Interviews Archives - Page 2 of 10

“Heaven” is for Real: An Interview with Aharon Keshales

October 3, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

I met Aharon Keshales during the junket for Big Bad Wolves and found in him something like a kindred spirit. A former teacher and film critic, he spoke fondly of his love for 1970s cinema and provided cogent defenses of modern blockbusters. Both his co-directing debut, Rabies (the first Israeli horror film), and its follow-up, Big Bad Wolves, demonstrate a strong distaste for hewing to conventional narratives and resolutions. His first American film, South of Heaven, finds Jason Sudeikis at the moment of his superstardom, bolstered by a supporting cast that includes Evangeline Lilly, Mike Colter, Shea Whigham, and Jeremy Bobb, each delivering career-highlight performances in the service of a script that feels personal and, above all, wise. Keshales spent eight years from his last film to get to this point and has some scars as proof of the hazards endured along the way. Like the weather-beaten films that inform his taste, South of Heaven begins as something like a love story and ends, as all great love stories must, in terrible tragedy. (Keshales is absolutely unafraid of the “down” ending.) Its obvious touchstones are Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Beat Takeshi’s Hana-bi; to say it’s exactly my jam is an understatement. I love Aharon as a person, so take this with whatever grain of salt you feel it merits, but South of Heaven is fantastic.

Crampton Comes Alive!: FFC Interviews Barbara Crampton

April 18, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

I don’t know what I was expecting from Travis Stevens’s Jakob’s Wife, but it wasn’t an at-times-heartbreaking study of a woman in late-middle-age, coming to terms with her mortality and given a second chance at the rest of her life in the unlikeliest of places. I like everyone involved with this project, and there’s no question that knowing Barbara Crampton (who plays the eponymous preacher’s wife, Ann) and her co-star Larry Fessenden (Jakob) personally has flavoured how I see this film. Sufficed to say that Jakob’s Wife is clearly an emotional autobiography for Crampton–an intensely personal picture that’s not coincidentally home to her best performance. She kills me in this. I don’t know if she knows how good she is; I don’t know that she’d ever really been given a chance to show it before this.

Zoom Generation: FFC Interviews Rob Savage & Jemma Moore

April 4, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, UK

Shudder’s Host, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, is this peculiar moment’s The Blair Witch Project, a landmark film that provides insight into not just these dark times via the technologies that have evolved from our collective woe, but also how we ourselves have evolved, changed in unexpected ways by the products of our hands. Never so much as to lose touch with what scares us, though. Even the genesis of the project–Host was born of a prank a bored Savage devised to scare his friends on a Zoom chat one evening (a prank posted later on social media, where it gained another half-life)–has its roots in how things that are old-hat (the noise in the attic, the jump scare, the Rear Window effect of being a voyeur to the love and death of loved ones without the power to affect them) don’t go away as the tools of our existence change. They adapt. What we’ve always feared, we fear still. And here we are now with this stuff we’ve Frankensteined into existence (social media, virtual hosting, Bluetooth, the cloud) without a complete understanding of the doors it’ll unlock in our relationship with the universe. We’re playing with fire, and Host is a warning no less eloquent for being too late.

Body Politics: FFC Interviews Dusty Mancinelli & Madeleine Sims-Fewer

March 24, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews

Even among the generally positive responses to Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s superlative Violation, one finds evidence of the predictable fallout that occurs whenever a woman in horror, particularly in the rape-revenge category of horror, fails to adhere to expectations of victimhood. Surely a woman who reacts to rape with violence is psycho, yes? Violation has as its closest analogues the Greek tragedies involving a woman cruelly wronged who righteously wrongs in return; the final image of the film is as clear a metaphor as I can imagine for how we all, men and women alike, take on the sins of the father in our various acts of consumption, both gustatorial and sexual. I was excited to speak with co-writers/co-directors Ms. Sims-Fewer (who also stars) and Mr. Mancinelli about their film and its positive–if sometimes confused–reception. So often, exhaustingly often, when one seeks to change perception, one instead manages to reveal how unchangeable perceptions can be. We should be beyond this conversation in 2021. In a lot of ways, Violation reveals that we’ve yet to properly broach the topic. The pair, sitting on a pale blue couch with a Frida Kahlo throw pillow between them–an appropriate totem of gender ambiguity and, indeed, rage, I thought–were engaged and smart about what their film was about. Violation is intentional in a way that very few movies can get away with–and it gets away with it because it’s, y’know, brilliant. I started by asking them the perhaps obvious question of why men hate women who reveal themselves as fully human.

Open Hart: FFC Interviews Julia Hart

December 12, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

My grad advisor in British Romanticism, Brad Mudge, had this thing where he’d ask, after reading a poem, where the poem “breathes.” I always loved that question; I love it still. It speaks to me of understanding that art will, when it’s done well, cease to become something extant and begin to become something internal. The Romanticists–Shelley, I think it was–talk about the words of poets as seeds that engender new ideas in the heart of the reader. The moment I’m Your Woman “breathes” for me is in a diner sequence midway through where our hero, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), tells her temporary protector, Cal (Arinze Kene), how after a series of miscarriages, she “burned” all the desire for a child out of herself to protect herself from more heartbreak. Already a good film, I’m Your Woman becomes a great one here in this open, vulnerable conversation about something that happens to as many as 20% of known pregnancies. It’s so prevalent an event that common wisdom dictates you don’t share your pregnancy news until well into a pregnancy in anticipation of it. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages (one more traumatic than the others, all of them a death of hope) before we successfully carried our first child to term.

Spokesmen: FFC Interviews Kyle Marvin & Michael Angelo Covino

November 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Towards the end of Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin's The Climb, anti-hero Mike goes to see a movie by himself at an arthouse theatre doing a repertory screening of Pierre Étaix's Le Grand Amour. The scene quoted in brief is part of the film's framing device in which the hero, played by Étaix himself, is about to be married, an event which causes him to ruminate on past loves and the series of events leading up to this moment. In speaking with Mr. Covino and Mr. Marvin, I misremembered a Jerry Lewis quote about Étaix, thinking he'd said he had met two geniuses in his life: himself and Étaix. In truth, what he'd said was he understood what genius was twice, the first time when he looked up the word in the dictionary, the second when he met Étaix. The truth paints Lewis in a better light, but it's not as funny. Lewis went on to cast Étaix in his self-suppressed Holocaust melodrama The Day the Clown Cried.

Into the Wildland: FFC Interviews Jeanette Nordahl

September 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Interviews

Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland (a.k.a. Kød & blod) doesn’t feel like somebody’s directorial debut at all. Where so many first features are packed to the gills with every idea the director’s ever had for fear they’ll never get another opportunity to make a movie, this one is indicated by an extraordinary reserve, a sense that for as much as made it into the film, there was more left on the table. Its connective tissue is diaphanous and reliant on the experience the viewer brings to it. Some veteran filmmakers could stand to learn from this–that an active viewership is a state to which one should aspire in art, not actively avoid. Wildland is a mature piece done by a filmmaker with a gratifying faith in both herself and her audience.

A Keeper of Flocks: FFC Interviews Abel Ferrara

June 15, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Lemme break it down:

I’ve grown up with Abel Ferrara’s films and they’ve grown up with me. His Driller Killer and Ms. 45 were on my exact wavelength when I first sought them out during illicit trips to the video store. I didn’t see it until much later, but his directorial debut, the porn flick 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, would’ve been my vibe back then, too. Watching it now, it’s a prep course for his later work, having the same grindhouse appeal and, as it happens, the same ineffable sense of intimacy that still informs his incomparable sex scenes. Movies for adults in the United States used to be nasty like this sometimes, and no one is nastier than Mr. Ferrara when he sets his mind to it.

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

November 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, San Diego Asian Film Festival

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.

Fessenden II: FFC Interviews Larry Fessenden

March 23, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Interviews

Larry Fessenden is smart, and he's modest about that–embarrassed, even. He's generous to a fault with his time. He likes a good beer, and he made one of my very favourite films, the melancholic, ageless Wendigo. At his best, he's an artist of the sublime. At his not-best, he loses the fire in pursuit of the kindling. He respects history and his place in it–and sometimes he takes too many pains outlining the appendix when The Wasteland is waiting. His new film–his second shot at the Frankenstein story after his 1991 feature debut, No Telling–is Depraved. I'm mixed on it. The parts I liked, I loved. The parts I didn't, I recognized as the product of an artist who has perhaps spent too much of his time nurturing the work of others and not enough dedicated to establishing the sea legs for his own endeavours. Yet although there's a little rust on it, a new Fessenden joint is always cause for celebration, and Depraved is no exception.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

November 7, 2018****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

FrightFest ’18: “It’s Alive!” – FFC Interviews ‘Frankenstein’s Creature’ Filmmakers Sam Ashurst & James Swanton

September 28, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, FrightFest, Interviews

by Walter Chaw Sam Ashurst's film of James Swanton's play "Frankenstein's Creature" is the best film of its kind since Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia. It solves the problem of shooting a static, one-set, one-man show with graceful, inventive technique. It's smart about what it does and an act of extraordinary brinkmanship that happens to pay off in spades. Both based in the UK, Messrs. Ashurst and Swanton were kind enough to chat with us from amidst the whirl and fury of London's FrightFest, where Frankenstein's Creature had its debut this past August. We started by talking about Mary Shelley's novel on the 200^th anniversary of its publication:

FrightFest ’18: “‘Night’ Moves” – FFC Interviews ‘The Night Sitter’ Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn & John Rocco

August 31, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Interviews

by Walter Chaw The Night Sitter is awesome indeed. Partially crowdfunded via Kickstarter, it represents the feature debut of writing-directing duo Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco and their filmmaking collective Roller Disco Massacre. Just a couple of guys who love '80s horror and know how to use it in a sentence, Bruhn and Rocco were kind enough in the heat of this year's FrightFest to answer a few pressing questions. We started off talking about practical details of shooting The Night Sitter:

FrightFest ’18: “All the Water is Holy” – FFC Interviews ‘The Devil’s Doorway’ Director Aislinn Clarke

August 22, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Interviews, UK

by Walter Chaw There are some things that horror does better than any other genre. At its best, there's no equal to its ability to surf the zeitgeist, to reflect what a culture fears and offer proximate and ultimate exorcisms. Aislinn Clarke's The Devil's Doorway is an intensely personal piece that works as metaphor in a few broad sociological conversations, covering the continued atrocity of the Catholic Church's systemic protection of predators among its ranks in addition to the broader tradition of male control over and exploitation of a woman's sexuality. Set in 1960, it even riffs, extra-textually, on that year's revolution in cinema, which saw the release of uncomfortable, status-disturbing pictures like Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom, Jingoku, Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, and Black Sunday. Jung had this idea that if you repress something hard enough and for long enough, it becomes monstrous eventually and explodes into the consciousness. The 1950s were a pressure cooker in many ways, and 1960 was the release. The Devil's Doorway is a release, too, in that it confronts directly and indirectly Ireland's dark Magdalene Laundry/Asylum legacy whilst seeking, in the person of a world-weary (doubting) Father Thomas, to make some sort of peace at last with our complicity in the machineries of oppression. Whatever the priest's non-Pyrrhic spoils, they're hard-won and long-in-coming.

A Waning Desire to Blow S–t Up: FFC Interviews Pete Travis

September 29, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Interviews, TIFF, UK

I was five minutes late because I’m a chronic screw-up but Pete Travis couldn’t have been more patient or forgiving. I’m doubly impressed by his zen calm when he tells me he starts shooting another feature in four days. I assume out loud that doing press at a film festival is the last thing he needs, but he says he’s grateful for the respite from a constantly-ringing phone. Later Travis, who gives off a major Ben Mendelsohn vibe in person, will compare big-budget filmmaking to lying on the beach; if we’d ordered drinks, I would’ve had what he’s having.

Travis came to this year’s TIFF with his follow-up to the sensational Dredd, the London-set City of Tiny Lights, in tow. Starring the charming, ubiquitous Riz Ahmed, it’s about a detective (Brits, including Travis, favour the term “gumshoe”) whose search for a missing prostitute brings him in touch with his own tragic past. It’s a conventional hard-boiled whodunit–the genre has survived by being incorruptibly formulaic, allowing it to comment on modern times by throwing into relief our changing mores and values–with one glaring exception: only one of the main characters is white. It’s fascinating how deceptively fresh this makes it feel. My major complaint after the movie was over was that it retreats from those Chinatown places that would give it resonance beyond its enlightened casting (screenwriter Patrick Neale, adapting his own novel, scaled back on his book’s doom and gloom considerably), but upon spending some time with Travis, I came to see the optimism of City of Tiny Lights as deeply personal to a serene and hopeful man.

We spoke on September 15, 2016 at the Azure Restaurant & Bar in the InterContinental Toronto Centre.

Needing Bigger Boats: FFC Interviews Larry Fessenden

October 24, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

illustration by Bill Chambers

It was within the first six months or so of trying this thing out professionally that I reviewed Larry Fessenden's third film (and masterpiece), Wendigo. I was moved, deeply, by its observation of childhood and innocence lost. I was taken by the care of its presentation. It was thematically tight. And technically? On point, including a fantastic stop-motion, practical conception of the titular bogie. It's a lovely bit of myth-making that understands why we make myths in the first place. Years later, when Fessenden directed his "aquatic" film Beneath for basic cable, certain wags would brand it his Jaws–knowing, famously, that Spielberg's maritime yarn was among Fessenden's favourites. The boat they missed is that his Jaws is actually Wendigo: childhood's end; death of the father; the parents' inability to protect their young; and, yes, the creation of myths to contextualize what it could and explain the rest away.

Synchronicity: FFC Interviews Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, writers/directors of “Big Bad Wolves”

January 12, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Israel

Just a couple of weeks after I caught writer-director Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado's Big Bad Wolves at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, having seen it himself at the Busan International Film Festival, declared it to be his favourite movie of 2013. Turns out QT screening the picture at a South Korean event represents a special kind of synchronicity, given that both he and South Korea's fulsome genre cinema were key influences on Kehsales & Papushado. Seeing both of Keshales and Papushado's films when I did (before I got a chance to screen Big Bad Wolves, I was inspired by the buzz on it to track down their 2010 debut, Rabies) felt like a bit of synchronicity in itself–or, at least, I felt lucky that I was able to catch this wave right at the moment that it crests and heads to shore. When I reached out to Mr. Keshales to see if he might be interested in an interview, he was quick to agree and then, over missed connections, a miscommunication about time zones (8 p.m. in Israel is 11 a.m. in Colorado, go figure), a bad Skype link, a newly-purchased cell-mike still package-fresh, and finally a cell call from a street in Israel (where Papushado almost got creamed by a car) to a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I was able to chat at last with Keshales and Papushado: the faces–the only ones, as it happens–of Israeli horror and a new day dawning in Israeli cinema.

MHHFF ’13: FFC Interviews “We Are What We Are” Director Jim Mickle

October 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

The Curtis Hotel is right across the street from the Denver Performing Arts Complex–a city block “hollowed out” in the middle that houses Denver’s premier venues: the ones for the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and touring companies of Broadway productions. On a hot day in September, I walked through the complex, under the four-storey-high glass canopy, to the Curtis. It’s a fun place, this hotel; the floors have themes. I met Jim Mickle on the superhero floor, on the morning his film was to screen at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival. He’s a tall guy, affable, friendly, and not at all what I was expecting after watching his sober, dense, matriarchal horror movie We Are What We Are. I expected, at the least, a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows. On the last day of publicity for the film, after which he was returning to editing duties on his adaptation of Joe Lansdale’s awesome noir Cold in July, I promised I would try to avoid asking him questions he’d already answered a few dozen times before–although I couldn’t resist bringing up Kelly McGillis and Witness because, yeah, I’m a big, giant dork. We started off, though, talking about Antonia Bird’s Ravenous and his own film’s Ravenous feel.

Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer

September 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Telluride, Telluride 2013

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Youth Is Heavy: FFC Interviews Olivier Assayas

May 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Interviews

May 23, 2013|"We didn't really know where we were heading," Olivier Assayas writes of his generation's amorphousness following the civil unrest of the late-1960s, "but the journey was exciting, charging time with meaning and offering a horizon all the more desired for our having had foretaste in May that had left a nasty feeling of unfulfillment." An anarchist preteen during the general strikes and student occupations that rocked Paris in May of 1968, Assayas came of age in the countercultural afterglow of the early 1970s, as part of a splintered youth culture struggling to realize the intellectual and political work of their predecessors in radically different ways. Surely owing to that belatedness, Assayas's reworkings of this historical moment, both in his memoir A Post-May Adolescence and in his films set during the same formative years (1994's Cold Water and 2010's Carlos), are shot through with ambivalence: They're as interested in that nasty feeling of unfulfillment as they are excited about the freedom of travelling without a map.