Interviews Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Carrying the Water: FFC Interviews Roger Spottiswoode

July 8, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

by Walter Chaw I asked Walter Hill about a moment in Hard Times, his directorial debut, where, during a little dance at a picnic, the scene pauses and runs backwards for a few frames. “On purpose,” I asked, “or because of damage? Needing an extra second to fill the scene?” Hill looked at me for a beat, then broke out laughing. “Roger promised me that no one would ever notice that,” he said, “and it was true for fifty years.” “Roger,” of course, is Roger Spottiswoode, the legendary editor turned director who cut that film and later collaborated with Hill on the scripts for 48Hrs. and the unproduced The Last Gun. They met in the early ’70s on Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway: Hill had adapted the eponymous Jim Thompson novel and Spottiswoode was the British editor of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs who’d been brought over to America to work on his Junior Bonner and The Getaway simultaneously. Peckinpah’s next film, the troubled Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, marked the end of Spottiswoode’s association with the notorious “Bloody Sam.”

Noir Punk: FFC Interviews Francis Galluppi

May 23, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

I spoke with filmmaker Francis Galluppi the day after the news broke that he’ll be helming the next instalment in the Evil Dead saga. We were already scheduled to chat about his feature debut, the exceptional desert noir The Last Stop in Yuma County, a smart updating of two Bogie masterpieces (The Petrified Forest and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). It’s a tremendous picture I don’t feel right formally reviewing because I consider stars Jim Cummings and Barbara Crampton my friends. It’s so good, though, that I wanted to at least interview this Galluppi guy. So I dug into his two short films–the Texas Chain Saw Massacre-tinged High Desert Hell and his high-concept sci-fi piece, The Gemini Project–as well as his accomplished quartet of music videos. And I read the passel of interviews he’s given since Yuma County‘s triumphant premiere at 2023’s Fantastic Fest. They paint a picture of a young artist navigating a repetitious press inquiry for the first time, none of the questions getting at the heart of an emerging aesthetic that is not only film-nerd chic but also in thrall to a very American Romanticism. At the risk of seeming more uncool than I already, naturally, seem, there’s an Ani DiFranco song called “Untouchable Face” that captures a certain Galluppian melancholy. Particularly this lyric block:

The Adventures of Renny Harlin: FFC Interviews Renny Harlin

January 17, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Renny Harlin,
director of THE BRICKLAYER

Renny Harlin is older now. Wiser. He almost made an Alien movie, was thisclose to taking the reins of the James Bond franchise, caught the biggest comedian on the planet in the last ten minutes before his precipitous fall… Harlin was a minute ahead of his time and sometimes a minute behind, and today he has a new movie out, with three more finished and on the way. He thinks the best is ahead for him, and…I might agree. There is something unlovable about Harlin’s films–an irascible, some would say vicious quality that has engendered affection for them despite their gore and what should be noted is an at-times-uncompromising meanness. He shoots action sequences with clarity and logic: bullet strikes feel heavy, car chases physical, his ubiquitous explosions so jarring I remember the cuffs of my pants fluttering when the passenger plane went down in Die Hard 2 on opening night. He is a maximalist who got his start in low-budget horror and graduated, for a brief time, to the blockiest of blockbusters. Then it all went sideways.

Breaking the Rules: FFC Interviews Demián Rugna

October 9, 20232023, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Demián Rugna,
co-writer/director of WHEN EVIL LURKS

At the risk of being premature in my assessment, I think Demián Rugna is the real deal. His Terrified from 2017 was confident and brilliant: a strange, alchemical product of the unimaginable and the familiar; a "fun" extreme gore/horror exercise that crossed the line so often it rewrote it. Now, six years later, here's Rugna's follow-up: When Evil Lurks, which is more–and amplified–innovative obscenity. The large gap between Terrified and When Evil Lurks and the failure of announced projects to materialize have, if anything, only sharpened the cruelty of his images and the atrocity of his ideas. I wondered if Terrified was an anomaly, given that it seemed to come from nowhere, fully formed with its payload of "what the fuck?" lawlessness, but When Evil Lurks confirms the arrival of a major talent.

That Old Witchcraft: FFC Interviews Tereza Nvotová

September 24, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, Slovakia

Walter Chaw interviews Tereza Nvotová,
co-writer/director of NIGHT SIREN

Tereza Nvotová's Nightsiren (Svetlonoc) was among the handful of titles that blew me away at this year's long-ago-feeling Boston Underground Film Festival. It's smart, beautiful, savage, and from a part of the world, Slovakia, with whose cinema I'm unfamiliar. (Ditto the filmmaking team of Nvotová and her co-writer, Barbora Namerova.) Part folk-horror and part female-empowerment/coming-of-age melodrama, Nightsiren demonstrates an ease with archetype and the courage to use funding provided by the Slovakian government to create a piece that questions the country's systems and traditions uncompromisingly. It's righteous.

Feed My Frankenstein: FFC Interviews Laura Moss

August 30, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Laura Moss, co-writer/director of BIRTH/REBIRTH

Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth is the second of three distaff takes on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein set for release in 2023. As the United States reckons with a series of strikes, the loudest calls for labour reform in recent memory, these new reads of the novel, notable also for seizing on the social progressiveness of the text, seem of a piece with a cultural zeitgeist pointing towards the disruption of our ingrained systems. Grateful for the opportunities the festival success of Birth/Rebirth has afforded them, Moss is as intelligent and energetic in person as their work suggests, and insightful about their creative process. The film itself is fresh, ferocious, and uses David Cronenberg correctly in a sentence, too, so when I was given the opportunity to talk with Moss, I started by asking them about the horror of the flesh:

Story Time: FFC Interviews Bomani J. Story

June 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Bomani J. Story, writer-director of
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

I love writer-director Bomani J. Story’s feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It’s one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley’s presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He’s said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.

The Curator: FFC Interviews Brian Hu

May 7, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Film Programmer Brian Hu

Brian Hu picked me up from San Diego International in 2019. I was a guest of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, for which Brian is the artistic director, and he took me directly to a little Mexican joint that served the best menudo I’ve ever had, cafeteria-style, in a bustling, air-conditioner-free space. For dinner, he and his staff introduced me to a dumpling place on San Diego’s 5^th Street, sandwiched between a wealth of used-record shops and vintage stores. They served things there that made me cry, for the first time since my father’s death, for the memories I was surprised with of the food he used to make us when I was a kid. Brian is as good a host, in other words, as he is a programmer, educator, and curator of cultural memory. The first room he showed me during my quick tour of the Pacific Arts Movement campus was a library lined, floor-to-ceiling, with shelves holding VHS tapes and DVDs of all the submissions the SDAFF had shown in its then-nearly 20-year history. I think of this image whenever I think of Brian.

To Speak!: FFC Interviews Luca Guadagnino

November 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, Italy

Walter Chaw interviews Luca Guadagnino, director of
BONES AND ALL

Sicilian-born Luca Guadagnino is a chronicler of the sensual, of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous. He’s a sensationalist in the best sense of the term, a cartographer of the more embarrassing, least examined borders of human experience. His closest analogue, to my mind, is Nagisa Ōshima, another artist unafraid of digging into our most intimate, most carnal aspects and somehow mining high-minded art from all that primate muck. At his best, I would slot Guadagnino’s pictures in with the likes of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes or Derek Jarman’s The Last of England: erotic rather than titillating; taboo rather than polite. His movies are about the freedom of becoming lost.

The Thinker: FFC Interviews Rian Johnson

November 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Mystery

Walter Chaw interviews Rian Johnson, writer-director of

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

I met Rian Johnson when his directorial debut, Brick, was making the festival rounds. In the middle of interviewing him, I received a panicked call from my wife that my infant daughter was sick and had been vomiting. Rian overheard some of it, saw my reaction to the rest of it, and, as I hung up, handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone and email on it and told me we could continue talking if I wanted after I was sure my kid was okay. We’ve been friends ever since. I can confidently say that through the rollercoaster of a Hollywood career, he’s remained the same person: kind, funny, available for a chat, able to navigate the absolute highs and troll-infested lows of fandom with equanimity and a notable lack of ego. Speak to his collaborators and you’ll hear the same stories about what seems like a unicorn in show business–but I’d add the caveat that Rian, in addition to being a truly nice guy, is also razor sharp. He’s the kind of person who likes to play board games and will beat you at them; who will make a bet about his beloved Dodgers with some idiot who has to root for, say, the Rockies, and never let you forget it. His unique genius is on display in films as varied as Knives Out, a morality play about righting a complex social injustice as much as it as a whodunit, and The Brothers Bloom, a puzzle-box all of sleights-of-hand and the love of the grift. Wanting to talk with Rian about the sublimated outrage, the righteousness, of his new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I began by asking him to identify the pleasure that films like Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun held for him as a kid:

The ‘Old Man’ and McKee: FFC Interviews Lucky McKee

October 9, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Lucky McKee,
director of OLD MAN

I met Lucky McKee and the brilliant artist Vanessa McKee, his wife, when I had them out to screen McKee’s feature debut May via his personal 35mm answer print about a decade ago. Like many filmmakers showing their work retrospectively, they didn’t want to watch their movie again, so I sat with them in the green room between the introduction and Q&A, and we started talking about film in a broad-ranging chat that went deeper and farther than these things ever do–a product of their warmth, on the one hand, the depth of their knowledge and passion on the other. As they were leaving for their hotel, Lucky shook my hand warmly and thanked me for “talking good movie.” A great night–and I thought that was that, but Lucky texted me a couple of weeks later to ask after me and follow up on a few family things we’d touched on. Considerate, smart, and, above all else, authentic.

Light Years: FFC Interviews Bernard Rose

August 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

Walter Chaw interviews Bernard Rose,
director of TRAVELING LIGHT

I met Bernard Rose a few years ago when I flew him and his 35mm answer print of Paperhouse out to Colorado for a special screening of the film. Not long after, he returned with Tony Todd for Candyman and a rousing post-film discussion that teased a reunion for the director and actor, which has come to fruition not once but twice since then. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for the Candyman sequel that sees Helen as the bogey; perhaps the idea of a white lady academic gentrifier is already scary enough. During that first visit, Rose and I spent a couple of hours in a bar discussing Tolstoy, which, besides being bracing under any circumstance, is an exceedingly rare event outside of academia. It’s been one of the honours of my life to encounter brilliant creators and to benefit so richly from the association. When I learned that Rose and Todd had picked up a camera, taking to the streets of Los Angeles in the dark days of the pandemic to shoot a new, experimental project inspired by Luis Buñuel called Traveling Light, I was grateful for an excuse to interview Rose. Of course the film is iconoclastic, challenging in the best way and a time capsule of a particular moment that already seems a hundred years ago and fading. We began our conversation by talking about the massive–and largely unexamined–psychic toll of the last two years on the human race.

Masks: FFC Interviews Scott Derrickson

July 3, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Scott Derrickson,
director of THE BLACK PHONE

I’ve known Scott Derrickson a long time–indeed, an eternity in Internet years. He grew up in Westminster, Colorado, just down the road from where I live now, in a “cone of death” where the plutonium from the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear plant–through a series of fires, meltdowns, and misadventures–was lost into the air in particles a magnitude smaller than pollen. The site is among the most contaminated places on Earth still, though judged to be clean enough to house a “wildlife preserve” and way too much new housing, the residents of which are not informed of the level of radioactivity they’re sitting on. To this day, dogs aren’t allowed at Standley Lake because dogs…dig. We grew up making jokes about the glow coming from the plant at night. Whenever I drove past it as a kid, I would hold my breath with the thought that maybe this would insulate me from irradiation and cancer. Maybe it did.

Mad God: An Interview with Phil Tippett

June 1, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews VFX legend Phil Tippett, writer-director of MAD GOD

by Walter Chaw The heir apparent to stop-motion pioneers Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippett is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. It's his hands animating the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back. He designed creatures for the Cantina and the moving pieces on the Dejarik table. He animated the Rancor, and the bugs in Starship Troopers, and RoboCop's ED-209. He was the "dinosaur supervisor" on Jurassic Park, overseeing the industry-changing transition from stop-motion, Tippett's metier, to CGI. It could've been the end of his career, but his working methods adapted to the digital realm. The product of his hands is, for my generation, the clay of our imagination. I grew up playing with toys based on his designs and watching movies full of his animating spirit, everything from Piranha to The Golden Child. With his place in the pantheon long assured, he moved to the director's chair for the thirty-years-in-the-making Mad God, and the end result is something that looks and feels very much like madness. It's glorious. I spoke with Mr. Tippett over Zoom and was betrayed once or twice by overwhelming emotion; I thought I was done feeling like this about things, but speaking with the father of Vermithrax Pejorative was humbling and exhilarating. If you get the chance to tell your heroes how much their art has meant to you, do that.

All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

April 17, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews “The Daniels,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The function–the true function–of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve…I don’t know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don’t know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.

Adams Family Values: An Interview with the Creators of “Hellbender”

February 28, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Hellbender creators
John Adams, Lulu Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser

Of all the movies I saw last year, two viscerally exhilarated me, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for the power of their craft and the empowerment of their messages. The first was Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, the finest spectacle film I’ve seen in I can’t remember how long–a smart updating of a well-travelled text by one of the few unquestioned masters of the medium. The other was Hellbender, the seventh film by a family of wanderers–and artists–who decided at some point to buy a rickety old RV, drive it across the U.S., and make a very particular brand of home movie to document their nights and days. Hellbender is so alive with the rapture of living that it almost pulsates; watching it is a tactile experience, and its celebration of women and coming into power feels effortless. It’s not unlike the idea of “blood harmony”–when it happens, it’s supernatural. Hellbender is the truth. So when I was offered the chance to interview filmmakers Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams over Zoom one snowy afternoon, I was beside myself. It’s fun to catch phenoms right before they take off into the stratosphere.

Dream House: An Interview with Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

February 20, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Strawberry Mansion creators
Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley

Strawberry Mansion is fascinating stuff: a film that runs the danger of being distracting for its quirkiness but is, in point of fact, a mature piece about investing in love with the full knowledge of how love is heartbreak. It isn't, in other words, odd for the sake of odd, but rather odd for the specific purpose of communicating a point of view, a creative ethos. It's…is the word "artisanal?" If it's not, it's like that. There's a lot of same going around (same as it always was, as it happens), but here's a new thing, and if you don't support it, then more new things don't happen. There's hope with a film like this, because it points to someone brave enough to make it and then a few more someones willing to find a way to get it into theatres and onto streaming services.

Becoming: An Interview with Mark Pellington

February 8, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Mark Pellington's body of work deserves serious reconsideration. It describes the arc of a serious artist, someone tapped into a collective threnody, a manifest weltschmerz expressed increasingly through techniques that move him away from traditional narratives into exclusive realms of movement and music. Schooled in rhetoric, Pellington made his mark as one of the early pioneers of MTV and music video, helming clips for artists as varied as U2 and Anthrax. His video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" is seen as a landmark for the form in terms of its expressiveness and willingness to venture into dark places (child abuse, bullying, suicide). Pellington was inspired at that moment by the recent loss of his father to dementia–an experience he hopes to turn into a movie someday–and it's that throughline of grief, as it moves through stages of rage, denial, and addiction, that informs the work of his lifetime. Each unimaginable loss feeds Pellington's next project. I'm in awe of his transparency and courage.

Far from the Madding Cloud: An Interview with Iuli Gerbase

January 17, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Film Festivals, Interviews, Sundance

I first caught Iuli Gerbase's fantastic debut The Pink Cloud as part of last year's virtual Sundance and came away from it feeling like I'd seen perhaps the definitive film of the pandemic. But it wasn't a pandemic movie, per se. It was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, meaning its story of two people negotiating isolation is engaged in unpacking a different kind of virulence. The script was completed post-Trump but pre-Bolsonaro, so this Brazilian film isn't even exactly a political metaphor, although it could certainly be read that way. While it's good, publicity-wise, for The Pink Cloud to seem a work of prescience, it's bad in that the picture's prescience detracts from the thorniness of its broader sociological themes. Given time, its embedded subtext concerning a patriarchal system reinforcing traditional gender roles should emerge as the novelty of it as the world's grimmest Magic 8-ball recedes.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: An Interview with Lauren Hadaway

December 19, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

World-weary and wise and sharp as the crack of a pistol, Lauren Hadaway, after years as a top-shelf ADR artist, set a goal for herself to become a director. During the downtime between looping sessions on Justice League in 2017, she started writing the script for what would become The Novice, a semi-autobiographical film about a driven young woman joining her college crew team and finding in it an Everest she must scale just because it's there. Just because, nay, especially because, it's hard. The resulting film is as sharp and as driven as its creator, every frame composed not just beautifully but to tell a visual story of the protagonist's interiors. It's clear almost immediately that, more than a sports story, The Novice is about finding purpose through ritualized pain–and maybe a little bit or more about Hadaway overcoming self-doubt and enduring an unprecedented global event to see this project through to completion.

I began our interview by asking her about the process of coming through a difficult time.