FILMMAKER INTERVIEW

Joe Lauro, director of Fats Domino and The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, details the challenges of making a film about a living legend and a very private man. One hurdle was finding archival footage of Fats Domino's performances (which he did, in France). Lauro ...

Jon Brewer, the director/producer of B.B. King: The Life of Riley, describes how the first documentary on the blues legend came to be, his experience of filming B.B., and how his own background in the music business helps his film work.

See behind-the-scenes footage of producer Julian Schlossberg interviewing director Mike Nichols. The interview became an important part of the film Mike Nichols: An American Master. Schlossberg is a film producer, radio talk show host and representative of the Nichols and May archive.

Photographer-filmmaker Timothy Greenfield Sanders uses a large format Deardorff camera and shoots just six to eight frames for his portraits. For the women in The Women's List, he has created 15 portraits that are distinct, but also flow together. The portrait sitting and filmed interviews ...

A photograph of his mother standing next to Althea Gibson, and his mother's pride at having played once against the tennis champion, are the origins of Rex Miller's interest in Gibson. Gibson's tennis achievements initially drew Miller to tell her story, but he was also ...

Raymond Telles and Yvan Iturriaga are co-directors and co-producers of American Masters — Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey. The filmmakers conducted an original interview with Guerrero in 2010 and used that as "the spine for telling his story," says Telles. Although they filmed on ...

In this filmmaker interview, Ric Burns describes what camera techniques he used to capture the ephemeral nature of dance on film, as well as how he came to discover ballet through the process of filmmaking. The documentary American Ballet Theatre: A History premiered on American ...

Emmy- and Peabody-winning filmmaker Peter Rosen describes his three key assets for making the documentary Jascha Heifetz: God's Fiddler: the home movies by Heifetz that Rosen discovered; a set provided by Heifetz's reconstructed music studio; and the person of musician Ayke Agus, Heifetz's student, accompanist ...

Filmmaker Sam Pollard's latest documentary for American Masters is August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand. In this interview Pollard speaks about August Wilson's relevance, interviewing actors, surprises and more. "[Wilson] stands head and shoulders with Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller," says ...

Filmmaker Molly Bernstein describes her astonishment the first time she saw Ricky Jay perform. It led her to learn more about sleight-of-hand and the history of magic. She and her partner eventually earned Jay's trust and began the documentary film that was more than a ...