Interviews

UK filmmaker Adrian Sibley profiles the late and (very) great Irish actor in 'The Ghost of Richard Harris', screening in Venice Classics. The director first met up with Harris the year before he died in 2002. “Everybody says that their film is long in gestation, and that it has taken forever. With this one, it really did,” Sibley tells Business Doc Europe.

Sergei Loznitsa discusses his new archive-based documentary about the trial, in 1946, of fifteen Nazis and their collaborators, accused of war crimes committed during WW2 in Ukraine. “On the one hand, of course, they are all criminals. The crimes they committed are absolutely terrible and inhumane. On the other hand, they are human beings. It is terrible to think they made such terrible choices in their lives that drew them to this complete degradation and destruction.”

Casa Susanna tells the intriguing and deeply moving story of a house in the Catskills region of New York that was used in the 1950s and ‘60s as a refuge for an underground network for transgender women and cross-dressing men. “The story of a clandestine community is there for all to see. With it, a fragment of queer history, stretching from the McCarthy era to the 1970s, is revealed,” explains director Lifshitz.

Screening Out of Competition in Venice, Steve James’ new documentary tells the remarkable story of the US spy Ted Hall who, in the 1940s, passed over secrets about the atomic bomb. “He did it for the right reasons. He didn’t do it because he wanted the Soviet Union to dominate the world. He did it because he was worried about what the US was capable of,” James tells Business Doc Europe.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature, premiering in Venice Classics. She talks to BDE.

Spielberg, Eastwood, Scorsese, De Niro, Tarantino…these modern-day titans of cinema all gave extensive interviews to Francesco Zippel for his new feature documentary, Sergio Leone – L’italiano che inventò l’America, screening in Venice Classics, produced by Sky Studios and Sky Italia and due to be released in Italian cinemas by 01. Director Zippel gives a fistful of comment about his new doc.

US docmaker KD Davison talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film, screening in Venice Classics, about the legendary Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-born poet who, after arriving in New York in the later 1940s with nothing, established himself as a leading filmmaker, curator, critic and guru. “Don’t go to film school. Just make films,” Mekas advised Davison early in her career.

It’s the question everyone asks. Just how did filmmakers Chris Grubb and Luke Mellows prise England’s most celebrated cricketer, Ben Stokes, out of his shell for their film Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes (produced through Whisper Films and premiering on Amazon Prime on August 26). They explain how to Business Doc Europe.

“Dùthchas” is a word in Gaelic which evokes every strong feelings. It means heredity or the place of one’s birth and it provides the title for the new, archive-based documentary premiering at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and across Scotland on August 20. Directors MacKinnon and MacDonald talk to Business Doc Europe.

Veteran Scottish filmmaker Don Coutts tells Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which first led him to start filming the “acid croft” band some time nearly three decades ago. “There was huge tension within the band but the anger made them really fantastic,” he recalls. “It really gave them an edge.” Coutts' documentary world premieres this weekend in Edinburgh’s Night Moves strand.