Conversations with Filmmakers Series [PDF / epub - mixed]

Conversations with Filmmakers Series

Charles Burnett: Interviews [PDF]


Charles Burnett (b. 1944) is a groundbreaking African American filmmaker and one of this country’s finest directors, yet he remains largely unknown. His films, most notably Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), are considered classics, yet few filmgoers have seen them or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the work of a rare film master whose stories bring to the screen the texture and poetry of life in the black community.

The best qualities of Burnett’s films-rich characterizations, morally and emotionally complex narratives, and intricately observed tales of African American life-are precisely the things that make his films a tough sell in the mass marketplace. As many of the interviews reveal, Hollywood has been largely inept in responding to this marketing challenge. “It takes an extraordinary effort to keep going,” Burnett told Terrence Rafferty in 2001, “when everybody’s saying to you, ‘No one wants to see that kind of movie,’ or ‘There’s no black audience.’” All the interviews selected for this volume―spanning more than three decades of Burnett’s directorial career, including his recent work―examine, in various degrees, Burnett’s status as a true independent filmmaker and explore his motivation for making films that chronicle the black experience in America.



Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews [PDF]


Before he was the Academy Award-nominated director of The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) interviewed some of cinema's great masters: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and others. Since becoming an acclaimed filmmaker himself, he has given countless interviews to the press about his own career.

This volume collects thirteen of his best, most comprehensive, and most insightful interviews, many long out of print and several never before published in their entirety. They cover more than forty years of directing, with Bogdanovich talking candidly about his great triumphs, such as The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?, and his overlooked gems, such as Daisy Miller and They All Laughed.

Assembled by acclaimed critic Peter Tonguette, also author of a new critical biography of Bogdanovich, these interviews demonstrate that Bogdanovich is not only one of America's finest filmmakers, but also one of its most eloquent when discussing film and his own remarkable movies.



Werner Herzog: Interviews [PDF]


Over the course of his career, legendary director Werner Herzog (b. 1942) has made almost sixty films and given more than eight hundred interviews. This collection features the best of these, focusing on all the major films, from Signs of Life and Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. When did Herzog decide to become a filmmaker? Who are his key influences? Where does he find his peculiar themes and characters? What role does music play in his films? How does he see himself in relation to the German past and in relation to film history? And how did he ever survive the wrath of Klaus Kinski? Herzog answers these and many other questions in twenty-five interviews ranging from the 1960s to the present.

Critics and fans recognized Herzog's importance as a young German filmmaker early on, but his films have attained international significance over the decades. Most of the interviews collected in this volume--some of them from Herzog's production archive and previously unpublished--appear in English for the very first time. Together, they offer an unprecedented look at Herzog's work, his career, and his public persona as it has developed and changed over time.



Peter Weir: Interviews [PDF]


Peter Weir: Interviews is the first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b. 1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject. He talks about “the precious desperation of the art, the madness, the willingness to experiment” in all his films; the adaptation process from novel to film, when he tells a scriptwriter, “I'm going to eat your script; it's going to be part of my blood!”; and his self-assessment as “merely a jester, with cap and bells, going from court to court.” He is encouraged, even provoked to tell his own story, from his childhood in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, to his apprenticeship in the Australian television industry in the 1960s, his preparations to shoot his first features in the early 1970s, his international celebrity in Australia and Hollywood. An extensive new interview details his current plans for a new film.

Interviews discuss Weir's diverse and impressive range of work―his earlier films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, as well as Academy Award-nominated Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander. This book confirms that the trajectory of Weir's life and work parallels and embodies Australia's own quest to define and express a historical and cultural identity.



Harmony Korine: Interviews [ePub]


Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.

After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative.

He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect, Gummo, two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity (Mister Lonely), a gritty quasi-diary film (Trash Humpers), and a blistering portrait of American hedonism (Spring Breakers), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.



Baz Luhrmann: Interviews [PDF]


Though he has made only five films in two decades--Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the Oscar-nominated films Moulin Rouge!, Australia, and The Great Gatsby--Australian writer-director Baz Luhrmann is an internationally known brand name. His name has even entered the English language as a verb, as in "to Baz things up," meaning "to decorate them with an exuberant flourish." Celebrated by some, loathed by others, his work is underscored by what has been described as "an aesthetic of artifice" and is notable for both its glittering surfaces and recurring concerns.

In this collection of interviews, Luhrmann discusses his methods and his motives, explaining what has been important to him and his collaborators from the start and how he has been able to maintain an independence from the studios that have backed his films. He also speaks about his other artistic endeavors, including stage productions of La Bohème and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his wife and collaborative partner Catherine Martin, who has received two Academy Awards for her work with Luhrmann.



Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews [PDF]


With her gripping film The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her movie, Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.

She is one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark, the female vigilante movie Blue Steel, and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking.

The first volume of Bigelow’s interviews ever published, Peter Keough’s collection covers her early success with Near Dark; the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker; and her triumph with The Hurt Locker. In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.



Stan Brakhage: Interviews [PDF]


In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects nine of Stan Brakhage’s most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks; his theories of vision and sound; the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work; his concept of the muse; and the key influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933–2003) discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and The Text of Light.

One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his fifty-two-year-long career. These films include psychodramas, autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles, meditations on light, and hand-painted films, which range from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

As a filmmaker, Brakhage’s life-long obsession with what he called an “adventure in perception” made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of the “untutored eye” with which children can access ineffable visual realities. Adults, who have lost such primal sight, can “retrain” their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world. Brakhage’s films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence film today.



Agnès Varda: Interviews [PDF]


Over nearly sixty years, Agnès Varda (b. 1928) has given interviews that are revealing not only of her work, but of her remarkably ambiguous status. She has been called the “Mother of the New Wave” but suffered for many years for never having been completely accepted by the cinematic establishment in France. Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), displayed many of the characteristics of the two later films that launched the New Wave, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. In a low-budget film, using (as yet) unknown actors and working entirely outside the prevailing studio system, Varda completely abandoned the “tradition of quality” that Truffaut was at that very time condemning in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Her work, however, was not “discovered” until after Truffaut and Godard had broken onto the scene in 1959. Varda's next film, Cleo from 5 to 7, attracted considerably more attention and was selected as France's official entry for the Festival in Cannes. Ultimately, however, this film and her work for the next fifty years continued to be overshadowed by her more famous male friends, many of whom she mentored and advised.

Her films have finally earned recognition as deeply probing and fundamental to the growing awareness in France of women's issues and the role of women in the cinema. “I'm not philosophical,” she says, “not metaphysical. Feelings are the ground on which people can be led to think about things. I try to show everything that happens in such a way and ask questions so as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments.” The panoply of interviews here emphasizes her core belief that “we never stop learning” and reveal the wealth of ways to answer her questions.



David Fincher: Interviews [PDF]


David Fincher (b. 1962) did not go to film school and hates being defined as an auteur. He prefers to see himself as a craftsman, dutifully going about the art and business of making film. Trouble is, it's hard to be self-effacing when you are the director responsible for Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network. Along with Quentin Tarantino, Fincher is the most accomplished of the Generation X filmmakers to emerge in the early 1990s.

This collection of interviews highlights Fincher's unwavering commitment to his craft as he evolved from an entrepreneurial music video director (Fincher helped Madonna become the undisputed queen of MTV) into an enterprising feature filmmaker. Fincher landed his first Hollywood blockbuster at twenty-seven with Alien3, but that film, handicapped by cost overruns and corporate mismanagement, taught Fincher that he needed absolute control over his work. Once he had it, with Se7en, he achieved instant box-office success and critical acclaim, as well as a close partnership with Brad Pitt that led to the cult favorite Fight Club.

Fincher became circumspect in the 2000s after Panic Room, shooting ads and biding his time until Zodiac, when he returned to his mantra that "entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay." Zodiac reinvigorated Fincher, inspiring a string of films--The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--that enthralled audiences and garnered his films dozens of Oscar nominations.

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