Interviews
Both of us always mention in our master classes or panels with cinema students to choose a subject that you really like for your projects because you are not sure how long you are going to spend on the project. Better to choose something that is very close to your heart.
I said maybe I will do a film about the worst version of myself in 20 years, and then that is when I reconnected with the poetry world, because making a film about a filmmaker wasn't that interesting to me.
This is a very profoundly intimate, personal family story. So while certain dates are very important because of historical events, I wanted the 1970s to have less of that. I wanted for us to see a sense of normalcy with this family.
The new book from J. Hoberman traverses a wide swath of mediums and movements that, in his telling, coalesced into what we now recognize as the counterculture of the mid-to-late 1960s.
I realized that we Black people really have never had our CNN or our New York Times, but we are remarkably well-informed. Even a lot of the uneducated class of folks are remarkably well-informed. I had to ask myself: How is that? Why is that? How are we getting this information?
While we were conversing, I think it was important to give her all my ears and my being, myself, to listen to her. This was really key because we differed in our points of view about certain things. Quite a few things, I would say: the role of women in life, tradition, faith.
The further one delves into Creton and Barré’s catalogue, the more the films begin to feel like pieces of an indivisible whole, one that encompasses the entirety of their personal and professional lives.
Once we committed to the body camera footage, we were determined to live in it. We wanted to build and recreate the world that this community existed in, which you couldn't do otherwise. So, it was challenging at times, and there were moments I doubted it.
One takeaway I hope people get from the movie is that through all of this rot and through everything, there are things that are worth paying attention to, and they're happening all around you. And I think it's really just a matter of shifting your focus, of looking for smaller things.
It was a physically demanding film, for the crew and the cast, because of weather and the terrain and time limitations. It is not exactly improvisational, but once we start—and because we keep shooting the scenes over and over again without stopping—it evolves. And then in the editing, another being comes alive.
There’s a delicious spaciousness to the first film by writer Durga Chew-Bose, which has all the sybaritic trimmings of a coastal summer: sun-dappled skin, chalky beach expanses, fresh fruit on the veranda, a perpetual breeze...
The fugitive joys of the characters in Killer of Sheep emanate, as they so often do, from the collision of art and the body. A dancing woman clings to her lover’s chest, and a boy leaps between building tops. A voice within me cries: ascendence remains not only plausible, but essential.
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.
Despite its anxious and melancholic air, When the Phone Rang also captures the golden haze of youth, with its moments of whimsy and wonder . . .