Interviews Archives - Page 3 of 10

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.

Tippi: FFC Interviews Actress Tippi Hedren

November 17, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Interviews

A conversation with the last of the Hitchcock Blondes

According to Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography The Dark Side of Genius, Alfred Hitchcock’s tendency to become overly enamoured with his blonde stars reached an ugly head with Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie. Revisiting the book now, several years after first reading it and resisting some of the allegations therein, I see an author whose love for Hitchcock the auteur is at war with the unpleasant details of his subject’s emotional life. As Ms. Hedren so delicately put it when I had the pleasure of chatting with her the other night: “As a man, [Hitchcock] was found wanting.” Spoto’s declaration that Marnie is a result of sloth but also unusually personal and effective as art and even memoir illustrates, I think, the schism at which most scholars of Hitchcock at some point arrive. When I read The Dark Side of Genius as a college freshman, it was a gateway to understanding better exactly what was going on in Notorious, and exactly what Hitchcock’s men are always playing out.

Keeping Score: FFC Interviews “Payback” Filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Margaret Atwood

May 10, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Interviews

It’s PAYBACK’s time

March 16, 2012 | The Massey Lectures are as much a Canadian institution as the RCMP, so it’s fitting that I spotted honorary Mountie Paul Gross in the audience of Margaret Atwood’s closing talk back in 2008. Landing at the anxious first crest of the financial crisis, Atwood’s lectures, collected and published as the best-selling Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, were regarded as the latest in the internationally-renowned author’s string of prophesies come true. (The Handmaid’s Tale‘s dystopian vision of an American theocracy that reduces women to reproductive concubines might now be mistaken for Rick Santorum’s four-year prospectus.) Yet Atwood wastes no time in announcing that debt is not in vogue so much as hardwired into human patterns of thinking. Nor does she offer financial advice, playfully following her interest in score-keeping wherever it takes her, whether to the Victorian novel, where a parent’s balance sheet can make or break a marriage, or to how we think about the penance in penitentiaries.

The Ghost Writer: FFC Interviews “The Innkeepers” Writer-Director Ti West

April 24, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

THE INNKEEPERS writer-director Ti West on the right way to use a train set

April 23, 2012|The irony of identifying Ti West as a member of the new guard in the horror genre is twofold in that first, there doesn’t appear to be a new guard in the horror genre, and secondly, if he does represent a revolution, it’s a revolution in retrograde. What seems refreshing about West’s films, particularly his lauded The House of the Devil and now The Innkeepers, is his dedication to character-driven pictures, shot on real film, with long takes and small moments–a babysitter listening to The Fixx on her Walkman, an asthmatic girl struggling to take out the garbage–that build, gradually, to “the goods” in the finale.

In conversation, West is direct to the verge of impatient, quick with unguarded opinions and apparently weary of the usual junket questions. I didn’t, therefore, ask him to rehash the story about meeting Kelly McGillis over Skype, or how cast and crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar in Connecticut while filming The House of the Devil and how fortunate it was that they didn’t stay at a chain (specifically The Marriott) during that time, because it would have killed The Innkeepers in its cradle. I didn’t want to rehash the 17-day shoot, the strict limits on stock and the fear that they wouldn’t be able to complete the film should any reshoots be necessary…

But I did want to ask Mr. West about his relationship to FFC fave Larry Fessenden, producer for all of West’s films (except Cabin Fever 2, which was taken away from West–for reasons I also didn’t wish to rehash) to date. We spoke briefly via telephone last Wednesday in conjunction with the Blu-ray release of The Innkeepers.–Walter Chaw

The Future is Now: FFC Interviews Miranda July|The Future (2011)

August 7, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Interviews, Romance, Theatrical, UK

Miranda July reflects on The Future

THE FUTURE
***/****

starring Hamish Linklater, Miranda July, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres
written and directed by Miranda July

In The Future, writer/director/star Miranda July indulges in the same wayward malaise of her previous film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but, somewhat ironically, the focus on the uncertainty of “what comes next” makes this one seem a lot less scattershot. Dance teacher Sophie (July) and tech-support guy Jason (Hamish Linklater) have rescued a sickly cat from the wild and sent him to an animal shelter, and they’ve got a month until they can reclaim him. However, the cat will require ’round-the-clock care from them to stay alive, so they conclude that this is their last “free” month before years-long responsibilities squander their potential, and they quit their jobs in a bid to become more “spontaneous.” Jason goes door-to-door selling trees for an environmental program and Sophie decides to film “thirty dances over thirty days” for a short-track to YouTube stardom. But neither one is prepared for the apathy and self-loathing that greets their cutesy little endeavours, and as they spin their wheels, they gravitate towards people who appear to “really have their shit together”: Sophie becomes attracted to a single father with a small business (David Warshofsky), while Jason regularly visits an old man (Joe Putterlik) who once sold him a used hairdryer. What’s important is that July quickly establishes that these behaviours are not a matter of self-improvement or jealousy–it’s just a hell of a lot easier to stare at the lives of others and marvel at how organized they look from the outside. In other words, Sophie and Jason take no real “action” of their own accord; everything they do is just another bit of slacktivism to avoid the responsibilities for which they’re supposedly preparing. Her self-esteem takes a hit as she views other women’s “dancing” videos, so she cancels her Internet and calls it a great opportunity to focus. July makes this sheltered worldview all the more fascinating by introducing an element of surrealism–soon, her characters’ paradoxical desires to move forward and stand still give them to power to bend the universe to their will, as an imminent break-up is stalled by the literal stoppage of time. (And yet, time still manages to march on.) The self-conscious obviousness of its metaphors gives The Future a strong grounding in reality, rendering even July’s silliest notions–such as a series of helium-inflected monologues from the cat himself (the only neglected “victim” in this scenario), waiting for his loving masters to return–deeply affecting.–IP

August 7, 2011|Miranda July is very much like the characters she plays, and they are very much like her: she stares at you with wide, intense eyes, and her responses trail off once she realizes that she’s revealed all she wants to about a given subject. She’s in town to promote her second feature film, The Future, for the Boston Independent Film Festival, and we both seem a little eager to discover if, indeed, this sophomore effort can be discussed at length. Over the course of our conversation, we shared a couple of awkward laughs–in mutual recognition, I think, of the inherent absurdity of this meeting; we had been tasked to interpret and explain an intentionally abstract piece dealing with moving on and growing older, about which the creator must refuse a “full” explanation. Still, though July insists on keeping some things secret, she comes across as utterly sincere–so much so that I felt a pang of remorse when I realized that I had unintentionally lied to her by not attending the festival’s screening of The Future like I said I would. Several days later, given another interview opportunity for a different film, I made it a point to ask her husband Mike Mills to apologize on my behalf.

Subjectivity: FFC Interviews Mike Mills

June 18, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

Mmillsinterviewtitle

Starting fresh with the director of BEGINNERS

June 19, 2011|All of Mike Mills’s films–narratives, documentaries, and music videos alike–share a common theme of perspective: how the individual views others, how others view the individual, and the projections that exist on both sides. Although I was somewhat skeptical of its indie quirk, Mills’s Beginners left me thinking about the people in my life, past and present; I was genuinely affected by its interpersonal dynamics. As it happens, a major fulcrum of Mills’s work is that he creates a dialogue not only between the artist and the masses–he also strives to forge a bond with the individual. After several days of combing through his filmography in preparation for the interview below, I finally discovered that Mills had been keeping a video diary on the official website for Beginners chronicling the sights he’s seen and the people he’s met on the movie’s press tour. It hardly came as a surprise.

A Very Civil Dialogue: FFC Interviews Tom Shadyac

April 30, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Interviews

May 1, 2011|”Ian, my brother.” A casual greeting turned into an awkward embrace, and I realized then that all the time I had spent researching director Tom Shadyac’s career wasn’t going to play much of a role in the ensuing conversation. Shadyac was in town to discuss I Am, his self-conscious documentary break from light family fare–which, he hopes, will change a few minds about the essential nature of humanity. (If he doesn’t consider the days of Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty to be behind him, this was not, I correctly surmised, the publicity tour on which to discuss it.) When we sat down to talk, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about I Am. The director sensed my skepticism from the very beginning, and he didn’t try to convert me in any traditional sense of the word. He just wanted to hash out our respective feelings on the film and have a decent conversation about them. I sort of wish that his vibrant personality shone through in I Am as well as it did in person; his statements here were delivered like an interesting university lecture, whereas the movie feels a bit more hectoring in its approach. And, yes, he followed through with a second hug at the end of the interview.

Real Questions: FFC Interviews James Gunn

April 3, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews, Superhero

April 3, 2011|James Gunn has spent most of his career rewriting icons of decades past (Tromeo and Juliet, Dawn of the Dead, the big-screen Scooby-Doo pictures), and while I share many of my editor’s misgivings about Gunn’s latest post-modern exercise, Super, I was looking forward to interviewing him when his PA tour came around to Boston. Gunn had fifteen years on me, but it seemed apparent that our genre obsessions had sprung from similar sources. (Fresh out of college, I relished in the insanity of Gunn’s then-recent Slither.) Still, despite our common lexicon, it took us a few minutes to get a bead on each other. “Just don’t be like that last guy,” Gunn told me with a laugh as I turned on my tape recorder. “He had two recording devices. He turned off the first one, and then I said some stuff that I shouldn’t have said, and the thing was still recording. And I’m like, ‘oh, fuck’–’cause he got me to say exactly what he was trying to get me to say.”

Passing Through: FFC Interviews the Farrelly Brothers

February 27, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Interviews

February 27, 2011|Having conducted my usual round of research (re-watching the movies, poring over the DVD commentaries and other making-of material), the Farrelly brothers were pretty much how I expected them to be when I interviewed them at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston: older brother Peter is very talkative and up for an impromptu debate, while Bobby is content to hang back and drop the occasional pearl of wisdom into the conversation. Of course, research only prepares you for so much. Their career-defining gross-out sight gags have never been my cup of tea, but just about every one of their films (including their latest, Hall Pass) is driven by an unmistakable–perhaps surprising–humanity. Still, it wasn’t until our discussion heated up that I truly began to appreciate the source of that humanity. The Farrellys seemed a little surprised that anyone would bring it up, but their innate kindness shined through as we talked about their approach to making movies. (I feel somewhat privileged, actually, to have witnessed it firsthand.) It’s obvious that they’ve spent their joint career striving to promote an egalitarianism in Hollywood–not just with their all-inclusive casting decisions, but also with their embrace of the test-screening process as a barometer of artistic success.

Natural Habitat: FFC Interviews David Michôd & Ben Mendelsohn

August 21, 20102000s, 2010, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

August 22, 2010|I met up with David Michôd and Ben Mendelsohn–director and star, respectively, of the exceptional Aussie crime drama Animal Kingdom–in the dining room of Denver’s Panzano for a little breakfast and espresso. In the middle of an exhausting schedule for the duo that saw them shuttling back and forth across the United States in support of their film, they appeared to be mutually nursing some variety of respiratory ailment–just one symptom (along with red eyes and a pale complexion) of too much time spent breathing recirculated air in the company of strangers. Entirely unpretentious and unfailingly polite, both wore torn T-shirts and shabby jeans, sported two-day growths of stubble, and seemed completely comfortable with me, probably because I was dressed, more or less, in exactly the same way. I liked them instantly.

How I Did It: FFC Interviews Vincenzo Natali

June 6, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Interviews

With Splice, director Vincenzo Natali’s career comes alive. ALIVE!

June 6, 2010|I had been invited to interview Vincenzo Natali, and although I immediately acquainted myself with his previous work, nothing could prepare me for the film he was coming to Boston to promote. Indeed, anyone who’s seen the trailers for Natali’s latest, the Frankenstein-ian family drama Splice, is certain to be surprised by what the final product has in store. You didn’t see that one comin’, did ya? I know I didn’t.

The Age of Unintended Consequences: FFC Interviews David Russo

April 20, 20102000s, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Interviews, Theatrical

April 21, 2010|The films of David Russo have a distinctly handmade feel, and often the hand becomes visible. A largely self-taught filmmaker and animator, he makes no pretense that he’s not manipulating the action. When he sets his models into neon time-lapse against backdrops that strobe from sky to sea to blackness, he almost always winds up in the shot. In Russo’s short creations and in his first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, bespoke art objects–or even just words–make long, looping journeys in search of some answer. But like most philosophical quests, the journey is more important than its endpoint.

While he developed his craft, Russo carried on an 11-year career as a janitor, a vocation that sharpened his sense of the things society values: what we keep, what we cast away, what we flush. His short art films Populi (2002) and Pan With Us (2003) (viewable here, along with most of the artist’s other work) gave him his first wider exposure, competing at the Sundance Film Festival in consecutive years. More recently, his hand-wrought animation lent texture to the video for Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill” (2006).

Dizzle‘s path from script to screen was fraught with financing issues and a slender production window. It wasn’t bought for distribution after its Sundance debut in early 2009, and by the time it reached Russo’s hometown Seattle International Film Festival the same year, its hopes for release were no better. Finally, Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film picked up Dizzle for a brief 2010 New York theatrical engagement and a video-on-demand run that starts today. Russo’s renegade janitors, chemically enlightened and midwifing the birth of a new species, might manage to swim free of the sewers after all.

Accept with Simplicity: FFC Interviews Michael Stuhlbarg

October 17, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

October 18, 2009|When you’re a stage actor who’s suddenly found himself the lead in the new Coen Brothers picture and playing Arnold Rothstein on “Boardwalk Empire”, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming HBO series, you’re more or less obliged to accept the mantle of Rising Star. There’s no doubting this guy is going places. Yet A Serious Man‘s Michael Stuhlbarg is exceedingly modest in describing his craft, dismissing his own contributions with a day-job casualness that seems to leave the fancy artistic crap for his directors to figure out. All things considered, his superficial distance from in-depth discussion might be a consequence of the endless variations on “What’s it like to work with the Coens?” or “What’s it like working with Scorsese?” he’d undoubtedly been asked dozens of times before we met at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Either that, or he’s reluctant to put too fine a point on a profession (and a film) noted for its slippery nature.

Docu-Drama: FFC Interviews Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson

August 9, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Interviews

PAPER HEART‘s Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson talk love and filmmaking

August 9, 2009|It’s early afternoon, and I’m at an empty nightclub lounge to discuss Paper Heart with the film’s lead actress and co-writer Charlyne Yi and her co-star, Jake Johnson. Immediately upon introducing myself, she tells me that “Ian” was the name of her kindergarten crush. Segues into hybrid-documentaries about the nature of love and romance don’t get much easier than that, but this little tidbit establishes a casual-yet-uncomfortable tone for the rest of our conversation. Yi is only a year-and-a-half younger than I am, and the discussion is so natural, the setting so easygoing, that I suppose it became difficult not to regard each other as peers. Her nervous laughter is always present, punctuating even the most self-evident of observations (oftentimes prompting nervous laughter of my own), but she’s not nearly as clumsy and coy as her comedy act would have you believe. Meanwhile, Johnson’s appearance–complete with an unshaven face and a long, dark, horseshoe moustache–is so far removed from his role as a fictionalized version of the film’s director, Nick Jasenovec, that it takes me a moment to mentally register with whom I’m actually speaking. He’s an interesting fellow, very animated and willing to engage you no matter what you ask–but as our dialogue heats up, he throws me off again by effortlessly taking the reins on most of the “filmmaking” questions. Even I begin to mistake him for his cinematic counterpart, unconsciously turning to him when the questions are more technical in nature.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Like: FFC Interviews Lynn Shelton

July 9, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Interviews

Humpday director Lynn Shelton wants her men get to know each other better

July 10, 2009|It’s mere coincidence, filmmaker Lynn Shelton will tell you, that her last two movies plumb the phenomenon of men reaching a make-or-break point in their friendships. Coincidence also, one assumes, that both films feature these bosom bros sprawled out across the same bed after the climax. The soft-spoken exploration Shelton began in My Effortless Brilliance (2008) finds a comedic payoff in Humpday, her third feature, which won a special jury prize at Sundance. In June, the film came to the Seattle International Film Festival for its first screening in Shelton’s native city and base of operations–where it proceeded to win none of SIFF’s upper-echelon awards, netting low runner-up status in the categories of best film and best actor (for Mark Duplass) and a second-place showing for Shelton as best director (with first-place going to The Hurt Locker‘s Kathryn Bigelow). Symptoms of a hometown backlash? Still, her flick had already outpaced many of its SIFF fellows in the race for distribution and strong word-of-mouth.