Interviews
Interviews
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“I Wanted To Find Real People Who Were Going Through Real Problems in an Unreal Place”: Lance Oppenheim on His Hulu-Screening Doc, Some Kind of Heaven
The recently announced results of the 2021 U.S. census produced a number of headline takeaways: for example, the nation’s white population declined for the first time, Hispanics have become California’s largest ethnic group, and metropolitan areas were the beneficiary of declining population in over half of America’s smaller counties. And among those growing metropolitan areas, one, in Florida, stood out as the most quickly expanding: The Villages. Over the last decade, the over-55 retirement community saw its population increase by nearly 40%; it now encompasses 60,000 homes, with more on the way. Seeing The Villages show up in an official […]
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“Our #TellEveryone Hashtag is About Celebrating the Power of Black Art”: Monkeypaw CEO and Co-writer Win Rosenfeld and Director of Social Impact Keisha Senter on Candyman
Although the COVID-19 pandemic delayed its release for over one year, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is finally in theaters and already the subject of intense debate. The film, a sequel to the 1992 original directed by Bernard Rose and starring Tony Todd and Virgina Madsen, certainly invites difficult discussions to be had, and that’s before you even factor in its relation to the brutal events of 2020 that unfolded after the movie wrapped production. A tragedy told on a grand, horrific scale, this new spin on Candyman is as American as apple pie. Set decades after the events of the original, […]
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“I Feel Completely Vindicated Now the Film’s Been Made”: Michael Caton-Jones on Our Ladies’s 20+-Year Journey to the Screen
Things were going well for Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones at the start of 2020. The director of Scandal (1989), This Boy’s Life (1993) and Rob Roy (1995), among many others, Caton-Jones was preparing for the theatrical release of Our Ladies, a passion project he’d been trying to get made for over 20 years. It had received its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, where it “played out of this world”, in his words, to an audience of roughly 800 attendees in its first public screening. Flying relatively under the radar in a stacked program largely […]
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“A Deteriorating Mind Condemned to Hell…”: Sadri Cetinkaya on Fantasia Doc Lost Boys
I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After […]
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“News Would Disappear Off Social Media”: Nanfu Wang on COVID Documentary In the Same Breath
Given the amount of turmoil, despair, anger, and loss we’ve experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s fair to say that the past two years have been the longest 20 years of our lives. As breaking news changed rapidly and information was uncovered, the severity of the virus came into focus. As dangerous as COVID-19 was (and, given the acceleration of mutated variants, how dangerous it continues to be), just as damaging was the misinformation being spread by various government-sanctioned media and harebrained conspiracy theorists. Nanfu Wang’s latest documentary, In the Same Breath, covers the entire gamut and, per her signature style, […]
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“We Edited the Film in a Sort of Circle – Without the Credits It Could Even Be Played in a Loop”: Tea Lukač on Her Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Debut Roots
Premiering in the East of the West Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (August 20-28), Roots is an unexpected documentary gem from filmmaker and video artist Tea Lukač. Through striking cinematography and the simplest of concepts the Serbian director takes us on a journey to present-day Dvor, the Croatian town that Lukač and her family fled when war came and she was just six years old. Intriguingly, we get to know the rural locale not through travelogue but through the back seat of a moving car, where seven distinct stories unfold via passengers of ascending age. Costumed […]
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“Spreadsheets Are the Best Things in the World”: Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski on Animating Cryptozoo
Cryptozoo, Dash Shaw’s beautifully animated follow-up to 2016’s My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, begins with a stark, colorless prologue in which a couple, Amber and Matthew (voiced by Luisa Krause and Michael Cera), scale a fence that seems to be randomly placed in the middle of the woods and find themselves staring at an honest-to-God unicorn. The ensuing scene is delicately handled, conveying both the beauty and fright of the encounter and, eventually, its tragicness unflinchingly, without sentimentality. It’s a wonderful introduction to the weird world of the film, where not only unicorns but also gorgons, griffins, […]
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“15 Terabytes of Data Per Day”: Neill Blomkamp on Making Demonic with Volumetric Capture Technology
I’ve always had an affinity for tales of Roger Corman’s frugal resourcefulness. If the legendary filmmaker had a standing set and a “name” actor with a few surplus days left on a contract, you can bet Corman was going to expediently craft a movie to fit those puzzle pieces. Outside of a shared fondness for social commentary within genre, the films of Oscar nominated writer/director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium)—with their cutting-edge special effects and ample budgets – don’t typically bear much resemblance to Corman’s drive-in heyday. However, Blomkamp’s latest effort, Demonic, was constructed with a similarly enterprising spirit. When […]
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“Multitasking in Film is Quite Stressful”: Sean Penn and DP Daniel Moder on Flag Day
Ever since his directorial debut with The Indian Runner in 1991, Sean Penn has been intent on keeping a certain tradition of American cinema alive: the tradition of directorially self-effacing, behavior-driven movies for adults in which complicated men and women find themselves unable to get out of their own and each other’s way. It’s the school of filmmaking practiced by John Cassavetes, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson, on whose work Penn builds with movies that fuse character and landscape to get at something unique and complex about American identity and culture. His latest film, Flag Day, stands alongside The Indian […]
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“It Pays to Already Be a Good Diver”: Ian Seabrook on His Career as an Underwater Cameraman
Ian Seabrook is an aquatic Zelig for film franchises. He crossed paths with Deadpool, RoboCop, Godzilla and the Blair Witch. He joined the Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men and Mission: Impossible. He sat ringside for Freddy vs. Jason, Aliens vs. Predator and Batman v Superman. So it’s understandable if he can’t quite recall which Hellraiser sequel served as his baptism as an underwater cameraman. “I think it was four or five, I don’t even know what number they’re up to at this point,” said Seabrook. What he does remember about that job is an enduring lesson of underwater photography—you may only get […]
