Interviews
Interviews
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Sundance First-Time Dramatic Competition Producers Discuss Career Paths and the Challenging Producing Landscape
“Producing is an identity,” said producer Karin Chien in her keynote speech at this year’s virtual Sundance Producers Brunch. She continued, “It is a tribe, it is an active community and is it is an artistic practice that encompasses more than can be communicated. A producer solves problems and creates problems, good problems. A producer questions why things are the way they are. We are independent producers because we subvert, and we complicate the status quo, with the intention of forwarding new thoughts, ideas voices and stories, our culture, our communities and our industry depend on us to do this.” […]
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“The Biggest Challenge Facing Producers and the Film Industry at Large Is an Unhealthy Relationship to Labor”: Producer Jesse Hope on A Love Song
Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song pits a pair of reconnected childhood sweethearts—both now widowed—against the backdrop of an intimate American West. Shot in rural Colorado in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the film required precautions in excess of what was stipulated in then-new union guidelines, necessitating everyone involved to enter and form a “bubble” for the duration of production. First-time producer Jesse Hope discusses the difficulties and rewards of such an approach and how his experience working on sets with directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers prepared him to take the reins. Filmmaker: Tell me about the […]
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“When Building a Team Around Your Film, Don’t Forget to Build Your Own”: Nikkia Moulterie on Producing the Sundance Horror Drama, Nanny
The Sundance Dramatic Competition entry Nanny, a horror story about an immigrant domestic child-care worker in New York who’s saving to bring her own young son over from Senegal, is the first feature produced by New York-based Nikkia Moulterie. It’s her reunion with writer/director Nikyatu Jusu after producing the writer/director’s excellent 2019 short, Suicide by Sunlight, and it follows a decade-long career producing shorts, UPM’ing features and producing commercials and music videos. Below, Moulterie discusses the way she met and bonded with Jusu, the challenges of producing a feature during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice she’d give to new producers […]
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“I Do Take Pride in the Fact that All of the Parties Feel Authentic and Accurate”: Jessica Switch on Producing the Sundance Comedy/Drama, Cha Cha Real Smooth
The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]
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“Security Considerations on this Film Were Everywhere, All the Time”: Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing on Her Sundance-Debuting doc Midwives
With grace and humility, Midwives, the feature debut of Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, puts a nuanced human face on a complicated conflict long flattened by the Western press. Back in 2012 the director returned to her birthplace in Rakhine State, an area of Myanmar now infamous for the ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya population, yet also a place where Buddhists and Muslims lived in harmony at the time Snow was growing up. There she met two equally complicated women: Hla, a Buddhist midwife and the hardened business-minded owner of a medical clinic, and her young apprentice Nyo Nyo, a dreamy […]
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“Even in Asian American Progressive Circles, People Have Not Heard This Story”: Eugene Yi and Julie Ha on Their Sundance-Premiering Documentary, Free Chol Soo Lee
Those who knew Chol Soo Lee, or saw his image printed on the posters, stickers, and t-shirts of the 1970s Pan-Asian American movement to release him from jail, often remarked on his stunning beauty. “What a good-looking kid. I mean real good-looking kid,” chirps investigative reporter K.W. Lee, recalling their first encounter at San Quentin Prison in Free Chol Soo Lee, a new Sundance documentary that tells the story of a young man falsely convicted of murder, the symbol he became, and the activists who rallied for both. Later in the film, investigative reporter, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, asks the witness […]
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“I’d Never Really Written Personally About My Own Loss”: Mark Pellington on The Severing
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s great chroniclers of grief, from early genre films like The Mothman Prophecies (in which the horror story is a vehicle for an unsettling, affecting tale of personal anguish) to more overtly philosophical takes on the subject like I Melt With You, The Last Word, and Nostalgia. While Pellington’s work is undeniably informed by the devastating loss of his wife Jennifer in 2004, it has tended, up until this point, to come at the subject from oblique angles, as in the 2008 dramedy Henry Poole Is Here. With his latest […]
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“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
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“I Wanted to Enchant the Birds and the Increasingly Poisonous Skies They Fall Out Of”: Shaunak Sen on His Sundance-Debuting Doc All That Breathes
“You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” Those are the poetic words heard in the closing voiceover of Shaunak Sen’s mesmerizing All That Breathes. World-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition (January 21) at this year’s Sundance, the film’s an ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky. With stunning cinematography and utmost attention to the tiniest detail (down to mosquitos buzzing […]
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“African Spirituality Has a History of Being Demonized in Cinema”: Nikyatu Jusu on Nanny
West African mythology is an integral facet of Nikyatu Jusu’s filmmaking. Whether in her directorial stint on an episode of The CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories or the melanated day-walking vampires in her short film (and 2019 festival circuit hit) Suicide by Sunlight, the Sierra Leonean-American writer/director has made it her mission to introduce American audiences to the folklore of her heritage. If she also manages to revamp tired (and overly Eurocentric) monster tropes while she’s at it, then so be it. It’s fitting, then, that Jusu’s feature debut Nanny manages to do a little bit of both. When a […]
