As I left the screening of the documentary The Queen of Versailles, my immediate thought was, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Director Lauren Greenfield has created a complicated, fascinating, and humbling film, perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist. Election-year rhetoric aside, we remain in the ever-widening wake of the Great Recession, and Greenfield’s riches-to-rags story releases waves of conflicting emotion: pity, schadenfreude, guilt, empathy, disgust. With fortuitous—and perhaps shrewd—timing, her film captures an America in flux. The Queen of Versailles tells the story of David and Jackie Siegel, a billionaire couple who were building the largest house in America, a […]
by Susanna Locascio on Jul 19, 2012Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Winter, 1994. Today, most of our Filmmaker covers are original photography, but back in the day, we didn’t have the budget and were forced to work with supplied art from distributors. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who went on to The Deep End, Bee Season, and, most recently, Uncertainty, made their debut with Suture, a formally challenging meta-thriller with a wobbly poster that produced for us a somewhat inscrutable cover. We took their key art, cropped it, colorized it yellow […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2010If one had only a single adjective with which to describe the body of work that directing team David Siegel and Scott McGehee have crafted over the past decade and a half, cerebral immediately jumps to mind. Since their debut film Suture (1993), an austere, black and white thriller starring Dennis Haysbert that took Toronto and Sundance by storm, they have often found it difficult to get their peculiar brand of thoughtful, idea driven filmmaking off the ground. Even if it was far from experimental hijinks of a Hollis Frampton or Kenneth Anger, the fact that the original Suture VHS […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 11, 2009