Lisa Williams talks to Garin Nugroho, director of Opera Jawa, who tells her how he coped with the making of a film that includes no less than 60 songs, 70 dance routines and seven art installations.
Interview by Lisa Williams

Following 2003’s acclaimed Tarnation, in which American filmmaker Jonathan Caouette turned the home-movies of his formative years into an introspective psychological examination of his life, a British director has now collated and edited her family’s history into an engaging tale of a bifurcated family separated by land and culture. Alex Fitch caught up with I for India director Sandhya Suri at the ICA in London and asked her about her project to turn decades of transcontinental communication between her émigré father and his family in India into her first documentary feature.
Interview by Alex Fitch

An engaging, articulate and very funny thirty-four-year-old with a boyish crew-cut, John Maringouin, the director of Running Stumbled, a twisted documentary about his troubled family, told Electric Sheep about the paradoxes of truth and reality, reminisced about his childhood hero Evil Knievel and explained why his film is really a stunt.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Mention the words ‘road movie’ and most people will think of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding down the highway to the tune of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’. Easy Rider may remain the daddy of road movies but there is more to the genre than this, as the newly published 100 Road Movies amply demonstrates. We met up with author Jason Wood, a man whose knowledge of cinema is as phenomenal as his enthusiasm and rapid-fire delivery, to talk about his book.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

‘Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker’. That’s how Melvin Van Peebles, the legendary maverick whose revolutionary 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song sparked Hollywood’s blaxploitation fever, describes himself. His actor and director son, sat next to him, exuding the same effortless cool, does not disagree, in spite of all the respect and esteem he evidently has for him. It is in this spirit, enthusiastic but truthful, full of admiration but critical, that Mario Van Peebles made Baadasssss, a vibrant, exhilarating docu-drama recounting his father’s struggle to get Sweetback made. In an interview conducted in 2005 father and son told Virginie Sélavy how, thirty years on, nothing much has changed in Hollywood.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Based on the memoirs of former FLN (National Liberation Front) leader Saadi Yacef, The Battle of Algiers charts the rise of the Algerian nationalist movement from 1954 until independence was declared in 1962. Now 79, Yaacef, who produced and starred in the film, is a senator in the Algerian National Assembly. When he evokes his violent activities as a guerrilla fighter, it is clear that he is acutely and painfully aware of what he did, and that this awareness has not been blunted by time. Warm, soft-spoken and extremely articulate, Yacef comes across as a passionate humanist who was led to commit violent acts from which he would have recoiled in any other circumstances.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

The Night of the Sunflowers was met with resounding acclaim in Spain and Sánchez-Cabezudo suddenly found himself the toast of this year’s Goya Awards, being nominated for best screenplay alongside such luminaries of Spanish-language cinema as Pedro Almódovar and Guillermo del Toro. In the interview below he talks at length about serial killer films and the disappearance of rural Spain and he also explains why the last scene of The Night of the Sunflowers is not an homage to Luis Buñuel.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

At 78, Jodorowsky bristles with youthful energy and playful humour. A wonderful storyteller, he regaled us with fantastic stories drawn from his colourful life as a filmmaker, comic book writer, Tarot reader and practitioner of psicomagia, swearing on his five cats that it was all true. Earlier that day Virginie Sélavy caught up with him and quizzed him about eerie sound effects, Sam Peckinpah and the ‘Conquest of Mexico’.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Where animators extraordinaire the Brothers Quay talk about dream states, Cameroonian ants, Argentine literature and the frustrations that come from being under pressure to make a more accessible film.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

On January 3rd, 1984, members of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten joined forces with musicians such as Genesis P. Orridge and Frank ‘Fad Gadget’ Tovey to perform a one-off piece entitled ‘Concerto for Voice and Machinery’ at the ICA. The gig, involving pneumatic drills and chainsaws, was chaotic even by Neubauten standards, culminating when someone threw bottles into a cement mixer, which sent broken glass flying all around the room.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy