Interview: Sue Kim on "The Speed Cubers" her Oscar finalist

by Nathaniel R

After screening the moving and very engaging doc The Speed Cubers we were shockd to learn that it was a debut Figuring there was a story we sat down with director Sue Kim and as it turns out, we were right. Though she comes across as genuinely humble, twenty years of experience on sets helped her to be fully formed as a filmmaker the first time out of the gate. She'd been producing commrcials for 20 years before directing her first short The Speed Cubers. As the mom of a cuber, she knew the world intimately and knew how she wanted to frame the story. After a pitch to Netflix and the benefit of a few years of archival footage from The Cubicle, to help shape the backstory, "we were able to focus our filming efforts pretty precisely."

Kim and her team shot for six months up leading up the Speed-Cubing World Championships. We were delighted to hear what convinced Sue to try her hand at directing and what it was like to make a movie with no antagonists and two heroes, speed cubing champs Max Park and Feliks Zemdegs...

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Interview: BAFTA nominee Mikkel E.G. Nielsen on finding the balance and structure of "Sound of Metal"

by Nathaniel R

Talking to film editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (A Royal Affair, Beasts of No Nation), is a bit dizzying. His conversation moves around our subject, Sound of Metal, in circular fashion regularly bringing up both the films beginning, a raucous noisy concert where we first experience Ruben (Riz Ahmed's) hearing loss with him, and the films very quiet yet symmetrical ending. It doesn't surprise us then when he describes his job holistically. "My job is to try and create a whole from start to finish where you feel that you've been on this journey. Either it's revealing or it's fulfilling or emotional."

Nielsen divides his time between movies, music videos, and commercial work and though he loves the immersive challenge of cinema, he appreciates the mix. "Molding a movie" for months, he explains, becomes all encompassing. Working on a spot for three weeks, though, "Wow, that was almost like a vacation!'"

Another 'vacation' will have to wait. We're deep in awards season and Nielsen's fine work, honing the film's structure, and finessing the movies internal and external rhythms alongside its much praised sound design, has been honored with a Critics Choice Award for Best Editing and, this morning, a BAFTA nomination as well. We recently spoke to him about his work and international career...

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Interview: Pixar's Mike Jones on co-writing "Soul" and "Luca"

by Nathaniel R

Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.

We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...

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Interview: on "Welcome to Chechnya" and putting visual effects to humanitarian use.

by Nathaniel R

Director David France and Visual Effects Supervisor Ryan Laney on "Welcome to Chechnya"

If you haven't yet screened the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, a finalist for Best Documentary Feature, don't delay. The film details the journey of a group of incredibly brave LGBTQ activists in Russia, working to help people escape Russia and Chechnya where the government condones the abduction, torture, and murders of queer people, by denying that it's happening at all. The primary storyline involves "Grisha" (not his real name) a gay event planner who was abducted and tortured in Chechnya while working on a job there.

Due to the unique risks to the people involved and the need to protect their identities, Welcome to Chechnya opted to deploy innovative visual effects rather than the traditional "shot in shadow" or blurred faces you would usually see with anonymous voices in documentary. Now the film finds itself charting unfamiliar awards territory as a finalist for the Best Visual Effects Oscar, a category that's usually focused on sci-fi films, superheroes, and action blockbusters...

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Interview: Malgorzata Szumowska talks Oscar, Great Actors, and "Never Gonna Snow Again"

by Nathaniel R

Though it's easy to lose track of great cinema, especially in this strange time of virtual festivals and very little traditional moviegoing, you won't want to miss Never Gonna Snow Again, when it arrives this Spring. The Polish hopeful in this year's Oscar's International Feature Film race is a hard-to-describe elusive wonder about a Ukranian massage therapist (Stranger Thing's Alec Utgoff) who a suburban community becomes obsessed with. We were thrilled to jump on the phone with its talented 47 year-old director Malgorzata Szumowska. She's forged a long and international career for herself with award winning films like Elles (with Juliette Binoche), Body, the LGBT drama In the Name of, and her first English language picture last year, the cult drama The Other Lamb. 

She goes by 'Malgo'. "It's easier," she offers quickly, surely having heard her name mangled before. The director lives up to our expectations with a candid tongue and sharp sense of humor. Poland is a large country but she describes their film industry as small though not without its professional jealousy for those with international careers. The name directors, she adds, are "very supportive" of one another, name-checking three of the country's finest as we settle in for our chat: She mentions Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi) briefly; Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War, Ida) is her very close friend -- she actually found him his lead novice actress for his Oscar-winning Ida; and shortly before our chat, Oscar nominee Agnieska Holland (Europa Europa, In Darkness) had called to catch up.

We're crossing our fingers that she soon joins their ranks at the Oscars. But Malgo appears to be less of a dreamer and more of a bemused pragmatist when it comes to careers and awards. "Some people think they'll make one film and then they'll be in Hollywood. It doesn't work that way. If you make a movie that wins an Oscar than, yes, but that's an accident, a lottery."  She's in it for the long haul and the work and eager to get on with her next project as we spoke...

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