Joan Micklin Silver
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“What’s This Bright Guy Doing in a Pickle Barrel?” Peter Riegert on Crossing Delancey
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and click here to read an interview with co-star Amy Irving.] Filmmaker: You’d worked with Joan Micklin Silver before, on Chilly Scenes of Winter. What kind of an actor-director relationship did you have? Riegert: It was very comfortable. She was a very good writer—she wrote Chilly Scenes of Winter—and knew how to take [on] a script that she didn’t write. She knew how to cast. She had a wonderful eye for […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 10, 2025 -
“I Found My Pickle Man”: Amy Irving on Crossing Delancey
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and check back tomorrow to read the final part, an interview with co-star Peter Riegert.] Filmmaker: Joan Micklin Silver is a filmmaker whose reputation has really grown over the past decade, and I’m curious what her secret sauce was, for lack of a better term. What do you remember about working with her? Irving: Joan spent a lot of time figuring out her cast. If you look at all her movies, […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 9, 2025 -
From the Jewish Repertory Theater to the Movies: Screenwriter Susan Sandler on Crossing Delancey
When Joan Micklin Silver died on the last day of 2020, cinephiles mourned the passing of a major American filmmaker, a status to which she may have begun to ascend in late 2014, when IFC Center presented a 35mm screening of her third feature Chilly Scenes of Winter with its original title and the director’s preferred ending—the first time in perhaps a decade that the film had resurfaced in New York’s repertory scene. At that time, Vadim Rizov spoke to Silver, then in her late 70s, about her struggles to break into the film industry (“‘At that point in time, […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 8, 2025 -
Joan Micklin Silver on Casting Crossing Delancey and Steven Spielberg’s Role in Getting the Film Made
Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, her studio romantic comedy about a thirtysomething trying to escape her Lower East Side roots, is the epitome of the New York Woman series the Quad has been running all month. After a difficult experience at United Artists with her 1979 masterpiece Chilly Scenes of Winter, Silver took on her biggest production yet, an adaptation of Susan Sandler’s stage play, Crossing Delancey. The Nebraska native returned to examining Jewish identity in New York, as she did in her first film Hester Street, but instead of immigrants at the turn of the century, her focus was […]
by Graham Carter on Jul 17, 2018 -
The Yakuza, Interiors and Chilly Scenes of Winter: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) is an idiosyncratic but fascinating blend of incongruous tones made all the stranger by the difference in sensibilities among the men behind the camera. The film started as a script by brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader, who sold it for a boatload of cash thanks to the high-concept premise: an ex-soldier from the U.S. travels to Japan and infiltrates the underworld in a mash-up of the American action flick and the Asian martial arts film. Once Pollack came on board to direct the movie became something less commercial but, in its way, more compelling; uncomfortable […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 3, 2017 -
“Women Directors are One More Problem We Don’t Need”: Joan Micklin Silver on Chilly Scenes of Winter
Released in 1975, Joan Micklin Silver’s feature debut Hester Street is the story of immigrant Jews assimilating with various degrees of success to turn-of-the-century New York City. She followed with two contemporary works: 1977’s Boston alt-paper story Between the Lines and 1979’s Chilly Scenes of Winter. The latter is set to screen tomorrow at NYC’s IFC Center as part of the “Celluloid Dreams” series, whose premise would not have made sense in the very recent pre-DCP past: it aims to show repertory cinema on 35mm. Chilly Scenes is based on Ann Beattie’s first novel, which primarily concerns itself with Charles (John Heard) and his deathless, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 11, 2014
