hearing Prince’s pleas to party, many Americans spent the evening at home, bewitched by a bizarre mix of sentimental reverie and fear. The end of the century, it turned out, was a time for reflection and mild panic. Media coverage warned that computers might register the year 2000 as the year 1900. Chaos could ensue, and you did not want to be caught in the club when the “millennium bug” caused the lights to go out and nuclear warheads to whirl mid-air. As Lisa de Moraes wrote in the Washington […]
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Bad Education: Writer/Director Molly Manning Walker on How to Have Sex
The act of recalling our earliest sexual encounters can unleash a wave of secondhand embarrassment for the people we used to be. What we previously said, did or even desired as unyieldingly hormonal adolescents will undoubtedly incite full-body cringes for as long as our psyches choose to preserve those encounters. Yet no staggering quantity of cautionary tales can—or, arguably, should—dissuade young people from fantasizing about the ideal circumstances for losing their virginity and navigating previously uncharted sexual waters. While there’s nothing wrong with romantic idealization, the idea of experiencing pure satisfaction during a formative sexual exploit is, at the very […]
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“Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things”: George C. Wolfe on Rustin
It might seem strange for an actor to have a breakout year at age 54. To those who witnessed Colman Domingo’s star rise on the New York theater scene in the early aughts and would cringe at now labeling the actor a “discovery”—I don’t disagree! I first encountered Domingo’s stage work in summer 2008, in the Broadway premiere of Passing Strange that would be filmed a few days later by Spike Lee. (Looking over Domingo’s earlier theater credits, I realize now that I would’ve first seen him in the 2003 Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V, but the […]
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Cannes 2023: Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton on The Sweet East
Originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, our interview with Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton about their recommended feature, The Sweet East, is being reposted today as the film is in theatrical release from Utopia. America’s fraught political present meets the less savory corners of cinema’s past in The Sweet East, the first feature directed by celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Penned with typically acerbic wit by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder in a should-be-star-making performance as Lilian, a high school senior who impulsively runs off while on a class trip to Washington, […]
