Our interviews are often the pieces we’re most excited to publish here at 4:3, and it’s always rewarding to look back on our favourite conversations at the end of each year. We’ve continued our emphasis on longer discussions, and have focused, for the most part, on filmmakers who don’t always fall into the spotlight. This year, we published 35 interviews, and have a few up our sleeve, to run in January. The 21 conversations featured below cover a range of filmmaking practices, approaches, and countries.
You can read all of our interviews from this year here.
Lo and Behold director Werner Herzog, interviewed by Keva York
“I would probably be a better survivor than Lawrence Krauss—because I have travelled on foot, I’m good in a jungle, I’m good in the snow, I’m a good hunter, I can make fire without matches… and a few other things. I would be a fairly good Neanderthal.”
By the Time it Gets Dark director Anocha Suwichakornpong, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“When I was making the film, I didn’t realise, to be absolutely honest, that I was also quite critical of cinema. That never occurred to me. Even, I thought I was making a film that was a love letter to cinema. Once the film was finished, and quite a few people had seen it, there was one comment that I kept getting: “You made cinema look quite bad, in a way.” I thought “oh, okay… I was not aware of this.” I thought I was asking questions of what cinema could do and could not do. Somehow, in that process, the dark side of cinema emerged.”
What Happened to Her director Kristy Guevara–Flanagan, interviewed by Blythe Worthy
“Every semester when I taught undergrad filmmaking there would be at least two final films on dead women in a trunk. Ninety-nine percent of my grad interviews with men never mention female-made films or films with women as leads, and with female students it’s still less than half. With Hollywood and its machinations, it’s more what the audience bring to it. I get pissed off about what people bring to the film they’re watching. I get so sick of these kinds of things because they’re not trivial.”
Newton actor Rajkummar Rao, interviewed by Virat Nehru
“I believe most of India lives in small towns. Most of the population lives there. Honestly, they are people who make or break our films. So I’m very happy we are going back to that era which Hrishikesh Mukherjee started with his films. Most of his films were rooted in small towns and its characters. And now that sensibility is coming back.”
Cocote director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“Sometimes, when you see filmmakers from the third world, they are so, so worried because they’re being impressed by this idea of what art is, or what cinema is.You see [film]makers from Europe or United States, so free in their forms and I say fuck it, man. No one is going to tell me how to make films. The first thing that I’m going to defend, as a maker, is my freedom. And I will do whatever I feel I want.”
Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder director Fern Silva, interviewed by Conor Bateman
“In the United States, the election was coming up and there were all these climate change deniers and so a lot of it was thinking like, ‘a landscape film in 2017’ and whether that’s all of a sudden radical because we’re dealing with all of these political issues. Is fucking landscape filmmaking or landscape painting radical because it’s just like not gonna exist in this situation, in what’s being threatened? There’s so many ways to wrap [your head] around it, even these ideas of horror and these signifiers: something as simple as a hand and what that means.”
NFSA Film Curator Sally Jackson, interviewed by Jessica Ellicott
“Film collectors tended to be from all walks of life, but we’ve found that the majority of them have worked in the industry, quite often as projectionists, or some element of distribution, or elsewhere in exhibition. Film prints tend to get left behind in cinemas. It’s not the same now, but they’re meant to be returned to the company that they hired them from. But they don’t always do that. So that’s how that side of the collection often gets built—by people holding onto things, not wanting to get rid of them. Either they might have a passion for it, or they can’t bear to see something destroyed. And they end up giving it to us. So that’s how it came into the collection.”
Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic author Franck Boulégue, interviewed by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
“I think it is fundamental to remember the etymology of the word cinematography: the art of writing movement. As early as the first films, cinema, dance, and choreography have been strongly linked, from the Lumière Brothers and other early filmmakers’ Danses Serpentines shorts to Méliès’ pantomimes and dance films, evolving at the beginning of the 20th century into Germaine Dulac’s Thèmes et variations and René Clair’s Entr’acte. In a way, one could even go as far as saying that cinema was invented to film dance.”
Cameraperson director Kirsten Johnson, interviewed by Conor Bateman
“I think for me the question is sort of absence, what has been in a place and what evidence can you find and it’s often what I’ve been charged to do, to go to a place where something has happened and try to find a way to visually evoke what can’t be seen. Understanding the political systems and history that exist in landscape is part of what fascinates me about the work.”
Off Frame A.K.A. Revolution Until Victory director Mohanad Yaqubi, interviewed by Ivan Cerecina
“It’s funny to see, well not funny, but it’s not only particular to Palestine and Palestinians. Every place is losing its memory, our cinematic memory. It’s everywhere: in Africa, South America, even in Europe, there are a lot of filmmakers and films that were made in the ’60s and ’70s that no one knows about today. You can make Off Frame for any country.”
Meteors director Gürcan Keltek, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“I always gave my colleagues the example of Iran. They had this funding problem. They had a really limited amount, but they had really beautiful films – in terms of film language and narrative. This proves that we shouldn’t start with the idea of “I’m going to this country, I need government funding.” This is bullshit.”
Western director Valeska Grisebach, interviewed by Jessica Ellicott
“In westerns there’s often this discrepancy between the fantasy of being on the road and the desire for a normal life. There’s also this great coward figure in westerns. Heroes who carry it within themselves, on the one hand this dream of “who would I like to be?” and on the other hand there’s who they are when their behaviour and actions are affected by fear. In Winchester ‘73 there’s this coward, who’s always sitting with his fiancé in the wagon, and when the Indians come he rides off and leaves everyone behind. For some reason I find him one of the most interesting characters in the film.”
Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time directors Arash Kamali Sarvestani and Behrouz Boochani, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“We wanted generations in the future to look back and never forget that this sort of thing has happened. That was one of our objectives. We wanted everyone to realise and for people in the future to realise that human rights abuses have occurred here. Violence has occurred here. We just couldn’t let the Australian government in a few years time wash its hands of all of this and just move on as if nothing had happened. We want this documented. We never want this to be forgotten.”
When The Day Had No Name director Teona Strugar Mitevska, interviewed by Lidiya Josifova
“Our concern has to be Macedonians, and to be called Macedonians. What has been the concern of Albanians? To be Albanians. But we have buried ourselves, in all these nationalistic ideas, which have nothing to do with who you really are. Of course the country is important, of course “I am Macedonian” – but I care more about creating a future for my people. I don’t know.. along the way, nationalism has eaten us alive.”
Wajib director Annemarie Jacir, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“I’m not interested in the obvious political stuff. I’m not interested in the stuff we already know, the easy stuff. I’m more interested, like even with them, with all their dialogue in the film. There’s a lot of talking in the film. I’m more interested in the silent moments between them. I think it says a lot more when they can’t speak, when they don’t know how to say something. There’s more in those moments.”
Dawson City: Frozen Time director Bill Morrison, interviewed by Conor Bateman
“I think America was built on some pretty serious fault lines. You could make a greater case that capitalism was built on the same fault lines. Dawson City is a distillation of that story. You can see it as a simple story of how some films were buried and retrieved but it also encompasses a greater story of the history of Western civilisation.”
Milla director Valérie Massadian, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“They are not victims. I couldn’t deal with… I couldn’t film a victim. A victim I would destroy. I know, because I’m very nasty. They are fighters and they’re very lonely in this struggle. That’s who I want to work with… because I love them; because I have this extremely primary animal tenderness where I just want to say: “Come on girl. Let’s fuck this. Let’s do it.”
Composer, filmmaker, historian and writer Michel Chion, interviewed by Ivan Cerecina
“When you go see a film in a cinema, you don’t see a recording. You follow the film, you read it (assuming that it holds your interest). It’s a well-worn comparison, but music is like a film for the ear — so I want people to live the work, not think of the apparatus. We are in the time of the work.”
Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, interviewed by Phoebe Chen
“For the pacing of this film, it’s what I call “slow burn”. Desire is slow burning. You have to think about adding little elements after little elements — it’s not about rushing into things, not about having Oliver arrive and everyone is thrown into a frenzy. It’s more about a growing suspicion — a growing suspicion that becomes a growing desire.”
Good Luck director Ben Russell, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“I think that knowledge within a Western regime is a trap, you know? We imagine that if we know things about people or places, that we somehow understand them, that we somehow own them. We have some leash on what and how they operate. It’s a false idea. It’s something that I think has allowed colonialism and neo-imperialism to happen around the world, because we assume that if we know somebody’s name, and we know where they’re from, then we somehow know them. I don’t believe it. I’m really interested in resisting those things and proposing that the understanding of a visceral experience of time and bodies is much more productive and generative, because it implicates the audience in a system without really giving them a way out; reverting back to a kind of a fact-naming to me is like, a very low-level experience.”
A Skin So Soft director Denis Côté, interviewed by Jeremy Elphick
“I don’t care because I don’t need cinema as an escape. I’m not into escapism. Most people are, and I totally understand that. They go to work, they go to a factory, they have a family life, sometimes they have a shit life, and at night, they want to watch Spider-Man, which is totally normal. It’s escapism from a shit day at work. I’m a filmmaker. I pay my rent with my free film. I don’t need to watch a superhero film to be entertained. Real life is my entertainment.”
You can read the rest of our Year in Review coverage here.