Interviews
Interviews
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Back to One, Episode 178: Jon Bernthal
From The Walking Dead and Punisher to The Wolf of Wall Street, Small Engine Repair, The Many Saints of Newark, and this month’s King Richard, Jon Bernthal has established himself as the hard-working, all-in, go-to, actor’s-actor of the moment. In this episode, he talks about some of the elements he uses—generosity, energy management, isolation, fear-as-fuel, group strength—to do his work, the one thing all great directors have in common, why he’d be just as grateful doing regional theater, plus much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And […]
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“My Parents Supported Me Making This Art about Them”: Nira Burstein on Charm Circle
After appearing in the international competition at Sheffield DocFest 2021 (where I then worked as a programmer) and being hailed by press, juries, and audiences alike as one of the major highlights of the festival, Nira Burstein’s Charm Circle went on to international festivals around the world. I finally caught up with Burstein in Lisbon, after the film’s premiere at Doclisboa, one of Europe’s finest documentary festivals. After COVID prevented me—but not Nira!—from attending Sheffield in June, and with that incarnation of the festival now decisively a thing of the past, I was eager to catch up with her to […]
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“This Sometimes Happens, That Cameras Fall in Love”: Alexandre Koberidze on What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze’s camera is caught up in the day-to-day of the locals of Kutaisi, Georgia, before the meet-cute of main characters Giorgi (Georgi Bochorishvili) and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) draws its attention. The camera watches their shoes as they first stumble into each other, recollect their fallen books and dart off in the wrong directions before realizing the mistake, turning around and bumping into each other all over again. When the camera finally pans up to reveal their faces, it places the curse of the “evil eye” on the would-be lovers, who just scheduled their first date together. As a personified […]
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Bun B on the Houston Cinema Arts Society, Criterion Laserdiscs and Squid Game
In May of 2015, legendary rapper and Texan Bun B joined the board of directors of the Houston Cinema Arts Society—first conceived in 2007, with the first edition of its annual film festival held in 2009. This Friday sees the start of the 13th Houston Cinema Arts Festival, including centerpiece and closing night screenings of Bushwick Bill: Geto Boy, a documentary that allows the late artist to tell his story in his own words. Bun B will be moderating the latter Q&A, which is far from the first time he’s gotten out and pushed for the organization. My job, by definition, does not […]
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“97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]
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Back to One, Episode 177: Ruth Negga
Ruth Negga loves words. And even someone who doesn’t particularly love words falls in love with the ones spoken by Ruth Negga. It’s not just her Irish accent. She uses words like a master craftsman uses tools. A profound humbleness. No pretension. Just the right tool, used at the right time, to make you understand, to make you believe. Obviously this goes for her acting work too. But, in true master-craftsman-style, there’s no sign of craft. You just believe. Loving got her an Academy Award nomination, her Hamlet got raves on both sides of the pond, and now Passing, Rebecca […]
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“The Horse Needs to Go to the Right”: DP Mihai Mălaimare Jr. on The Harder They Fall, Assembling a COVID-Era Lens Package and On-Set Safety
There are moments in the new Netflix western The Harder They Fall that glean inspiration from Sergio Leone or the paintings of Kadir Nelson, but the film’s style—replete with split screens, zooms and precisely arranged widescreen compositions—was also shaped by cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s choice of lunchtime perch. “Because of COVID, we couldn’t all eat together, so we would each pick our own spots. I always ate up on the balcony of one of the sets,” said Mălaimare Jr. “The crew always joked that was why we have so many high angle shots in the movie, because I would be […]
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“It’s Really the Act of Saying the Words Out Loud, Bringing Darkness into Light, Negotiating the Past for Yourself”: Matthew Fifer on His Autobiographical NYC Drama, Cicada
Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]
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20,000 Kelvin at 9 PM: DP Eli Arenson on Lamb
Comedian W.C. Fields coined the often-repeated adage, “Never work with children or animals.” One would assume that aphorism extends to hybrids of the two as well. Cinematographer Eli Arenson learned the difficulty of that amalgamation on the new A24 film Lamb, while also braving a petting zoo’s worth of critters, including horses, dogs, cats and, of course, sheep. Set in the remote north of Iceland, the film finds a sheep farming couple (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) pulled from the depths of grief when one of their ewes gives birth to a part human/part sheep child they christen Ada. With […]
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Back to One, Episode 176: Jason Isaacs
After 30 years in the business, with credits ranging from Angels in America to the Harry Potter films and everything in between, Jason Isaacs has cultivated an approach to the craft of acting aimed at bringing himself fully into the moment. As he talks about in this episode, that approach involves not memorizing his lines, erasing all descriptors in the script, making no decisions before seeing what the other actors bring. “I try to do nothing. I try to be an empty vessel.” In Fran Kranz’s Mass—a real-time, one-room, four-hander where every actor shines—Isaacs plays a father of a child […]
