Jennifer Morrison On How Acting Prepared Her for Her Moving Directorial Debut Sun Dogs
Jennifer Morrison has created some of the most lovable characters on film. Dr. Allison Cameron in House, Emma Swan in Once Upon a Time, and Winona Kirk in Star Trek are all strong and captivating women we love to watch on screen. Now, Morrison is shaping compelling new characters from behind the lens in her feature film directorial debut Sun Dogs.
Now on Netflix,
Writer/Director Boots Riley on his Staggeringly Original Sorry to Bother You
Sorry To Bother You is coming to a theater near you, courtesy of Annapurna Pictures, after being one of the most buzzed about films shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The directorial debut from Boots Riley, articulate troublemaker and frontman for the band The Coup, has had a bumpy but fascinating road making it to the screen. This satiric, decidedly trippy film is about a young, seemingly malleable telemarketer named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) and his girlfriend,
How Director Kevin Macdonald Uncovered Bombshell Allegations in his Whitney Houston Doc
Before he shot Whitney, Scottish documentarian Kevin Macdonald did not consider himself a particularly avid Whitney Houston fan. The Oscar-winning director (One Day in September) preferred The Clash back in the day when Houston dominated pop music with her unmatched vocal power. “I was not into that kind of mainstream poppiness,” he says. “At the time you couldn’t avoid her music, but it was kind of unhip to like Whitney Houston.”
Pose Guest director Tina Mabry On the Groundbreaking Show
Though the month of June is Pride month, Hollywood should ideally be celebrating the LGBTQIA experience year-round, in the name of diversity.
Luckily, a new show on FX, Pose, has premiered to great acclaim, and week by week is gathering an appropriately rabid fanbase. Creator/writers Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy (Murphy also directs two episodes) have built a story which takes place in 1987,
Writer/Director Ari Aster on his Terrifying Debut Hereditary
When critics bend over backwards to keep a movie’s secrets under wraps, presume that the title in question is a step beyond the norm and well worth seeing. That is the case with Hereditary. Writer-director Ari Aster’s feature debut caused festival goers at Sundance and South by Southwest to squirm, shudder and gasp out loud at what transpires onscreen. Starting on June 8, the public will get to witness this grandly operatic yet exceedingly unsettling horror thriller about a grieving family seemingly beset by sinister forces – if they dare.
Writer/Director Veena Sud on her Timely Netflix Drama Seven Seconds
A young detective, frantic because he cannot reach his pregnant wife, is driving through the snow, trying to reach her on his cell. He hears a sickening thud, but does not realize what he has hit – who he has hit – until he gets out of the car and sees the mangled bike under his wheel. A black teenage boy named Brent Butler was riding that bik,e and the cop is white.
When his colleagues arrive,
Ibiza Director Alex Richanbach on Mixing the Perfect Comedic Cocktail
For his sophomore directing gig, Alex Richanbach (We Are Young) opted for a little quirkiness, a lot of romance and a whole load of laughs. The film is Ibiza, streaming now on Netflix and starring Gillian Jacobs, Vanessa Bayer, Phoebe Robinson and Richard Madden. Jacobs plays Harper, a thirty-something New Yorker who jumps at the opportunity to travel to Barcelona for an important business meeting. When her pals,
Writer/Director Bart Layton on his True Life Crime Caper American Animals
Writer/director Bart Layton has a long history of bringing true stories to the small screen. He created and produced the documentary series Locked Up Abroad and directed the television documentaries 16 for a Day and Becoming Alexander.
In 2012, he brought his unique skills to the big screen with the documentary The Imposter. The film earned critical acclaim and Layton won the BAFTA Film Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer,
Queen Sugar Showrunner Kat Candler Leads the Charge for Ava DuVernay’s Game Changing Show
It’s no exaggeration to say that Queen Sugar, the popular OWN series, is changing television. From the beginning, creator Ava DuVernay committed to hiring only female directors, which has led to a number of other shows seeking women for their roster of directors and other below-the-line roles. This season, writer/director/producer Kat Candler has been given the challenge of maintaining this great forward momentum for women working behind the camera,
The Gospel According to Andre Director Kate Novack on the Man Behind the Fashion Icon
As a fan of fashion documentaries, director Kate Novack knew Andre Leon Talley as the larger-than-life, high priest of haute couture. As a journalist- turned-filmmaker, she knew there was more to him than that.
“I’ve been watching Andre in many fashion docs since Unzipped in 1996, which is around when I was getting out of college,” Novack says. “It was always always this over-the-top [depiction] where he’d steal the scene but he was always an enigma.
Documentarian Morgan Neville on Revealing Mr. Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which premiered 50 years ago on PBS, is undergoing a bit of a renaissance of late. Although host Fred Rogers died at age 74 in 2003, his effect on the lives of adoring preschoolers and beyond is still being felt. Earlier this year, PBS aired It’s You I Like, a tribute show named after one of Rogers’ many self-penned songs that he performed on the series. The U.S.
Writer/Director Paul Schrader on Seeing The Light in First Reformed
Perhaps best known for writing such Martin Scorsese films as Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, Paul Schrader has also directed more than 20 movies. These include 1980’s American Gigolo, a commercial hit, although Schrader’s style and subject matters rarely attract a mainstream audience. His latest film, First Reformed, is a stark tale of personal despair and environmental crisis. Ethan Hawke plays Toller,
Writer/Director Ramin Bahrani on the Spooky Timeliness of his Fahrenheit 451 Adaptation for HBO
We’re living in times that are increasingly concerning. Okay, that’s a massive understatement. After the election of Donald Trump, dystopian novels became increasingly popular again with reissues of novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The latter novel, which is now a bleak and hugely popular Hulu series, is a good example of the types of stories audiences have been looking to turn to in confusing and trying times.
Director Wim Wenders on his Unprecedented Access in Pope Francis: A Man of His Word
At 72, German-born auteur Wim Wenders defies categorization as a filmmaker. He is as much at home with Oscar-nominated documentaries that deal with the arts (1999’s music-filled Buena Vista Social Club; 2011’s Pina, about German choreographer Pina Bausch; and 2014’s The Salt of the Earth, about Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado) as he is with visually striking features (1984’s road-trip Western Paris, Texas, 1987’s angelic fantasy Wings of Desire).
Book Club‘s Creators on How Fifty Shades of Grey Inspired Their Dream Project
Whatever you did to celebrate Mother’s Day probably wasn’t as great as Bill Holderman’s gift to his mom in 2012. The final book in the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy had just been published, and the Book Club director, co-producer, and co-screenwriter sent the entire set to his mother.
“As sons do, right?” Holderman joked.
Book Club co-producer and co-screenwriter Erin Simms worked with Holderman at a production company at the time and heard about the plan.
Howard Director Don Hahn on the Legendary Composer Howard Ashman
The name Howard Ashman — the subject of the new documentary, Howard, that premiered at the recent Tribeca Film Festival — might not immediately ring a bell. But you probably have hummed along to the timeless lyrics he wrote in collaboration with composer Alan Menken for the now-animated classics that led to Disney’s ‘toon revival in the late 80s and early ‘90s and continue to endure today.
The catchy words he penned for the Calypso ballad Kiss the Girl from 1989’s The Little Mermaid and the Oscar-winning title tune from 1991’s Beauty and the Beast just helped two American Idol contestants to advance to the next round of voting earlier this week.
RBG Co-Directors/Producers on Their Groundbreaking Subject – Part 2
In Part 2 of our two-part interview with Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the filmmaking team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG that opens May 4, the pair discusses what they learned while doing their research (the justice is a huge opera fan), her nearly 56-year fairy-tale marriage to her incredibly supportive college sweetheart Martin Ginsburg and how they got around not being able to film the Supreme Court in session.
RBG Co-Directors/Producers on Their Groundbreaking Subject – Part I
Ruth Bader Ginsburg – the Brooklyn-born, 85-year-old grandmother of four who became the second female to be appointed as a Supreme Court justice in 1993 – has been having a pop-cultural moment since 2015 or so. That’s when the liberal-leaning Harvard grad was cheekily dubbed The Notorious RBG (a play on the late rapper Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. The Notorious BIG) by a pair of young female writers who saluted this petite powerhouse’s stealthy sense of bad-assery in book form.
Dawn Porter on her Netflix Docuseries Bobby Kennedy for President
It’s been 50 years since the turbulence of 1968 changed this nation forever. From the escalating Vietnam War to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the riots outside the Democratic convention, that year was one of the most difficult our nation has ever faced, and that serves as measuring stick anytime a particular year in America feels especially fraught. Last year was one such year. So was 2016. The same could said of 2018.
Director Sebastian Lelio on Capturing Forbidden Love in his Urgent new Film Disobedience
Director Sebastian Lelio has had quite the exciting past few months. Lelio’s last film, A Fantastic Woman, about a transgender woman whose partner tragically dies, swept the awards circuit. It won 17 awards including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film—which was the first Chilean film to do so. Right now, there’s no stopping Lelio and his work.
In theaters today, Lelio is tackling another story about women’s interior lives.
