On June 20, the Nantucket Film Festival will honor Harold Ramis with their Screenwriter’s Tribute, and will host a special 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters (there’s ticket info on the Festival’s website). With speculation over the long-awaited Ghostbusters 3 at a fever pitch, I called Ramis and we talked about the status of that project, how he’s been “burned by sequels” and why he made a villain out of the EPA.

Why do you think that people are still so hungry for a new Ghostbusters, twenty years after the last film? Why Ghostbusters, and not, like, Caddyshack?

There was another “Caddyshack,” and it was terrible. That could be one reason.

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“I have to say that the adult films have been a total pleasure. They were like getting paid to live out my greatest fantasies. The rest of the stuff … sometimes got to be a real grind.”

So sayeth the late, great Marilyn Chambers. And though porn star Sasha Grey, who makes her “mainstream” debut as a high-end call girl in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, would most likely disagree with the latter part of that sentiment, I couldn’t help but think of Chambers’ often wasted talent as Grey and I sat down to chat. This self-proclaimed “performance artist” is every bit as intelligent and articulate as Soderbergh’s latest HD fling is tedious and condescending. Here’s hoping Grey’s next experience is worthy of her wonderful lust for life.

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The Tribeca Film Festival has often shown a predilection for a certain type of New York feature and filmmaker — see this year’s Woody Allen-directed opener, or last year’s opening night film Baby Mama, or the many virtually interchangeable Ed Burns pictures that have played the festival in previous years –– all reflecting a version of the city so plasticine that their use of actual locations seems to offer no more authenticity than a Hollywood soundstage.  But within 2009’s pared-down, recession-conscious lineup, a number of titles call back to a very different, dirtier aspect of the hometown’s filmmaking legacy, one which seems all the more ripe for a revisit in this climate of financial pain and industrial upheaval. Bette Gordon’s 1984 postfeminist noir Variety is the centerpiece of this unofficial strain, and it finds cousins in at least three program mates: Gordon’s latest feature Handsome Harry (starring Steve Buscemi), as well as the documentaries Blank City (in which both Gordon and Buscemi appear, discussing the downtown filmmaking scene of the late 70s-early 80s) and Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB.

If Celine Danhier’s Blank City plays as an anthropological study of the interconnected community of downtown artists shooting transgressive provocations for no budget on low-gauge media, Variety is the prototype of a product of that community; co-written by Kathy Acker, featuring appearances from Nan Goldin, a young Luis Guzman and Spalding Gray, produced by Gray’s girlfriend Renee Shafransky, co-lensed by Tom DiCillio and scored by John Lurie. The two latter names would shortly move on the Stranger Than Paradise.

Sandy McLeod stars as Christine, a wannabe journalist who takes a job selling tickets at a Times Square porno house to pay the bills. She soon finds herself caught in an economic, moral and generational limbo, surrounded by women who are driven, by some combination of liberated curiosity and economic panic, to explore the sex industry, and yet find themselves in beyond-traditional, passive-aggressive relationships with their boyfriends. Increasingly fascinated with the tension between watching and being watched, Christine begins tailing a regular visitor to the theater, ultimately playing with the option of choosing her own sexual objectification. All of it unfolds in grainy 16mm against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified Manhattan where, as John Waters puts it in Blank City, “just walking home was like going to war.”

Speaking over the phone last week, Gordon described the means and tools of production that made Variety possible, considers why the film had an impact then and why its assessment of the choppy waters of female sexual empowerment is perhaps even more relevant now, and explains why she doesn’t want to be a “woman filmmaker.” A restored print of Variety screens on Wednesday at 5pm at SVA on 23rd Street; it’s also available on DVD.

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It’s not unusual for young filmmakers to experience some sort of pain and frustration in making the transition from DIY no-budget feature making, to working with other people’s money and within higher profile marketing and distribution strategies. What is unusual, is for said filmmakers to talk about that pain and frustration candidly with journalists. Before I saw The House of the Devil at a Tribeca pre-festival press screening, its writer/director Ti West contacted me and told me that he wasn’t sure which version of his fourth feature would be screening for the press. There’s what he calls his director’s cut, which he says was finished last December; then, there’s a version with a four minute chunk shorn out of the film’s middle, an edit which West says was mandated very recently by Devil’s producers, the Chicago-based MPI subsidiary Dark Sky Films, in the hopes of enlivening the prospect of a Tribeca sale. When I did see the film I couldn’t see any obvious slash marks, and I was looking. Still, it wasn’t hard to see how a financier could jump to the conclusion that The House of the Devil could be a hard sell.

Though a huge step up in terms of image quality from his 2006 festival hit Trigger Man (the director spent the intervening years between this and that working on a comparatively high-budget Cabin Fever sequel, with which he’s no longer directly associated and which has still not been released; more on that later), Devil employs a similar pacing and narrative approach to West’s earlier work made with the support of producer Larry Fessenden. West seems to be developing a patented style: long stretches of quiet creep, so intensely controlled that only the cultural references distinguish it from a European art film, giving way to unforgiving violence which unsettles while still avoiding the show-it-all sadism of torture porn. If the performance-driven Devil (which stars Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov and Greta Gerwig) is an indication of where he wants to go and what he’s capable of, this seems like a worthwhile artistic pursuit; unfortunately, as West is well aware after losing some degree of control over two consecutive directorial efforts, worthwhile artistic pursuits don’t have much of a place in the contemporary horror climate.

I called the director after seeing the film and told him that I liked what I saw, even if I wasn’t sure which version of the film had been shown.

“Did she play the piano?” West asked.

“No.”

“Then it’s not my version.”

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One of the most laudable entries on the recent festival circuit is So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, which has racked up awards at Pusan, Dubai and Berlin. Following her 2005 DiY breakthrough In Between Days, Kim revisited the stories and settings of her childhood in Korea to film a stoic yet deeply affecting chronicle of two young sisters fending for themselves after their mother disappears from their lives. The film recently enjoyed a NYC unveiling at New Directors/New Films, and opens in limited release April 22.

In her review of the film at its Toronto premiere, Karina was most taken by the performances, which, she writes, “are all the more impressive considering the fact that the film’s two young stars are non-actors–––Hee Yeon Kim [who plays older sister Jin] was found in an elementary school in Seoul City, while five year-old Song Hee [as younger sister Bin] was auditioned along with her fellow housemates at a Korean orphange. Hee Yeon Kim’s performance as Jin is absolutely mind-blowing: trudging along with a sadness in her eyes that could only be described as world weary, she’s like a little adult trapped in the body of a girl barely old enough to go to school.”

While the performances of the children are indeed revelatory, there’s a lot of work going on off-screen to pull them off, amounting to a unique strain of filmmaking that incorporates both strict preparation and flexibility, and rigorous screenwriting with documentary improvisation. I sat with Kim during the Berlinale (as she took a quick break between tending to her two children - her film, and her young daughter) to learn more about her technique for filming children and what it was like to shoot an indie film in Korea.

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It’s strange to watch the transition of an actor from a bit part to burgeoning indie darling and whirling media-dervish. But it’s oddly appropriate for Paul Dano, the 24-year old who is well on his way to awkwardly smiling and shyly introducing himself into your life before brutally attacking your conceptions of what it means to be an unassuming actor.

Praised for his calculating and spastic performance(s) as Eli/Paul Sunday in P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Dano is a peculiar character. Not that anything he does is strange—it’s just the opposite. He’s on the verge of continuing a leap into mainstream audiences that started with Little Miss Sunshine and continues to grow with supporting roles in Where The Wild Things Are and Taking Woodstock. He sticks out in all his roles, whether it’s his flopish look that seamlessly translates from troubled teen to angry asshole such as in Weapons, or his voice that manages to make the same radical emotional turns.

In Gigantic, opening today in New York and Los Angeles, he’s transitioned into a leading man role with Zooey Deschanel as his love interest/”Magical Manic Pixie Girl.” But when appropriately brought against Dano’s quiet style, that “quirky romance” staple is torn away to reveal two people who are utterly afraid of what they’re turning into and unsure about where they’re going in life. There’s also a homeless guy trying to kill him–maybe.

We spoke with Dano over the phone, in-between radio interviews and filming The Extra Man, and had previously profiled him back when it was just as easy to walk into a diner on Avenue A to talk.

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As I wrote when I saw the film last month at True/False, Justin Strawhand’s doc War Against the Weak uses all manner of visual ingenuity to translate Edwin Black’s history of the American eugenics movement “from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.” The film screens tomorrow at Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of a recent call from that state’s governor to set aside $250,000 to “provide justice and compensate victims” of North Carolina’s eugenics-influenced sterilization program, which was active until the mid-1970s. Via email, Strawhand spoke to the ongoing debate about documentary recreations, the “deep synchrony” between Nazi rhetoric and American eugenics propaganda, and the Full Frame screening’s unexpected timeliness.

How much did you know about eugenics before reading Black’s book? What was it about the book that made you think there was a film there?

I’d come across eugenics during my internet meanderings around ‘01. Much of the information was alongside what I would call generic conspiracy stuff. But eugenics grabbed me right away, because it was verifiable. It was taught in schools, bought and paid for by powerful families and corporations, enshrined by the Supreme Court. I think part of me wanted to rescue the material from the conspiracy theorists. Here was a subject that had all of the best elements of a conspiracy theory, but had played out quite visibly on the world stage. It was “all true.”

I knew right away I wanted to make a film about it. A researcher friend of mine started compiling, and I was thinking of telling most of the story through NY Times articles. Edwin’s book came out in 2003, and I read it soon after. The breadth and depth of his research was astonishing, and he made a point that no one else did: American and German eugenics were not only similar, German eugenics was in fact an offshoot of the American movement.

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I saw Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ at True/False in 2008 and was blown away by the filmmaker’s fearless experimentation with construction and story structure. The film is a portrait of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian living in exile in Australia who became a literary star when she published a purported memoir of her best friend’s honor killing. The book was eventually revealed as mostly or entirely fabricated; Khouri admitted to embellishment but insisted that the core of the story was true. Broinowski followed the disgraced author back to Jordan in the name of clearing her name, but inevitably uncovered a massive web of lies. Khouri reveals herself as a con artist for whom publishing a fake memoir (and the year of adulation and celebrity that ensued) waas jsut one act in a life-long performance; Broinowski reveals just what makes that performance work, and how Norma gets away with it.

I named Forbidden Lie$ as one of the Best Undistributed Films of last year; now, thanks to Roxie Releasing, the film is opening at the Cinema Village in New York this Friday, and in Los Angeles on April 10. Via email, I talked to Broinowski about her ongoing relationship with her subject, the inherently artificial tropes of documentary, and the natural symbiosis between a filmmaker and a con artist.

How did you discover Norma’s story, and how many of its twists and turns were you aware of when you started working on the film?

I was aware of Norma when her book first came out and she was a Jordanian celebrity in Australia, having chosen to live in exile here with the help of the Australian government, who gave her a special protection visa to help her escape the blood-thirsty Muslim terrorists who had supposedly put a fatwah on her head. But I had no interest in buying Norma’s book because the whole thing stank of anti-Arab propaganda, at a time when we were being encouraged to support the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I became keenly interested in Norma about a year later, when journalist Malcolm Knox exposed her as a hoax and a Chicago fraudster on the run from the FBI. I was hooked: what kind of woman could be so brilliant that while on the run from the FBI she could reinvent herself as a 32 year old virgin from Jordan, write a “true story” that became a best-seller around the world, and go on a book promotion tour pretending to be seeing the West for the first time, convincing the best minds in publishing and the media that she was telling the truth?

That’s when I emailed her. I said I am a filmmaker and I want to hear your side of the story. Obviously she agreed.

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In a way, this all started back in high school, in an art classroom, painters-turned-filmmakers Andy Duensing and Chris Doyle meeting there. Better known now as the pair behind the collective the Deagol Bros., Andy and Chris, working with longtime friends and fellow artist-musicians Eric and Jordan Lehning, have spent from production to final cut the last five years of their lives making the at turns poignant and goofball, genre-defying coming-of-age indie Make-Out with Violence.

As chronicled in journalist Jim Ridley’s feature story for Nashville Scene, the production was beset early by stumbling blocks. Budget limit halts of production, wear and tear on the seams of friendship and at least one very ill-timed break-up roughed up the filmmaking journey. Yet despite these trials, the high school friends, not knowing if they’d ever have another opportunity to make a feature, sought to tell the most distinct and interesting story possible.

Pulling from memories of growing up in a much more rural Hendersonville, TN than exists now, Andy, Chris and Eric, all working from separate cities, began a script crafting process that would, in its final stages, blend styles of many seeming opposites. One part comedy, one part drama, another mystery and the last (very small part in the scope of it all) horror, Make-Out with Violence tells the story of teenage twin brothers Patrick (Eric Lehning) and Carol (Cody DeVos), who after the disappearance and death of their friend Wendy (Shellie Shartzer), diverge in their paths toward after high school futures. While the somewhat obsessive Patrick tends to Wendy’s barely animated (read: zombie) corpse, Carol chases, much of the time ineptly, his elusive, tender sweetheart Addie (Leah High.) Told through the eyes of the brothers’ younger sibling Beetle (Brett Miller), the story unfolds with a necessary level of detachment into its punchy and disconcerting yet graceful, moving conclusion.

With its deftly-handled blends of style and score, Make-Out with Violence is at its best as an experiment; it’s both familiar and unexpected, nonchalant and thought-provoking, slapstick comic and full of all that’s yearning and desolate. As such the film in its festival run so far has had both its fervent champions and its quieter skeptics, those who really appreciate its many layers and those who stand in some confusion as to what is ultimately being said here. It’s undeniable, though, that whichever side holds greater sway for the individual filmgoer, Make-Out with Violence leaves a person wondering deeply, and just a little happier afterward for having seen this mix of ideas, images and songs. As Andy puts it, “There’s a certain amount of room there for the viewer to experience the movie in whatever way they want.”

Talking here in phone conference, Andy, Chris, Eric and Jordan share stories about the film’s development, particularly the crafting of its memorable original soundtrack — the disc length of which is longer than the film itself, “by quite a bit” says Jordan, who worked alongside Eric to compose all of the tunes. In the background of our conversation, Kevin Doyle, one of the film’s directors of photography, folds origami DVD sleeves for screener copies of the film. He does this for a full hour while the four others of the film’s creative core talk.

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Looking up at her co-star Souleymane Sy Savane and noting the pain written on his face, child actress Diana Franco Galindo pulled aside Goodbye Solo director Ramin Bahrani to ask why it was that his character at this moment seemed so sad.

“I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?” Bahrani asked.

Not having read any of the script beyond her own scenes, Galindo thought for a second on the question.

Here, of course, is all the story background that she, in considering the question, knew nothing of: With this latest work, Bahrani studies the world of naturally jovial, curious taxi driver Solo who, in meeting cantankerous, suicidal fare William (Red West), is forced to reconsider the definitions of friendship. Opening with an already quarrelsome scene between the two men, Goodbye, Solo, while quite a comfortable film to engage with, its journey full of levity as Solo studies for an exam to land a job as a flight attendant, leaves no easy way out either for its characters nor its audience. William has full intentions of leaving everything in life behind him, and Solo, despite his growing affection for the man, must learn not only to let him go but also to help him on his way.

Knowing this perhaps makes Galindo’s answer to Bahrani in that moment all this much more poignant.

“I think because he failed his exam,” she says.

“That’s a really good answer. Why don’t you really encourage him to pass it then!” Bahrani told her.

”And she said she would, and thus she really fills Solo with courage and hope in the final scene to pass, and manages to cheer him up and put a smile on his face about the future, right when another man’s future has been cut and Solo is thinking about the past, mortality, fragility and the briefness of life,” Bahrani explains.

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A self-admitted lover of armchair philosophy, nonfiction filmmaker Andrew Neel prefers questions to answers. “Present day cinema, indie documentaries included, has devolved into thesis-driven filmmaking; people want a conclusion walking out the door. I think that’s the death of cinema.

“When I leave a film that I feel is really good, I leave with lots of complicated questions that I can’t always answer, that I don’t feel comfortable answering,” he explains.

In studying the little understood culture of political conspiracy theorists, Neel, along with longtime collaborator and co-director Luke Meyer, engages with New World Order several of these uncomfortable questions, the most unnerving of which are: Is there a global elite, this New World Order, that orchestrates the hierarchies and power plays in societies? Does this elite, more alarmingly, hope to handicap the world only to rebuild it in its own image later?

As it follows the leaders of the growing 9/11 Truth Movement, foremost among them incendiary activist Alex Jones, the documentary staunchly refuses to make any judgment calls. If at times the messages sent within the film edify too passionately, the calls “9/11 was an inside job,” and “Wake up!” forever after to play in the recordings of the subconscious, it’s that the subjects of the film, not Neel or Meyer themselves as directors, have spoken those messages out so forcefully. Opting instead simply to gaze with great compassion at its oft ignored and scorned subjects, New World Order, at its core, is much less about government machinations than it is about the profundity of humaneness in a world rife with confusion.

Whereas in their last directorial collaboration Darkon, a glimpse into the fantasy world of live action role players, Neel and Meyer had the freedom to engage with all questions of fact and fiction, with New World Order, Neel says, explorations were thorny in that through the process of making the film questions arose that, as the directors, neither he nor Meyer could address for fear of compromising their objectivity, and hence the film along with it. In this interview, however, Neel opens up to share his thoughts on the power of ideas, the problem of peaceful revolution and the little bit of fear he has for the future.

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Outside the wind in Park City blows cold while inside here, in this tiny restaurant nestled away from the film festival hubbub of Main Street, filmmaker David Lowery slips off his jacket as he scans though the menu’s vegan options. In town for the Slamdance screening of his graceful, thought-provoking short film A Catalog of Anticipations, Lowery, more than this year ago now, bounces from venue to venue, sledding expedition to premiere party all the while returning to his hotel room in the breaks between to prep production for his debut feature film St. Nick.

Set in an isolated Texan winter landscape, the debut, which like Lowery’s shorts is as equally graceful and thought-provoking a mystery, follows a pair of adolescent sibling runaways who, for no seemingly better reason than that they can, trek out on their own self-reliant whim. Too young to understand the world as it is and yet too old to fully embrace the blind innocence of childhood again, the two scrape by, salvaging food from dumpsters and setting up shelter in an abandoned house. While aesthetically captivating and elegant, its shot design as experimental as it is fluent, St. Nick is undeniably a film composed of several provocative ideas and moments. It’s not always an easy film to understand, and that’s exactly, Lowery mentions now, just a few weeks left before the film’s premiere at South by Southwest, what he was after.

I love this notion in the Director’s Statement that you realized you were growing up on the first day of kindergarten, this idea that from that point on you’d have to wake up early. What was it like to be in that mindset as a child, and why do you think that idea occurred to you at that young age?

I wasn’t trying to make a happy film about childhood, and that was based on my own feelings. I remember being upset a lot as a kid, and so as I was trying to address all of that, it occurred to me that maybe that idea was tied into this [fear and anger] somehow. It seemed like a dynamic related. There was another moment I remember going up to my room and trying to knock myself out with a two-by-four; I was ten years old. So that’s an equally valid explanation of where the movie came from I think.

I was feeling a lot of resentment and other emotions when I was developing the project. That, I think, comes first. I had the idea for the movie, I was making it and then all of that emotion further came out as I was working on it. It wasn’t the driving force behind it, but it welled up as I was making it or preparing to make it.

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As a wedding present, Kris and Joe Swanberg received, among other gifts, an ice-cream maker. Almost immediately, Kris found herself experimenting with recipes—whiskey with bread pudding, hot chocolate with roasted marshmallows, coffee and doughnut and gingersnap cookie, four flavors a season. She sells them now by the pint at a local grocery store. During the day Kris heads to work as a substitute teacher, and though she loves teaching and is pursuing her graduate work in higher education, it’s a transitional occupation that she says is rather worthless and unfulfilling.

Joe, meanwhile, constantly developing ideas for a seemingly endless list of to-make films, struggles with all those mundanities that thwart his creative productivity. “Doing my laundry or washing my dishes, all of these tasks are cutting into time that I could use to be making work,” he says. “If I could employ a labor force to dress me in the morning, do all these tasks, drive me places, and if I could have people simultaneously scouting locations for several different projects and setting up the paperwork with SAG, then I’d have the energy within me to make six or seven features a year, I’m sure. Now, I’m just physically incapable of it.” The statement, made during an initial interview, is all the more humorously appropriate considering that Kris answers the phone for the second of the two lengthy conversations saying, “Oh, I’ll get Joe; he’s just folding socks.”

In many ways, as most couples do, Kris and Joe see and think in very different manners. While Kris tends not to debate film, or even at times actively note it, Joe delves into every nook and cranny of a cinematic trend or debate. While she’s articulate although softer spoken, he’s passionately, loudly declarative. While she finds comfort in realism, he finds himself moving into a greater period of experimentation. Yet for all of these differences, and perhaps because of them, the Swanbergs have weathered ten years together of both romantic ramblings and professional collaborations. This is only just the briefest of glimpses at the Swanbergs as a couple.

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On the other end of the phone line, first time feature director though veteran film and television producer Dia Sokol admits that she’s more than a bit nervous for this interview about her naturalistic “anti-chemistry, unromantic comedy” debut Sorry, Thanks. “This never used to happen to me. As a producer, I’d listen to directors fumble their way through describing their films, and I’ve always jumped in and been the person to sell it, to be articulate about it, and now I totally get it,” she says. “When it’s your film, you’re totally inarticulate about it; it comes from inside of you, so you have no perspective.”

Starring a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors and shot by a skeleton crew in San Francisco’s endearingly eccentric Mission District, Sorry, Thanks follows two adrift lonesomes Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles), neither of whom, even after a shared one-night stand, can begin to reconcile their thoughts on romantic relationships. As Max chases Kira, detaching himself along the way from longtime girlfriend Sara (Ia Hernandez), and attempts to immune himself to the criticism of his best bud Mason (Andrew Bujalski), Kira explores an uninspiring dating scene that only very quietly pinpoints the sadness of her recent break-up.

Despite its bittersweet, introspection-inducing lining, Sorry, Thanks is at its core incredibly funny, even at times painfully funny. Foibles are so at the surface, sarcasm so easily blended with childlike wonder that it’s simple to just enjoy the film without questioning every character intention and situation repercussion. It’s easy, namely, to root for Max and Kira even as they stumble into moral quagmires, and that’s where Sokol, in only the most articulate of manners, begins discussing her work.

[In the film’s production notes] you pose the question, “Can we still love these characters even when they are doing things wrong?” For me that answer with this film was, “Yes.” Yet I don’t fully know why it is that I still have that faith even as I watch these characters fall into situations that are morally gray. So, this idea of the moral quandary, I was hoping that we could start our talk there.

I started my career working for Errol Morris, and that informed a lot of my skepticism about the idea of redemption. So, when I talked to [co-writer and producer Lauren Veloski] about starting to write this, I said, “I really want to make a film that’s about redemption.” (laughs) When I look at this film now and think about that, to me it’s a reminder, “Oh yeah, and I don’t believe in redemption.” I believe in it as a concept, but I don’t know that I believe in it as an actuality. I don’t think the world works that way, and I’m incredibly ambivalent about films that act like you can make up for your bad actions. So, in some ways, I wanted the film to be about, “When you break something, is it really broken?”

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