When I spoke with actor Géza Röhrig and director/co-writer László Nemes on December 12, 2015, I knew it was going to be a serious conversation. I also knew that it was going to be as insightful as their film, SON OF SAUL. We started the interview with my asking why these two would want to immerse themselves… Read More »
SOMETIMES IN APRIL
In SOMETIMES IN APRIL, Raoul Peck (Lumumba), has taken the specific story of the Rwandan genocide of April 1994 and made manifest the universal implications of the events. There is plenty of culpability to go around and Peck is not shy about pointing fingers, but he is also not shy about pointing up the greater… Read More »
Adrien Brody is THE PIANIST, Thomas Kretschmann, his Tormentor
Meeting Adrien Brody and Thomas Kretschmann is like spending time with two old pals who still enjoy joking around with each other even after a difficult shoot in Europe and a grinding publicity tour schedule to promote their extraordinary film, THE PIANIST. Once we began talking about that film, though, they were deadly serious about the subject matter, the… Read More »
Raoul Peck on SOMETIMES IN APRIL
Raoul Peck is a softspoken man, but the gentle timbre of his voice does nothing to disguise the passion he feels for SOMETIMES IN APRIL, which he wrote and directed for HBO. This look at the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an event that took a million lives in 100 days, was a topic he was… Read More »
Richard Berge & Bonni Cohen Recount THE RAPE OF EUROPA
Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen spent years translating Lynn H. Nicholas’ book of the same name into a documentary. Hence, when I spoke with them on May 14, 2007, they had a wealth of stories to tell about both the subject matter, the Nazi plan to loot Europe of its art treasures and to destroy those… Read More »
Brett Morgen and the CHICAGO 10
The Yippies at the 1968 Democratic Convention gave themselves body and soul to protesting the injustice. The same can be said of Brett Morgen’s determination to make his documentary about the riots and the trial that resulted from them more than just a look back at an interesting moment in American history. When I spoke to him on February 21, 2008, the relevance of those… Read More »