Interviews
Interviews
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“Family Was Always On Set”: Valerie Weiss on Mixtape, COVID Rehearsals and Why Directing TV is Great
In the new Netflix film Mixtape, 12-year-old Beverly (Gemma Brooke Allen) tries to learn about her late parents by tracking down the songs they loved, a task made difficult by the pre-iTunes and Spotify era in which the movie takes place. The quest to find the songs—a necessity for Beverly given the unwillingness and inability of her grandmother (Julie Bowen) to answer questions about her mom and dad—yields one of the sweetest, smartest, funniest, and most touching coming of age dramedies since Stand By Me, a film with which Mixtape both invites and earns comparison thanks to its skillfully calibrated […]
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“I Was Directing, and I Ripped My Bicep”: Dolph Lundgren on Castle Falls, On-Set Gun Safety and Fighting with Scott Adkins
At the age of 64 Dolph Lundgren remains as busy as ever, alternating between Hollywood mega-productions like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and small-scale action movies like Castle Falls, which he produced, directed, and co-starred in (alongside Scott Adkins). Castle Falls, which opens December 3rd in theaters, on demand and digital, is a compact crime film in which millions of dollars are hidden in a derelict hospital slated for demolition. A prison guard (Lundgren), an ex-MMA fighter (Adkins) and a desperately violent gang converge on the crumbling edifice hoping to strike it rich before everything explodes. I spoke with Lundgren […]
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On Screwball Comedy, Making it Work in the Master and Queer Love Stories: Writer/Director Maria Maggenti on The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love
With Maria Maggenti’s 1995 picture The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love now in rerelease from Strand Releasing, we’re reprinting our 1995 print issue interview with Maggenti, who has gone on to write and direct Puccini for Beginners, write Before I Fall, and write and write and produce for series such as Motherland: Fort Salem and Supergirl. The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love is currently screening at New York’s Metrograph, where Filmmaker‘s Scott Macaulay will be moderating a conversation with Maggenti and Hall on November 24. The below interview has been lightly reedited to add […]
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Partners ‘Til the End: Lucifer Showrunners Ildy Modrovich and Joe Henderson
“I’m proud of the fact that we have a show that has the weirdest track ever,” says Lucifer co-showrunner Joe Henderson says. “You can have a show that airs for six seasons that people just watch or a show that people fought tooth and nail [for] to get the ending they wanted. And we fought to give them the ending that they deserved.” The uniquely fraught road to get Lucifer to the end of his journey is intrinsically intertwined with the show’s sudden premature cancellation from Fox in 2018 and a rowdy social media campaign to resurrect the show at […]
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Headroom, Banding and General F-Stops: DP Haris Zambarloukos on Shooting Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast
Adorned with a wooden sword and a garbage can lid shield, nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) begins Belfast fighting imaginary dragons, cloaked in the bliss of summer. That idyllic youthful revelry is ruptured by an explosion. That blast—and what follows—are based on the childhood remembrances of writer-director Kenneth Branagh, whose family was forced to grapple with the prospect of leaving its tightly-knit neighborhood after sectarian violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969. It’s a dilemma cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos understood well. Born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Zambarloukos and his family departed following a 1972 military coup and […]
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Back to One Episode 179: Alex Hassell
Shakespeare on the stage is his first love, but Alex Hassell loves the camera and it loves him back. Currently he plays Vicious in Cowboy Bebop, the live-action remake of the popular Japanese anime series. On this episode, he talks about being attracted to roles that are difficult, how years of stripped-down live theater work at The Factory formed him as an actor, why he’s more at ease when he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, his valuable contribution to Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and how the particular challenges of acting on film excite him. Plus much […]
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“The Price Has Dropped to What Per Pound?”: Mario Furloni and Kate McLean on Their Marijuana Legalization Drama, Freeland
The Emerald Triangle—three counties in Northern California— represents the largest region to produce cannabis in the United States. Even so, it hasn’t been a free-for-all for growers and sellers. As pot farming has become legalized in select parts of the west coast, the push for governmentally regulated weed distribution has become an expensive business to invest in, with required permits and enforced rules pushing out more experienced old-timers who made a habit of keeping things affordable and independent. As their businesses are crippled by state legalization, these farmers are forced to take desperate measures or risk losing their livelihood. Mario […]
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“We Found Ways to Combine Drama Therapy with Filmmaking into Something New”: Director Robert Greene on the Netflix Documentary Procession
At the root of the word “procession” is “process” — really a fitting description for any Robert Greene film. But the title of the nonfiction veteran’s latest foray into character-collaborative doc-making has other meanings. It nods specifically to the Holy Spirit’s procession and also to the dictionary definition of people moving forward, a march that includes the risk-taking filmmaker himself. Procession (which premiered at Telluride and just hit Netflix November 19) is perhaps Greene’s boldest cinematic move yet. Once again the director (and “filmmaker-in-chief” at the University of Missouri’s Murray Center for Documentary Journalism) blurs the lines between narrative and nonfiction, […]
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“It Always Seems That the Film Comes Together When You Just Go About Doing It”: Abel Ferrara on the Ethan Hawke-Starring Zeros and Ones
“Jesus was just another soldier, another war casualty — but on who’s side?” That’s military man JJ, played by Ethan Hawke, in voiceover as he walks the COVID-deserted streets of Rome in Abel Ferrara’s new Zeros and Ones. There’s a terrorist plot to blow up the Vatican but JJ’s got a more personal (and possibly intertwined) mission as well: his twin revolutionary brother, Justin (also Hawke), has been captured, and JJ’s nocturnal journey is an attempt to rescue him and possibly find some sort of spiritual salvation along the way. But the above is just the most reductive parsing of […]
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“While I Knew the Music Inside Out There Was So Much I Didn’t Know About the Story Behind the Album”: Alison Klayman on Jagged
As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not […]
