Features
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The Music Inside: Siân Heder on Her Oscar-Winning CODA
Filmmaker’s interview with Coda director Siân Heder originally appeared in our Summer, 2021 print edition, and is being reposted today following the film’s winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage […]
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Everybody Is a Star: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on Making His Oscar-Winning Doc, Summer of Soul
This interview with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson about his Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) appeared on the cover of our Summer, 2021 print edition and is being reposted following the film’s winning Best Documentary at last night’s 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor On June 29, 1969, Sly and the Family Stone delivered an electrifying performance at Mount Morris Park in Harlem, New York. Fusing the revolutionary fervor of the Black Freedom movement with the collectivist spirit of West Coast counterculture, the iconic band wowed the audience with rousing renditions of “Everyday People,” “Sing a Simple Song” “You Can Make It […]
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On the Journey: The Power of the Dog Producer Tanya Seghatchian
As a young woman, Tanya Seghatchian remembers laughing, crying and suffocating through Jane Campion’s early work, a cinematic compass she had internalized by the time she began her first job for the BBC—researching a two-part TV documentary about John Ford, pioneer of the American western. Over the years, Seghatchian’s trajectory expanded across genres and scales, from coproducing the first two Harry Potter films and executive producing more than 20 episodes of The Crown to producing Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love and Cold War, the latter of which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, in […]
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Speed of Life: The Worst Person in the World Director Joachim Trier Interviewed by Mike Mills
“With the passing of the years, each neighborhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life,” said French novelist Patrick Modiano in his 2014 Nobel Prize speech. Modiano was speaking of Paris, the setting of most of his novels, but his words resonate with the work of Norwegian director Joachim Trier—specifically, his loose “Oslo trilogy,” which culminates with the […]
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Interior Spaces: Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Lost Daughter
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
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Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
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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 […]
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The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
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Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
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Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz on The Velvet Underground
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz first worked together on Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s very funny and infectiously playful 2016 documentary on The Stooges. The Velvet Underground is a different band, whose story places different demands on the filmmakers and audience, but Gonçalves and Kurnitz once again found the proper cinematic corollary for their subject with Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Gonçalves is a Haynes regular, having edited narrative features Carol and Dark Waters for the director, along with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Kurnitz is a first-time Haynes collaborator (but, as he notes below, longtime Haynes enthusiast) best known […]
