Interviews
Interviews
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Back to One, Episode 182: Léa Seydoux
Léa Seydoux was a talented young French actor when she reached planet-wide stardom with her incredible performance in Blue Is The Warmest Color (she even shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which had never been awarded to actors before). Since then she has invaded Hollywood, starring in James Bond movies and Wes Anderson films, but also continuing to turn in exceptional performances for international directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Arnaud Desplechin, Ildikó Enyedi, and, for her latest film, France, Bruno Dumont. In this episode, she talks about the “sweet craziness” of working with Dumont, the importance of learning the “language” of […]
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Michael M. Bilandic on His Unhinged Pandemic Satire Film, “Project Space 13”
One of the final scenes of director Michael M. Bilandic’s fourth feature, Project Space 13, involves a delusional Manhattan gallerist wearing yellow knockoff Balenciaga sneakers and a ridiculous polka-dotted blazer at the shoreline of his beach house. He’s talking on the phone, via Airpods of course, to one of the two private security guards hired to protect the solo exhibition of an equally delusional artist named Nate in the midst of lockdown and protests. Throughout the night, every storefront on the downtown block has been looted except the eponymous white cube, where the artist and armed guards have been sitting […]
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“My Filmmaking is a Child of Mark Zuckerberg”: Wayne Koestenbaum on The Collective, Pandemic Exhaustion and Taking Up Filmmaking
“So abundant were the apples, we left them on the ground to rot. We regret the rot, but not the abundance.” These lines close “Tortoise,” one of the “fables” collected in Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat, the most recent of the 21 books he’s published across the last three decades. His written output—which ranges the terrains of prose and poetry, fiction and criticism, theory, memoir, and styles not yet named, typically collapsing as many of these terms as possible in a given sentence (his métier)—would alone qualify as an abundance. That he has, in more recent years, supplemented this body […]
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“Embracing the Male Gaze”: Sean Baker on Red Rocket
Red Rocket throws a curveball to viewers who think they know what to expect from a Sean Baker movie. There are surface commonalities connecting it to his previous works—docu-realistic stylings, detailed worldbuilding and the centering of marginalized communities. Yet, unlike his last three pictures Starlet, The Florida Project and Tangerine—which marinated in the humanity of, respectively, a young female porn star, transgender sex workers and a family living with invisible homelessness—the man under the magnifying-glass this time is an increasingly disturbing presence. Washed-up adult movie star Mikey Saber (played with real verve by Simon Rex) is selfish to the point of […]
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“Making Black Cinema ‘Palatable’ Does Zero”: Skinner Myers on The Sleeping Negro
Filmmaker and CU Boulder Film Professor Skinner Myers is in the middle of writing the long proposal for his dissertation, which will offer “a way of fighting Hollywood from one’s own cultural perspective.” Breaking from First, Second, Third and Fourth cinemas (Hollywood, European Art House, Third World and Indigenous Cinemas, respectively), his “Antagonistic Cinema Theory” eschews a numbered designation. In his feature debut, The Sleeping Negro, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, Myers pays respect to the Third and Fourth Cinema filmmakers who laid a path for him to stride—his dissertation records his own footsteps along the way. […]
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“We Used the Entire Sensor on the Alexa LF Every Single Time”: DP Greig Fraser on Shooting Dune for IMAX
Before Dune’s initial release, director Denis Villeneuve compared watching the film on a television to driving “a speedboat in your bathtub.” Beginning today, audiences have another chance to take that speedboat out into open water as the sci-fi epic returns to select IMAX theaters for a limited run. Cinematographer Greig Fraser was a bit more diplomatic in his analogy. In the December issue of American Cinematographer, he equated seeing Dune in a cinema to dining at a five-star restaurant vs. getting take-out. Ahead of the IMAX return, Fraser (Rogue One, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty) spoke to Filmmaker about […]
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“The Film is One Big Conversation. I Could’ve Cut it Ten Different Ways and It Would Still Be the Same Conversation”: Sterlin Harjo on His Netflix Doc Love and Fury
Sterlin Harjo is a longtime Sundance alum who’s directed two docs, three dramatic features and a slew of shorts. He’s also a founding member of Native American comedy quintet The 1491s, and his first comedy series (for FX and streaming on Hulu), the terrifically titled Reservation Dogs, boasts a team exclusively made up of Indigenous writers, directors and series regulars (including EP Taika Waititi who co-wrote the first episode). In other words, Harjo’s identity is solidly Native American (Muscogee Creek/Seminole) and solidly creative artist. Which may make Love and Fury the veteran director’s most personal film yet. (Not to mention his […]
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“I Had the Will and the Emotional Momentum… the Movie was Hyper-Topical, Being Made Basically in Real Time”: Dasha Nekrasova on Her Jeffrey Epstein Horror Film, The Scary of Sixty-First
Dasha Nekrasova wanted all the exteriors in her directorial debut to have the ambience of Christmas in New York. First up: leering gargoyles lining the 15-foot front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side apartment building. Clearly, Nekrasova doesn’t share the same merry Christmas cheer as most. In The Scary of Sixty-First, two roommates move into a semi-furnished apartment that may have been owned by the pedophile billionaire. When an amateur detective hyped up on amphetamines and conspiracies shows up to investigate Epstein’s life and death, the roommates are infected with the haunted truth of their new home. Creating a […]
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“I Would Find Myself Wondering Why My Face Hurt So Much at the End of a Shoot Day, and It Was Because I’d Been Smiling the Whole Time”: Penny Lane on Listening to Kenny G
As with all of Penny Lane’s films, Listening to Kenny G, the idiosyncratic auteur’s TIFF-premiering, DOC NYC-opening, exploration of the beloved/reviled “smooth jazz” saxophonist and his globally ubiquitous sound (to this day “Going Home” signals closing time throughout China) turns a straightforward subject into an unexpected philosophical inquiry. In this case, Lane begins her journey down the G-hole with a simple question: Why does the bestselling instrumentalist of all time, our most famous living jazz musician, “make certain people really angry”? Using interviews with G as well as elite jazz critics and academics as well as archival footage, Lane arrives […]
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“I Wanted People to See the Commonality of the Human Experience Through the Unique Perspective of a Near Mythical Figure”: Christopher Frierson on his HBO Music Box Doc DMX: Don’t Try to Understand
The title tagline “A Year in the Life of Earl ‘DMX’ Simmons” is a rather anodyne description that belies the emotional rollercoaster ride that filmmaker (and podcaster) Christopher Frierson takes us on in his riveting debut feature DMX: Don’t Try to Understand, which currently plays on HBO as part of the channel’s Music Box series. Filmed during what would turn out to be the last year of the acclaimed rapper’s life, the doc moves with lightning speed from packed concerts to corporate conference rooms, from meaningful meetups with fans to intimate reconciliations with family members. It’s a whirlwind of a life, […]
