Get the scoop on filmmakers presenting work at SXSW Film! Today's Filmmakers in Focus presents three innovators in our Visions category.
Click on a title below to read the conversation, and head to the film schedule now to start assembling your plan for SXSW Film.
Interested in reading more? Head to this page for a list of all the interviews to date!
- Sophie Huber on Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
- Penny Lane on Our Nixon
- Zach Clark on White Reindeer
Sophie Huber on Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
Image courtesy the filmmakers
Tell us a little about your film.
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction is an homage to the man, the actor, and the extraordinary singer and musician. Putting the focus on the music rather than his person helped to engage him and capture a part of him that few people have seen. We wanted to create an atmosphere that is true to Harry, moving along with him, in his mind, at his pace, rather than to follow a linear or biographical order.
Why did you start making films? 
Sophie Huber, courtesy
Harry Dean Stanton:
Partly Fiction
Originally I studied acting. With a group of other actors we formed a film collective in Berlin where we all were involved in every aspect of making a film and that’s how I started. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction is the first film that I have directed on my own.
Have you been to SXSW before? What are you most looking forward to?
No. I hear great things about SXSW and Austin and I am looking forward to experience both!
- Add Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction to your schedule here
- Click here to read all Filmmakers in Focus interviews to date
Penny Lane on Our Nixon
Image courtesy Our NixonTell us a little about your film.
Our Nixon is an all-archival doc featuring the Super 8 home movies of three of Richard Nixon’s closest White House aides (and fellow Watergate conspirators), as well as a whole lot of other rarely or never before seen archival footage and sound. It’s a humanistic, humorous and complicated portrait of the Nixon administration from a whole new angle, and also a kind of statement about history and point of view.
Why did you start making films? 
Penny Lane,
courtesy Our Nixon
When I was an undergraduate, I was an American Studies major with a special interest in film. But I never made any films until a little later, when I was working at a youth media center teaching “media literacy” to kids by helping them make their own movies. Watching these little kids making movies, I thought it looked like a lot more fun than teaching media literacy.
Tell us a random fact (or two!) that would help our attendees get a better idea of who you are.
I am a documentary filmmaker who hasn’t actually filmed anything in like four years. I like to scavenge images more than I like to create images. I like editing about a million times more than I like shooting. I felt bad about that for a long time but now I think that’s pretty cool.
Zach Clark on White Reindeer
White Reindeer, courtesy Daryl Pittman
- White Reindeer is a sad Christmas sex comedy. It’s about a real estate agent named Suzanne who suddenly loses her husband, discovers he was having an affair and spends the rest of December trying, with varying degrees of success, to come to terms with that. It’s my love letter to the season of giving.
Why did you start making films?
Zach Clark, courtesy
Daryl Pittman
- I like telling stories visually and film is the best medium to accomplish that. There aren’t a lot of movies out there now like the ones I make, so the opportunity to create original work is really exciting. And they’re fun - you get to write scenes and pick out costumes and find locations and come up with cool lighting and camera moves and things like that. I saw Alejandro Jodorowsky do a Q&A once and he said that he uses artificial images to access real emotions. I can’t think of a better explanation of the power of film.
Have you been to SXSW before? Any tips?
This will be my fourth year at SXSW. My first was 2006, as the editor of Dance Party USA. Then back in 2009 with my first feature Modern Love is Automatic. I was on a panel one year. My advice is to make friends and see as many movies as possible. Seriously, as many as possible.
Tell us a random fact (or two!) that would help our attendees get a better idea of who you are.
Douglas Sirk was my guardian angel on White Reindeer, but my all time favorite filmmakers are Russ Meyer and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You can find my movies somewhere in the middle of those guys.
