Category Archives: Interview

Interview: Michael Tucker on The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2007)

April 23, 2016 rmw Leave a comment

While making the Iraq-based documentary Gunner Palace in 2003, cameraman Michael Tucker was embedded with U.S. soldiers raiding what they thought was a bomb factory. What they found was four brothers in their family home – and no evidence. One brother spoke straight to Tucker’s camera. He didn’t seem angry at the soldiers in his garden but bitterly disappointed. Now Tucker tells the rest of his story.

He was Yunis Khatayer Abbas, an Iraqi journalist working for CNN and other foreign stations. He had been tortured as a dissident under Saddam Hussein and initially welcomed the Americans as liberators. He had no links to the insurgents. Yet, instead of being released, Yunis disappeared into the machinery of the occupation. For nine months, he and two of his brothers were held without charge at Camp Ganci, the low-risk section of Abu Ghraib. With the same clarity that he held the camera’s attention in Gunner Palace, Yunis explains the increasingly bizarre and terrible treatment he and his fellow inmates suffered. Yet he also praises the humanity of American guards who tried to provide some comfort to the prisoners.

(A version of this story previously appeared at AustinChronicle.com)
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Interview

Interview: Alan Ormsby

April 23, 2016 rmw Leave a comment

Last year’s Housecore Horror Film Festival was a celebration of an unusual talent in the history of cinema. Alan Ormsby is the definitive underground hero, a filmmaking polymath (writer, director, actor, make-up effects artist) who is beloved of hardened horror fans, but still

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (recently released on Blu-ray by VCI Entertainment) was the first in a series of Ormsby’s collaborations with Bob Clark. Two years later, Clark produced the Ed Gein-inspiredDeranged for writer/co-director Ormsby, before directing Ormsby’s script for post-Vietnam horror Deathdream. After their partnership collapsed, Ormsby went on to have a career in Hollywood, plus he designed the massively popular Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces dress-up doll.

However, it’s his first film that is probably his most famous. Appearing in between the revolutionary Night of the Living Dead and the equally epoch-changing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it was a quirky outlier – satirical, gory (for the era).

(A shorter version of this interview appeared in the Austin Chronicle)

Richard Whittaker: You’ve been the star attraction and celebrated filmmaker at this festival. Looking back, how does it feel going back and looking at this run of your career?

Alan Ormsby: Children seems to have been around a lot. It was in drive-ins and than it was on TV for years, whereas the other two had really disappeared. I was surprised a couple of years ago to see that they had a following. They put them out on DVD and I did a commentary on Death Dream and Children and Deranged. I was amazed. Obviously, it’s had some influence, along with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
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Interview

Interview: Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker on I Am Big Bird

February 7, 2016 rmw Leave a comment

Documentarians Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker spent five years unfurling the life of the man behind one of the most famous figures of modern culture: Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who has played Big Bird on Sesame Street since 1969 (portions of this interview originally appeared at austinchronicle.com).

Richard Whittaker: Everyone knows Big Bird, but how did you even become aware of Caroll?

Dave LaMattina: In 2005, I was interning at Sesame Workshop, because I wanted to go into family entertainment, and it was the pinnacle of place you could be for that. Great internship, and then a year or two later I was telling a friend about the various internships I’d had, and I said something about Sesame Street, and she said, oh, I’m actually family friends with Caroll Spinney. I didn’t know who that was, and thought Carroll was a woman, and she proceeded to tell me that he’s a man, and he’s been Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969.

So Chad were emailing, as we are want to do, and we were kicking around some doc ideas, and that came up and we couldn’t really let go of of it. We reached out to Sesame, thinking this would be a lot of red tape. and I think within a week we had a meeting set up with Carroll.

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Interview

Interview: S. Craig Zahler on Bone Tomahawk

January 13, 2016 rmw Leave a comment

In September 2015, I sat down with writer-director S. Craig Zahler in the bar at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas. His debut feature, horror-tinged Western Bone Tomahawk, was scheduled to play as the closing film at Fantastic Fest that night. We talked about the influences of the film, his approach to shooting its more gruesome moment, and his refusal to compromise on making the film the way he wanted to make it (parts of this interview have previously appeared in the Austin Chronicle).

Richard Whittaker: Was there ever a point where you thought, “I’ll do the soundtrack as well,” because you did everything else on this?

S. Craig Zahler: Well, I did! I did it with a friend of mine, Jeff Herriot. He and I have an epic metal, slightly doom metal band together named Realmbuilder. We’ve been working together forever, and he’s a music PhD, and I knew he knew all the orchestral stuff, and I said, well, I can come up with some melodies, and he can orchestrate it, and we worked on it, and he came up with some melodies and I orchestrated some stuff.

I don’t want to give away any surprises in the piece, but there are certain things connected to the troglodytes that came from me knowing, as I was writing it, there was going to be very little music. I wanted it to be very, very natural , and if it’s not going to be emotional for you, I don’t want to tell you it’s emotional with a bunch of music to pout frosting on it. If it doesn’t work for you, it’d doesn’t work for you, and that’s OK.

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