Interviews
Interviews
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The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee”
What if Jesus already made his way back to us in the 18th century, and we just missed it? The titular British-born spiritual leader played by Amanda Seyfried in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee believed herself to be the female embodiment of Jesus Christ and brought her scripture to Colonial America, enticed by its supposed promise of spiritual freedom. Co-written by Fastvold, who directed, and her partner Brady Corbet, and arriving only a year after their architectural epic The Brutalist, Ann Lee continues the pair’s interest in eccentric individuals who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of what […]
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Revolutionary Sounds: Sound Editor Christopher Scarabosio on “One Battle After Another”
Christopher Scarabosio only needed 15 minutes to start dreaming. The supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer was jet-lagged, drifting between trips to London, when writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to watch the first hour of One Battle After Another. The dialogue was rough, the score spare, but even in that stripped-down state, Scarabosio was astonished at what his longtime collaborator had put on the screen. There were imposing semi-trucks darting across a bypass; fireworks lighting up the night sky; car chases and shootouts across Southern California. When the projector shut off, Scarabosio only had one question for the filmmaker: […]
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Tension and Releases: Editor Ronald Bronstein on “Marty Supreme”
Ronald Bronstein premiered his feature Frownland at South by Southwest the same year as Josh Safdie’s short We’re Going to the Zoo played, and he felt a pang of insecurity when he saw it. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s somebody also vying for the same kind of immediacy,” said the veteran writer-editor. “It was like my feet were made of lead; this guy was like a helium balloon.” Back in New York City, Josh introduced himself to Bronstein and convinced him to play a character based on his own father. Bronstein helped write and edit the project, which […]
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An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”
Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and […]
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Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly”
30 years after his debut feature Kicking and Screaming (1995), writer-director Noah Baumbach, having crafted a notable career both in Hollywood and outside of it, has made his softest film yet, and that’s not meant as a pejorative. George Clooney stars as a fading movie star who embarks on a European trip to attend a film festival that’s planning to gift him a career tribute, using the honor as an excuse to spend time with his unsuspecting, backpacking daughter. Jay Kelly is a movie made by a parent in a time of reflection. That it was co-written by actress Emily […]
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CCR (Claustrophobic Control Rooms): DP Barry Ackroyd on “A House of Dynamite”
In Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, the United States’ government and military chain of commands scramble to respond as a ballistic missile of unknown origin speeds toward the Midwest. The non-linear narrative replays the final 20 minutes before impact from different perspectives, taking the viewer into the White House Situation Room, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, U.S. Strategic Command and an Alaskan missile defense battalion. It’s certainly not cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s first time lensing a room full of analysts staring worriedly into a bank of monitors. “Someone actually said to me once, ‘Is that the only thing you do? You’re […]
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DP Lukasz Zal on “Hamnet”
A tutor and a free spirit fall in love in sixteenth-century Stratford, but then Will (Paul Mescal) leaves Agnes (Jesse Buckley) for London while she raises their three children. Tragedy threatens to split them apart until Agnes sees her husband’s latest play, Hamlet. Based on the best-selling novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet has been earning praise since it screened at Telluride in August. Chloé Zhao’s direction, and performances by leads Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, have drawn particular attention. But Hamnet has a distinctive atmosphere that sets it apart from many of this year’s releases. That look and feel is […]
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The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams”
Composers are often brought on to score a film very late into the process, but Bryce Dessner was writing music for Train Dreams before director Clint Bentley began production. A longtime collaborator of Bentley’s, alongside his creative partner Greg Kwedar, Dessner has scored every narrative film project of theirs, either alone or with his brother Aaron, beginning with Transpecos. “Because we’re old friends, I was aware that they were thinking about [adapting Train Dreams] for a long time,” explains the musician. “I had read the book [and] early versions of the script. There’s a lot of information in the early […]
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“A Lot of Women Just Think It’s Fucking Hot”: Sarah Meyohas and Courtney Podraza on Their Taboo Erotic Short “Medusa”
After taking a spontaneous dip in the South of France, visiting Swedish perfumer Mia (Elektra Kilbey) is badly stung by a jellyfish. She rushes out of the water—topless, shivering, limping—and Franck (Franck Sémonin), a local out for a stroll, leaps into chivalric action, giving the bare-chested woman the shirt off his back. Tending to her injury, he runs a credit card over her thigh in order to remove the venom lingering on her skin. In France on a residency to further her craft, Mia grabs the card from Franck’s hand and wafts it under her nose—traces of lavender from her […]
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“My ‘Jaws’ Obsession Had No Boundaries”: Kleber Mendonça Filho on “The Secret Agent”
Kleber Mendonça Filho has never been shy explicating how personal memories have seeped into his professional work. Born and raised in Recife (capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco), the filmmaker has consistently dived into its history and, in doing so, his own history as well. While technically a narrative (featuring a remarkable cast led by Wagner Moura), The Secret Agent is also a movie about tumultuous events in and around the filmmaker’s hometown. Anyone who spoke out against the military dictatorship’s brutality was relentlessly harassed, spied on and, in some instances, murdered. An adolescent when these events unfolded, film-critic-turned-filmmaker […]
