REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

Daily | Interviews | Jodorowsky, Carrière, Breillat

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky

“I was always apolitical,” Alejandro Jodorowsky tells Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans. “I believed in poetic revolution, not political revolution. I hated politics.”

At Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney talks with producer Filip Jan Rymsza and Peter Bogdanovich about Orson Welles, “the ongoing IndieGogo campaign, getting into the atmosphere on the set, Welles’s famous prudery, and why they chose crowdfunding to get The Other Side of the Wind into the world.”

The French Institute Alliance Français series Jean-Claude Carrière: Writing the Impossible is rolling out every Tuesday, and Colleen Kelsey talks with the 83-year-old writer for Interview. “With over 140 film writing credits and a number of novels and plays to his name, Carrière has adapted Proust and Milan Kundera for the screen, and partnered with some of European cinema’s biggest auteurs, including Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle.” And of course, Luis Buñuel. “But Carrière continues to work prolifically: his latest book, Croyance (translated, Belief), was released in March, and a collaboration with Philippe Garrel, In the Shadow of Women, premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival.”

Nicole Richter for Reverse Shot: “I want to start with Anatomy of Hell, which I think is the most fearless and courageous film of the last two decades.” Catherine Breillat: “That’s the greatest for me too; that’s my favorite film. The film is perfect.”

Aaron Hillis talks with Gaspar Noé about Love for Vice. Suppose there’s pressure to tone down the sex for the U.S. release? “I don’t cut movies. I don’t like scissors.”

Souleymane Cissé on his film Oka (Our House)

“I relate [A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence] to the Spanish painter Francisco Goya,” Roy Andersson tells Nikola Grozdanovic at the Playlist. “He painted his paintings about existence, and I think he was 80 years old when he died. And he told us about his view of existence throughout all those years —sometimes very sad and hopeless, sometimes very hopeful, sometimes very grotesque and cruel, and so on. But above all he was all about humanism, and he believed, as I see it also, that art should always be at the service of humanism.” And Sam Fragoso talks with Andersson at the AV Club.

Laura Nanchino introduces an interview: “Launched in 2009, the Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, developed by the Institut Français and backed by the International Organization of French-speaking Countries, is a professional program organized as part of the Cannes Film Festival to enhance the international exposure of young filmmakers from countries from the south. Cineuropa met up with French director Claire Denis, patron of the 2015 edition, and CEO of the Institut Français Anne Tallineau.”

For Film Comment, Margaret Barton-Fumo talks with Isaach de Bankolé, who’s worked with Denis, Jim Jarmusch, Lars von Trier and others on more than fifty films. He’s just completed work on Joseph Cedar‘s Oppenheimer Strategies: “In the scene we shot here [in New York], I’m working at a luxury store and this Israeli politician stops in front of the window and admires a pair of shoes that he can’t really buy, because of the political implications. So Richard Gere enters my store with him and we both try to sell him the shoes. It’s a very long scene, like 20 pages long.”

“Though none of his works have been publicly shown in China, Hu Jie is one of his country’s most noteworthy filmmakers,” writes Ian Johnson at the top of his interview for the New York Review of Books. “He is best known for his trilogy of documentaries about Maoist China, which includes Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004), telling the now-legendary story of a young Christian woman who died in prison for refusing to recant her criticisms of the Party during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957; Though I Am Gone (2007), about a teacher who was beaten to death by her own students at the outset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966; and Spark (2013), describing a doomed underground publication in 1960 that tried to expose the Great Leap famine, which killed upward of 30 million people.”

Trailer for The Voice of Sokurov

For Vulture, Heather Schwedel talks with Jason Segel about playing David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour: “‘Infinite Jest really is what did it for me… I felt like I was reading a man who was sending out sort of a distress beacon saying, ‘Does anyone else feel dissatisfied?’ like, ‘Does anyone else feel alone?'”

Neil McGlone (Sight & Sound) and Paul Risker (Little White Lies) talks with Samantha Fuller about her documentary on her father, A Fuller Life.

“A lot of people wonder why I’m such a dinosaur, hand-drawing all my animation,” Bill Plympton tells Steven Heller in the Atlantic. “Yet it’s so much faster to draw my films myself, and 10 times cheaper.”

“The first thing to say about Lynn Hershman Leeson is that she is extremely funny,” writes Laura Cumming in the Guardian. “No description of her career—filmmaker, sculptor, performance artist, new media pioneer, ‘investigator of selfhood’ and other tedious art-world labels—gives any hint of this fact. For 50 years (she was born in 1941) Hershman Leeson has been applying her acute intelligence to modern times and modern lives, often with surprising foresight, but always with the readiest wit.” Lynn Hershman Leeson: Origins of the Species (Part 2) is on view at Modern Art Oxford through August 9 and Terri Cohn talks with her for SFAQ.

“I think there’s a spiritual malaise in the world,” Caveh Zahedi tells Micah Gottlieb in Fanzine. “Particularly in the Western World, with that sort of secular materialism–it hits a dead end. Our culture is the result of that dead end.”

For the Berlin Film Journal, Celia Wickham talks with Desiree Akhavan about Appropriate Behavior, “her stance on Iranian and queer cinema as a movement, and not waiting for anyone’s permission or approval to tell your story.”

Amy Nicholson‘s longish profile of Judd Apatow was the cover story of last week’s Voice.

Time Out New York‘s David Ehrlich talks with Hiromasa Yonebayashi, whose When Marnie Was There will be Studio Ghibli’s “last feature film for the foreseeable future.”

The L‘s Mark Asch talks with Bob Byington about 7 Chinese Brothers, his film featuring Jason Schwartzman.

Via Midnight Marauder

Listening (17’42”). André Gregory and Wallace Shawn are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

More listening (48’39”). Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca talks with Josh and Benny Safdie about Heaven Knows What. More interviews with the brothers: Paula Bernstein (Indiewire), Henry Stewart (L), Dan Sullivan (Film Comment) and Hillary Weston (BlackBook). And Amy Larocca profiles Heaven Knows What star Arielle Holmes for Vulture.

And yet more listening. Leonard Lopate (27’21”) talks with Andrew Bujalski, Guy Pearce and Kevin Corrigan about Results. Adam Schartoff (34’17”) interviews Bujalski and Corrigan. More Results conversations: Michael Agresta (Austin Chronicle), Jason Bailey (Flavorwire), Sam Fragoso (Keyframe), Danny Miller (Cinephiled), Elise Nakhnikian (Slant; more), Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker) and Chase Whale (Playlist).

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