Junkie Films

Alex Cox is a longtime filmmaker with a deserved cult fanbase thanks to REPO MAN, SID & NANCY, STRAIGHT TO HELL and WALKER, and has continued to make low budget films ever since, including his 1991 film EL PATRULLERO (HIGHWAY PATROLMAN), currently in re-release in theaters.

Stan Brakhage and Godfrey Reggio Talk to High School Students: I found an old cassette tape of an interview I made for the print issue Cinemad #2. Avant masters Stan Brakhage and Godfrey Reggio met for the first time at the Telluride Film Festival in 1999 while speaking with high school students attending the fest. I was working there as a projectionist and asked Brakhage for an interview, he suggested I sit in and record this. I turned it into an article but its more interesting as a rediscovered time capsule. Brakhage showed three brand new hand-painted shorts (part of his Persian Series) and Reggio had some of his film clips show with a Phillip Glass tribute. Both were yearly attendees with regular fans, but the kids did not know their work - making for an even better discussion, exploring what their films are and their thoughts on the world at large. The sound quality is ok but raw from the cassette. If you are a static addict, this will sound beautiful. The students asked the questions. Reggio's voice is lower. Stan's is higher pitched and he speaks first.

To learn more about films about English Professors, I interviewed my friend Sean who is a college English Professor. Originally from Florida, now teaching in the middle of California, he skates, surfs, writes poetry and books, runs the indie Gorsky Press, and is a Thomas Pynchon scholar. We talk about the English Professor character in movies, real life awkward interactions, when and why books make good films, and get to hear some great secrets about professors that could make better films. Sean also reminds me about the power of movies on the public and political views, and how films might be harming our view of higher education.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is incredibly modest. From his first feature Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) to the popular Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), his films and installations play around the world in art houses and museums with huge critical praise, he’s won the big film festivals, become a darling of the art world too. But his surreal style feels honest and convincing….if you talk with Apichatpong he’s a huge movie fan that notices the magic of the world surrounding him.

Longtime artist and filmmaker Jennifer Reeder is originally from Ohio and puts much of that midwest town essence into her characters and themes in art, installations and films. Now living and working in Chicago for decades, two of her most recent shorts take nuanced looks into teen life that are very stylized but have an incredible honest feel anyway. The two are playing film festivals everywhere - A MILLION MILES AWAY won awards at Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground and Oberhausen and just played at Sundance. Her newer short BLOOD BELOW THE SKIN just premiered at Berlin.Reeder also just received a Creative Capital grant for a feature script called AS WITH KNIVES AND SKIN. Another thing Reeder has is amazing film titles.

My friends C and S, who used to be daily addicts, talk about films. For the drug-film genre, heroin movies often try to be the most realistic, whether glorifying or damning. C&S talk about what their day-to-day drug life was like, what they think of the films and characters, AIDS scares, art, needles and Alf. Its a surprise which one captures the lifestyle the best.

Calvin Lee Reeder has been kicking around the avant gutter for a long time now. His 16mm shorts weirded out audiences at film festivals and then two feature films did - THE OREGONIAN and THE RAMBLER. His layers of vivid color and texture in the film's images and constructed soundtrack pumps electricity into the genre characters and plots they inhabit. We work those ideas out, talk about losing confidence, a thing named Jerkbeast, and his day jobs and bands along the way.

This is a quick podcast, highlights from a panel discussion I led at the Off Camera Film Festival in Krakow in 2009, where Anna Karina was showing a selection of her films she made with Godard and a few films she directed. If you don't know her, she made some of the best films of the 1960s with Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo and other great French cinema icons. The films not only hold up today as fresh and inspirational with old school genre stories (love, crime, life) reinvigorated with an exciting, unexpected style. But you realize how much of modern independent cinema has learned/borrowed/stolen from the group, particularly the power of Anna onscreen.

Name a film. Immediately and from memory, Chris will tell you what date it was released and Chad will tell you what the box office was. How would two guys go from being obsessed with Hollywood so much that they know marketing statistics to being entrenched in the independent film world. One going from big budget movie numbers to making a soft-spoken, character-driven Sundance award-winning feature, the other writing for a smart, esoteric Adult Swim show.

Jem Cohen has been making films since the 1980s, from legendary short shorts ("This Is A History of New York") and mystical longer shorts ("Lost Book Found") to inspiring features ("Benjamin: Smoke" co-directed with Peter Sillen, and "Fugazi: Instrument"). He captures people in such a way that you feel an innocence that movie cameras used to capture 100 years ago. We talk about his latest feature "Museum Hours," new projects, his friendship with Chris Marker, motivations behind filmmaking and how American audiences are still surprising and strong. Jem is philosophical, often working alone with a camera on a street corner - but he is also a fun-loving humorous guy.