Film directors panel roundtable: ‘American Fiction,’ ‘The Beanie Bubble,’ ‘Fair Play,’ ‘Fingernails’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
The directors behind the acclaimed films “American Fiction,” “The Beanie Bubble,” “Fair Play” and “Fingernails,” each found inspiration in some past classics that helped them not only want to become filmmakers but also serve as North Stars on their new projects.
“I think a real spiritual predecessor to ‘American Fiction’ is this movie called ‘Hollywood Shuffle by Robert Townsend,” writer and director Cord Jefferson says in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Film Directors roundtable. “I saw that when I was probably about nine or 10. And I think that although I probably didn’t know what the strict definition of satire was back then, I know the feeling that it gave me. I heard about racism and civil rights – these were things that I understood from class and from home. But those are issues that were normally talked about in sort of morose tones and sort of very grim circumstances. And then this was a movie that all of a sudden was talking about racism in a way that made you laugh. Every single scene is about people who were finding joy in all of this and finding ways to celebrate and laugh. To me, that was real. I just sort of like felt like a real light bulb went off over my head at that moment. And so while I wouldn’t say necessarily that’s what inspired me to sort of make films, that is something that has stuck with me for the past three decades.”
For “The Beanie Bubble,” directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash say that Martin Scorsese’s classic “Casino” was an important reference point.
“You wouldn’t see it on the surface necessarily,” Kulash says about the similarities between “Casino” and “The Beanie Bubble.” “It took me years to figure out why I was so in love with ‘Casino.’ It’s a great film, Scorsese films are all great. But I realized that there was something special about the way color and atmosphere worked in that film because it’s set in a ridiculous place. You can have this very heavy and serious type of drama that lives in a surreal world, and it is grounded because the world itself is meant to be surreal. And to me, that was an attraction to the Beanie Baby craze. We could tell this really dark tale in the middle of an incredibly joyful burst of ridiculousness.”
“Fingernails” filmmaker Christos Nikou, meanwhile, was struck by another ‘90s classic. “The movie that made me want to be a director was ‘The Truman Show.’ And it’s always an inspiration for everything I’m doing,” Nikou says – and it would be hard to argue based on the premise and tone of “Fingernails.” “That movie has the perfect balance between comedy and drama – and it has the perfect balance between creating something that is high concept, but at the same time, very grounded. How you can create something that is dystopian, but also very humanistic. So I think that [screenwriter] Andrew Niccol, especially with his first two films [‘Gattaca’ and ‘The Truman Show’], created something that as a writer we hadn’t seen a lot before.”
“Fair Play” writer and director Chloe Domont says she was inspired to become a director by a pair of Sidney Lumet classics: “Network” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” As with her debut feature, both films focus on complicated characters who aren’t necessarily heroic and use genre to tell a more specific story.
“My father showed me ‘Network’ when I was like 10 years old. But he showed me lots of inappropriate films. It just blew my mind that just in terms of tone,” Domont says. “‘Dog Day Afternoon, that was another film. I’ve never seen a heist developed like that before. And then I think it just subverted the genre in a way that was so exciting to me, just with the character and how just a character can subvert the genre in a way. That was just so heartbreaking and devastating and funny – it was kind of tonal mash-up that was so exciting to me.”
For more from this group, including how they think about the importance of tone, watch the full roundtable. Click each person’s name above to watch an individual chat.
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