T Magazine has profiled seven directors it’s deemed “the auteurs changing cinema,” all of whom released new films this year. They include: Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Jeff Nichols (Loving), Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Andrea Arnold (American Honey), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By the Sea), Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals), and Mike Mills (20th Century Women). Most of them (except Chazelle, Arnold, and Lonergan) participated in accompanying video footage, each one discussing a particular scene.
Jenkins’ Moonlight is full of long, emotionally wrenching scenes that will leave you recalling them for days, but in the video footage, he discusses a scene you might not remember, unless you were paying close attention; his description of the filming choices here show that even the smaller moments of the movie were meticulously constructed to teem with social specificity:
Meanwhile, Jeff Nichols — whose film, Loving, is about the Lovings’ relationship, and their pivotal fight against anti-miscegenation laws — talks about the attempt to capture “the representation of a feeling.” He describes the scene where “Richard [Loving, played by Joel Edgerton] comes home drunk from the bar and sits at the end of the bed with his wife [Mildred, played by Ruth Negga] and just repeats over and over again, ‘I can take care of you, I can take care of you.'” He says it’s important because “everyone in the audience — and Mildred I believe — knows that’s not true. It just punches you in the gut emotionally.”
Tom Ford discusses Nocturnal Animals’ horrifying visualization of part of the violent book his main character, played by Amy Adams, has been sent by her ex-husband.