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Miranda July
"I don't think the whole poop thing is really grabbing people."

Michel Gondry
"I simply take an idea and keep pushing it to an extreme."

Michel Gondry's clear-cut motto has spawned an astounding body of work that includes some of the best music videos ever made and now two feature films, each of which folds in the director's often humorous and uncanny effects to create touchingly human stories...

Over the last four or five years, Mike Mills has been working – slowly and steadily – on a feature film, an adaptation of Walter Kirn's coming-of-age novel Thumbsucker, which follows the travails of 17-year-old Justin Cobb and his family as the hapless boy tries half-heartedly to fix his oral obsession by replacing it with a host of amusing alternatives, including Ritalin...

Jeremy Blake

"The wires are crossed in my mind," says Jeremy Blake, chuckling as he explains that, when he paints, he's thinking about movies, but when he makes his movies, he's thinking about painting...

Lars von Trier

He's been dubbed "the most controversial filmmaker on the planet"”by the New York Times, and he blithely cites the troubling triumvirate of the Marquis de Sade, Carl Dreyer and Douglas Sirk as key influences. And while journalists have touted his nervous quirks and phobias, few have inquired about his writing habits. Piqued by the fact that Breaking the Waves has the dubious distinction of being called a perfect screenplay by a computer, we called Von Trier to ask talk screenwriting...

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Douglas Sirk – filtered through a female Finnish lens – the celebrated film artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila often finds her subject matter in the twisted and tortured perplexities of domestic despair...

Bill Viola

Driving through the desolate, industrial enclave of Signal Hill just outside of Long Beach, a city ringed by refineries belching smoke and flames and dotted by gray oil derricks pumping lazily in the distance, you'd hardly expect to stumble on the studio of prestigious video artist Bill Viola. But here, on a small side street, in a long, garage-like complex, you do indeed find the artist, along with his small team of assistants...

Shirin Neshat

"Somebody asked me recently, 'Why does your work always have to be about Iran? Why don't you make work about America?'" video artist Shirin Neshat recalls. After much consideration, Neshat decided that it was simple: because her biggest personal dilemma centers on being part of a group but living in exile, ideas about roots, of belonging, "of finding a little place for myself," all became central...