Interviews
Interviews
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“It’s Also a Story of the Power of the Media to Shape a Narrative in Ways That Do Disservice to the Truth”: Traci A. Curry on Attica
Attica (releasing in theaters on October 29 and on Showtime November 6) is the latest from nonfiction national treasure Stanley Nelson. Along with his co-director and producer Traci A. Curry, a longtime MSNBC producer, the Firelight Media co-founder and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, who has previously chronicled organizations from The Peoples Temple to The Black Panthers, has now chosen to tackle a very different kind of institution: The prison industrial complex that was captured in one word and broadcast round the globe on September 9, 1971. The titular uprising that occurred at that correctional facility in Attica, NY a half century […]
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“I Started to Think of the Film as a Kind of Ethnography of Fear and Violence In and Around Schools in America”: Todd Chandler on His Gun Violence Doc Bulletproof
There’s a truly startling sequence beginning about a half hour into Todd Chandler’s unsettling, formally assured documentary on school violence, Bulletproof. Until this point Chandler, with cool, distanced precision, depicts the “capitalist spectacle” that has grown around the issue of violence in schools. Active shooter drills, teachers given firearms training, a first-generation immigrant starting a business producing Kevlar hoodies, and a Las Vegas trade show where high-tech surveillance equipment and classroom accessories like bulletproof whiteboards are hawked to school board purchasers — the parallels between this education/security industrial complex and our post 9/11 security state, where weaponry and advanced surveillance co-mingle, […]
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“I’m an Only Child, I’m Jewish and I Use Wide-Angle Lenses”: Barry Sonnenfeld on The Addams Family
Barry Sonnenfeld was less than ten years into a successful career as a cinematographer—with credits including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and When Harry Met Sally on his resume—when he sat down in the director’s chair for the first time on 1991’s The Addams Family. It followed what turned out to be his last job (Misery) as director of photography; from that point on Sonnenfeld would work exclusively as a director, and occasional producer, on visually inventive and conceptually ambitious comedies like the Men in Black trilogy and Pushing Daisies, continuing to hone the dynamic style he had established as a DP. […]
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Brighton Beach and the East Village in the ’80s: Eric Steel on Minyan
Although primarily known as a documentary filmmaker (his 2006 feature, The Bridge, considered the countless suicides committed each year from the Golden Gate Bridge), director Eric Steel makes his narrative feature debut with Minyan, a faithful yet surprising adaptation of a coming-of-age short story by David Bezmozgis. Set in the Russian Jewish community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the 1980s, Minyan tells the story of David (Samuel H. Levine) who, while helping his grandfather (Ron Rifkin) transition into a retirement home, befriends two closeted gay men. As David begins to identify and expand on his own desires, his sense of self begins […]
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“That Particular Phrase, ‘Arthouse,’ Has Hung Over My Head Like a Cloud of Contagion”: Wendell B. Harris Jr. on Chameleon Street
William Douglas Street Jr. needed more money and less of a dead-end job. Working for his dad’s alarm installation company, he’d hit a wall. The only lucrative alternative was to deal drugs, but he refused to get wrapped up in that—instead, he became a conman and created his own opportunities after perceiving how arbitrary the barriers to higher-paying jobs and luxuries of high society are. Through his schemes, Street got to live the life of a Time sports journalist, a Chicago surgeon, a Martiniquan exchange student at Yale and many other personas—if only temporarily. Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street dramatizes […]
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Back to One, Episode 174: Vicky Krieps
Phantom Thread solidified Vicky Krieps as an acting force to be reckoned with. Her incredible performance in that film felt new, like a beginning of sorts. Her latest is Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. She talks about figuring out ways to turn the difficulties of that production into opportunities to create something magical. Plus she gives us a glimpse inside her process-less process, made up of deconstruction, openness, acceptance, listening, embracing chaos, exploding the method, living with failure, holding space for the unknown, and letting intuition lead the way. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including […]
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Cinematographer Michael Fimognari on Shooting the Netflix Series Midnight Mass and Stripping Away Departmental Hierarchy with Red, Green and Blue Camera Teams
In Midnight Mass, the arrival of a new priest upends the small, isolated fishing community of Crockett Island. It’s an original idea from writer/director Mike Flanagan, who made his name in the horror genre adapting Shirley Jackson, Henry James and multiple Stephen King opuses. Flanagan has been excavating the bones of Midnight Mass for years and at various stages it morphed from novel to film to series. The characters’ inner demons and struggles with addiction and faith mirror his own, with details taken from Flanagan’s youth as an altar boy on New York’s Governors Island. With the personal nature of […]
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Socks, Scope and 35mm Projection: Mia Hansen-Løve on Bergman Island
Filmmaking couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) arrive at Fårö Island to begin a real-life residency for artists who wish to work in Ingmar Bergman’s former home. “All this calm and perfection, I find it oppressive,” she says; “soothing,” he counters. Mia Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature, Bergman Island, sets up a number of binaries, most directly in the film’s bifurcated structure: the first half is a third-person POV of Chris and Tony’s time on the island, the second a film-within-a-film of the project Chris is writing and recapitulating for Tony. (For schedule availability reasons, the second half was shot first, while […]
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Suspense in 8K: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Wife of a Spy
Despite his association with horror films, few contemporary filmmakers have covered as much ground as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has shifted back and forth across genres countless times in his prolific 30+ year career. Nevertheless, his latest film, Wife of a Spy, marks his first period piece. It takes place in 1940-41, telling the story of Yūsaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) and his attempts to expose his government’s atrocities in Manchuria, as well as that of his wife Satoko (Yû Aoi), torn between her husband and her country. With a script co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Wife of a Spy unsurprisingly features intricate […]
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Overdraft Protection: Chloë Sevigny Talks to Amalia Ulman About her Feature Debut, El Planeta
Starting in 2012, the saga of mother/daughter scammers Justina and Ana Belén was low-key Spanish news fodder. Their scheme followed a buy-first, pay-never model, using a variety of excuses to dodge their bills. They came to legal attention when they attempted to dodge a hotel bill in Gijón, Spain, by threatening to accuse the proprietor of sexual harassment; a year later, in 2013, they were again arrested in the same city for racking up thousands of euros in unpaid dinners. In 2017, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman received a photo of the Beléns from her mother, Ale, who still lives in […]
