To celebrate the life of Larry Cohen (1936-2019), Film International will excerpt portions of Tony Williams’s interviews with the filmmaker from Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker, rev ed. (© 2015 Tony Williams by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com). Larry Cohen (LC): With a little bit […]
Control and Improvisation: An Interview with Mohammad Shirvani
Ali Moosavi
May 12, 2026
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By Ali Moosavi. I design the concepts and then within those concepts I leave the actors free…. As Béla Tarr has said, with interesting people and interesting locations you can make a good movie. I like to frame interesting people.” —Mohammad Shirvani At the 2008 Abu Dhabi Film Festival I watched […]
Be Like Water: Writer-Director the RZA on One Spoon of Chocolate
By Jonathan Monovich. Some paths are rocky, some paths are uphill, and some are downhill. Unique’s path is hopefully what makes this film special.” – The RZA To the RZA, the Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan, “hip-hop is moviemaking.”1 This should come as no surprise. The iconic first Wu-Tang Clan album, […]
Esther C.M. Yau and Tony Williams on Hong Kong Neo-Noir (from 2017)
The FilmInt community is saddened to learn of the passing of former contributing editor Tony Williams (at age 80), a groundbreaking film historian and critic. In addition to his work on the horror film and other genres, Tony had varied interests, as seen in this interview (conducted by editor Matthew […]
The First Movie Studio in Texas: Gaston Méliès’s Star Film Ranch – Kathryn Fuller-Seeley on Collaborating with Frank Thompson
By Gary D. Rhodes. Gaston was well aware of the rising popularity of narrative films in the US and Europe, as he’d become friendly with other prominent film producers, especially those at Vitagraph. He saw that sales of his brother’s fantasy films were falling sharply. Given a license by Edison’s […]
A Small Town with a Big Problem: Bob Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad on Normal
By Jonathan Monovich. When I think about movies that are in theaters, to a great extent…. They’re only aiming for the whole family’s satisfaction. They’re only aiming for spectacle from the beginning to the end. But, there’s something about Normal that makes you want to say, ‘Well, it’s a movie. […]
“Between Algeria and France There’s Still a Wound”: François Ozon on Adapting Camus’s The Stranger
By Alex Ramon. That’s why it’s a masterpiece – it escapes one interpretation. So I decided to accept the fact that this is my interpretation of the novel and hoped that it would touch other people too. Compared to other adaptations I’ve made of more ‘minor’ or lesser known works, […]
Reclaiming Cinema History: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on 1000 Women in Horror (Shudder)
By Ellie Dean. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and […]
Global Migration through State Corruption: Nathaniel Lezra on Roads of Fire
By M. Sellers Johnson. What I’m hoping to do with this documentary is present a relatively coherent blueprint for what other people go through. The first step to any sort of material change is how we see and talk to each other. To reminds us, that we are all human […]
Power of Solitude: Chen Deming on Always (Cong Lai)
By Yun-hua Chen. The film records the solitude of childhood and shows the power of poetry within that solitude.” Black and white, left-behind children, rural China – Director Chen Deming, in Always, uses a familiar formula to bring out a unique layer of poetry and coming-of-age. The Chinese title, Cong […]