Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions for Drea Cooper and Zachary Canepari About Their SXSW-Premiering Documentary, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets
As more and more human activity — personal, social, economic, political — happens online, a challenge is posed to practitioners of that legacy art form, the feature film. To wit: how to tell an 80-minute-plus story whose symbolic meanings were created in part by interactions and juxtapositions occurring in virtual spaces, a story that’s possibly inseparable from a rich visual culture that is most accurately parsed in portrait mode and not in a theater or on a flat screen? Providing one answer are filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, whose latest feature documentary, the SXSW-premiering Diamond Hands: The Legend of […]
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Shooting Under Fire: Filmmaking in Conflict Zones with Brent and Craig Renaud
Filmmaker Brent Renaud, who, with his brother Craig, made films in conflict zones around the world, was killed while filming in Ukraine today. He was also co-founder of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute and executive and artistic director of the Little Rock Film Festival. Here — originally published December 17, 2013 — is our profile of the two brothers and their extraordinary filmmaking practice. R.I.P. Brent Renaud. — Editor From NYC drug addicts to Mexican drug cartels, from today’s soldiers to yesterday’s civil rights pioneers, from Chicago gang members to Afghan warlords, Craig and Brent Renaud have made a career […]
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Five Questions for Casey Neistat about His SXSW-Premiering David Dobrik Documentary, Under the Influence
When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]
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“It’s About the Emotion, the Performance, the Rhythm and the Space in Between the Words”: Rosa Ruth Boesten on Her SXSW-Debuting doc Master of Light
A stunning work of cinematic nonfiction, Rosa Ruth Boesten’s Master of Light follows the classical painter George Anthony Morton, a fan of Rembrandt who conjures exquisite portraits of his own family members in the style of the Old Masters. Never formally trained, Morton nonetheless managed to land a spot at the New York branch of The Florence Academy of Art, eventually going on to study in Europe and win awards abroad. Which would be a remarkable feat for any American, let alone a Black man from Kansas City who spent a decade behind bars for dealing drugs. But likewise remarkable […]
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Building a Microbudget Ghost Story Around an AirBnB Location: Director Pete Ohs and Cast on the SXSW-Premiering Jethica
Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
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“There Were No Easy Answers to My Questions”: Iliana Sosa on Her SXSW-Debuting Doc What We Leave Behind
Iliana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind is an astonishingly intimate labor of love. The film emerged from Sosa’s desire to document her grandfather Julián, a proudly hardworking man who first left his native Mexico back in the early 1940s to join the US government’s Bracero program, which brought in farm workers to remedy the WWII labor shortage. After his daughters, including the filmmaker’s mom, moved permanently to the States, the widowed Julián spent the next two decades traveling solo from Durango to visit them in the southwest. But as he now nears his nonagenarian years the monthly bus trip becomes […]
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Rediscovering the NBA’s First Female Player: Ben Proudfoot on The Queen of Basketball
More than just the answer to an obscure trivia question, Delta State University’s Lusia “Lucy” Harris was one of the most dominant basketball players of her era, eventually becoming the first woman drafted into the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1977. Her collegiate and amateur accomplishments were numerous, including three national championships and a 51-game winning streak while being the only woman of color on the Delta State Lady Statesmen women’s basketball team. (Her home games were played in an arena that, to this day, remains named after Walter Sillers, Jr., a prominent white nationalist.) Director Ben Proudfoot’s documentary short A Concerto […]
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“I Was Raised by a Journalist, I Am a Journalist, and Here Was Someone Taken from the Earth Simply for Doing Her Job”: Erin Lee Carr on her HBO Doc Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall
Erin Lee Carr’s latest two-part doc for HBO tackles one of the grizzliest — and weirdest — true crime cases to make international headlines in recent years. In fact, the tale at the center of Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall is likely already familiar to HBO viewers, as Tobias Lindholm’s six-part narrative series The Investigation is based on the same bizarre event. It was back in 2017 that the Swedish journalist Kim Wall, living with her boyfriend in Denmark at the time, went missing in the waters right off Copenhagen following a trip in a homemade midget submarine built […]
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“These Were People Who Were Searching for a Place to Dream”: Nollywood Director Ike Nnaebue on his True/False-debuting No U-Turn
Ike Nnaebue’s No U-Turn—its title a reference to an interrupted journey the Nollywood director embarked on as an impoverished 20something and is now determined to finish—is an ambitious cinematic quest. Part of the Generation Africa project, the Berlinale-selected film is a cross-country trip across the continent to find out exactly why young people are still compelled to risk life and limb to reach Europe — 26 years after Nnaebue himself tried and failed to do the same. (And ended up with multi-award-winning filmmaking fame back home in Lagos instead.) To learn all about the road (bus) trip and any insights Nnaebue […]
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“I Was Born in Cinecittà”: Production Designer Dante Ferretti on Collaborating with Pasolini and Scorsese
Saturday, March 5th marks the centennial of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, and numerous retrospectives are being held worldwide commemorating the late Italian filmmaker. Tragically murdered at the age of 53, weeks before his infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, was set to premiere, Pasolini’s output continues to attract cinephile appreciation, political discourse, cultural reevaluation and a fair share of controversy. “His movies, influenced by his struggle to reconcile his concerns with Marx, Freud and Christ, often drew him into conflict with the Roman Catholic church and with secular authorities,” reflected The New York Times in 1990. Currently running […]
