Interviews
Maddin and the Johnsons here trade their decaying, manic images for something more coolly sustained and unsettling, creating an insular nocturnal mindscape where the banal and fantastic seamlessly mingle.
During the two year filming process, the number of places, curators, artists, and artworks involved, plus the historical context, produced so much content, and I mean useful content, that it was impossible to contain in 120 minutes.
I had the image of these two coal miners in the dark kissing. I think this is because I am always interested in the spirituality of Earth, of the depth of Earth. There is something very spiritual in that. And this film is about home and leaving home.
Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. The story of the Jordan family being forced by harsh economic realities to give up the farm they''d worked for decades is a poignant and beautiful epic in miniature.
Everything in documentary filmmaking is an ethical question. Every placement of the camera. Every question you ask or don't ask is an ethical choice. But the hardest choices are made in the cutting room because that's when you really are saying, this will be seen by the world.
His films are often extraordinarily sensitive contraptions motored by desire. Watching and rewatching the work of James Ivory in 2024 reveals that a certain frankness around love and life was always a part of that operation, even as obviousness was avoided at all costs.
My First Film is surprisingly optimistic in the face of the cringeworthy and toxic behavior that the fictional director and her crew contend with on set. In spite of all the failure and frustration, it is a film with a deep affection for the craft of filmmaking and the fools who have dedicated their lives to it.
The film demonstrates the way a certain strain of reactionary masculinity oppresses both the relatively privileged Thomas and the Malagasy characters, though a third act point-of-view shift ensures that this analysis does not equivocate the suffering of occupier and occupied.
People get into the habit of saying things like, this was a bad year for film, or this was a good year for film. Stupid stuff—stuff that's supposed to be based on concepts like supply and demand. But you can’t have meaningful supply and demand when nobody really knows what the demands are.
In this new interview, the legendary cinematographer sits down to revisit his career by looking at unforgettable images from his films, specifically those by David Lynch and John Cassavetes, and recalling how he helped to create them.
The whole movie sort of feels like a meditation on our memories of suburbia, our memories of TV shows about suburbia, and the way that lives on in a dream space. It’s more fun that way for me.
I would have never imagined this stuff about A.I. would feel so contemporary by the time we would be ready to show the film. Not to mention how much more relevant it seems now with the actors’ and writers’ strikes still ongoing. It’s not that I didn’t foresee the dangers of artificial intelligence, but I thought it’d be something we’d have to deal with in 15 or 20 years.
Sure, I make films as an artistic pursuit as an artist, but I make films to help my characters, my friends first.
There is this diffusion to the image projected on the glass. The glass has this inherent texture, and the way color looks on it is not natural… it’s not quite like Technicolor, maybe more like two-strip Technicolor, or even some early hand-colored things.