The Best Director Interviews About Their New Movies
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2023 was an amazing year for movies, and the competitive awards season following it is evidence of that. Whether you most loved the colorful world of Barbieland, the courtroom drama of Anatomy of a Fall, or the surreal trappings of Poor Things, there was something for pretty much everyone to watch and enjoy.
While most press is aimed at the cast when a movie is out in the world, it’s great to see a director reflect on their process after making something as huge as a movie. From awards season heavy-hitters to some of the hottest recent releases, here are fascinating media interviews from some of the directors of the best new movies.
Keep Reading: The 2024 Oscar Nominations in All the Major Categories
Greta Gerwig on Barbie
Greta Gerwig spoke freely about the stresses of helming such a huge Warner Bros. production on 60 Minutes. “You might as well take those big swings. I mean, literally the worst thing that can happen is it’s terrible, nobody likes it, and it bankrupts the studio,” Gerwig said through chuckles. The interview looked back on her career as Gerwig explained some of her favorite directing tricks to make Barbie pop visually as much as it did. She aimed to make the look of the movie, “authentically artificial, really fake. It’s about kids, it’s about playing with toys. The language of play has to be part of it.” She also revealed that the “I’m Just Ken” dance sequence was filmed in just one day.
Celine Song on Past Lives
In an excellent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Celine Song spoke about creating and sharing a story that was inspired by her own life experience. “Through Past Lives, I was trying to describe as accurately as I could what it’s like, for me, to be a person,” Song shared in this great conversation. “Then the audience showed up and said, ‘This really reflected the way that I’m a person. I feel like a person the way you feel like a person.’ Sometimes, that just makes you feel less lonely, you know?” The interview also featured Adele Lim, the co-writer and director of the excellent Joy Ride.
Justine Triet on Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet, a 2024 Best Director Oscar nominee, had a great chat with ELLE about her blistering courtroom drama. Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and secured five Oscar nominations. This film doesn’t tie up as cleanly as an episode of Law & Order, and Triet said she likes writing morally ambiguous stories “precisely because I’m not a judge. Because it isn’t my job to clean up a moral situation. I don’t think I [can] make an edifying film. And so finding spaces of nuance is what my cinema is about.”
Martin Scorsese on Killers of the Flower Moon
Another 2024 Best Director Oscar nominee, Martin Scorsese has a long and incredible career to look back on. Killers of the Flower Moon, his latest film, was yet another titanic achievement by the director. One reflective moment from this GQ profile had Scorsese looking back on his childhood, which was riddled with tough bouts of asthma. “Watching films came out of a necessity from the illness of asthma,” Scorsese said. “And it came out of a loneliness, which I still have, which had to do with my father and my mother. And they couldn’t do anything with me. So they took me to the movies.”
Christopher Nolan on Oppenheimer
For Time, Christopher Nolan spoke about the process of adapting the Pulitzer-winning biography American Prometheus into his epic story of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and the creation of the atomic bomb. When talking about a scene that was disputed for historical authenticity, Nolan said, “I feel we’re not making a documentary. You can’t hide behind authenticity; you have to make an interpretation—that’s the job.” However, the Best Director nominee at the 2024 Academy Awards also insisted that the disputed scene, which involved Oppenheimer poisoning a professor’s apple while a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was true.
Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. on Mean Girls
The duo behind the movie musical adaptation of Mean Girls talked with Town & Country about collaborating with Tina Fey and learning about the modern high school environment by interviewing students at Arturo Perez Jr.’s old high school. Due to the new strains of social media making everything more public, “It boggles my mind how anybody is strong enough to get through high school these days,” Samantha Jayne said. Perez said Fey welcomed them into the world she created and let them freely pitch new ideas. “There was never an idea that we had that she didn’t listen to. Anybody’s idea, it’s game.”
Jonathan Glazer on The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s arresting Holocaust drama takes place from the perspective of the perpetrators, with Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his family living in a luxurious estate next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. “What they had hoped for themselves and their petty bourgeois dreams—they’re not that different from ours at all,” Glazer told The Los Angeles Times while reflecting on writing these characters as a contrast to traditional Hollywood Nazis that are usually more cliché villains. Glazer is also nominated for Best Director at this year’s Oscars.
Takashi Yamakazi on Godzilla Minus One
Takashi Yamakazi and the whole team behind Godzilla Minus One crafted a thrilling creature feature that is also an equally human drama about PTSD and banding together after the devastation of World War II. He did a great interview with The Verge where he shared insights on the iconic character. “I wanted Godzilla to feel like the physical embodiment of a kind of negative energy tied to people’s fears, worries, and disillusionment,” Yamakazi reflected. “Minus One is about putting a name and face to something scary and inviting the audience to calm that negative presence through the shared experience of watching the film.”
Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos has created another singular work with Poor Things, his third collaboration with Emma Stone. He talked with the British Film Institute about adapting the Alasdair Gray novel. Even if his films look meticulously detailed, Lanthimos fosters a positive environment on set. “When we’re rehearsing I try to make it light. We’re just making films, and we should enjoy it, be creative, have a good time,” the 2024 Best Director nominee said. He also reflected on the movie’s unique setting and design when he noted, “We created this world which was period, but also non-period, with futuristic elements, but that doesn’t stop you from being contemporary.”
Cord Jefferson on American Fiction
Cord Jefferson had a chat with Esquire about his sharp new satire that earned five Academy Award nominations. Along with some great observations about how he related this film to his past as a journalist and TV writer, Jefferson’s thoughts on preserving small character scenes showed why the film picked up a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination. “The problem with movies is that we have only two hours, so you can’t have these tangents where you start exploring people’s lives. But to me, it was very important that we not forget these characters and that we make them people who feel lived-in and real,” Jefferson said.
Bradley Cooper on Maestro
Bradley Cooper spoke with Emma Stone for one of the Variety “Actors on Actors” series and shared the long six-year process of getting his movie about composer Leonard Bernstein made. When Stone asked where he got a fascination with conducting, Cooper responded, “Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny. I asked Santa Claus for a baton when I was around 8 years old, and then I would just conduct all the time because there was classical music playing in my house.”
Todd Haynes on May December
Todd Haynes revealed a lot of fascinating thoughts in a Deadline interview about his latest movie May December, a drama about an actor visiting a woman married to a man who was 13 years old when they began their relationship. “The thing that excited me is that I felt like it presented problems and challenges that I hadn’t undertaken before,” Haynes said. “It was very much specific to its own time and place. In this way, it was distinct from other films of mine about female characters.”
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