The best exam­ples of direc­tors grilling directors

This morn­ing, the Direc­tors Guild of Amer­i­ca released a select­ed excerpt from the upcom­ing issue of their offi­cial mag­a­zine, an inter­view between film­mak­ers Quentin Taran­ti­no and Mar­tin Scors­ese. As two peo­ple well-known for their gifts of gab and ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of all things cin­e­ma, of course their back-and-forth made for an engross­ing read, full of insights and tan­gents and ref­er­ences to films so deep-cuts that they haven’t even amassed a cult following.

While the celebri­ty inter­view has recent­ly grown into some­thing of a scourge of the jour­nal­ism world, this tête-à-tête illus­trates the upsides of putting two world-class pro­fes­sion­als in a room with one anoth­er. Far from the bud­dy-bud­dy tone of inter­views between A‑lister friends, they talk shop with the speci­fici­ty, breadth of knowl­edge, and artic­u­late author­i­ty of old mas­ters. In the inter­est of explor­ing this par­tic­u­lar dynam­ic, we’ve round­ed up some of our favorite direc­tor-to-direc­tor gab ses­sions, span­ning page and screen.

The French New Wave leg­end Fran­cois Truf­faut filled an entire book with tran­scripts of his con­ver­sa­tions with the great Alfred Hitch­cock, dis­cur­sive chats about the very build­ing blocks of cin­e­ma and the infi­nite com­bi­na­tions in which they can be put to work. Their med­i­ta­tions on the medi­um proved so chock­ablock with wis­dom that ser­vant of the mov­ing image Kent Jones adapt­ed it all into a 2015 doc­u­men­tary about the tome and the extra­or­di­nary process of its pro­duc­tion. (Fans include Paul Schrad­er, David Finch­er, and Wes Ander­son, to name only a few.)

That same year, cinephiles extra­or­di­naire Noah Baum­bach and Jake Pal­trow (yes, of those Pal­trows) assem­bled this fea­ture-length trib­ute to one of the lumi­nar­ies of New Hol­ly­wood. The mind behind such clas­sics as Blow Out, Scar­face, Phan­tom of the Par­adise, and many more walks through his fil­mog­ra­phy with no detail spared, look­ing back on a career that shaped the indus­try as much as he was shaped by it. Baum­bach and Pal­trow get the most pen­e­trat­ing sound­bites by know­ing to ask the right ques­tions; with inter­views, like meat grinders, you get out of it what you put into it.

A more recent exam­ple came in the revived Fan­go­ria Mag­a­zine, which has made an unof­fi­cial tra­di­tion of send­ing their last inter­view sub­ject to con­duct the next one. The chain start­ed with Paul Thomas Ander­son and Jor­dan Peele, chop­ping it up about their then-recent releas­es Phan­tom Thread and Us, respec­tive­ly. (Peele then hit up Ari Aster to talk Mid­som­mar, and Aster reached out to Robert Eggers to dis­cuss The Light­house.) They’re both a lit­tle more effu­sive than ana­lyt­ic, but we still get the price­less gem of Ander­son geek­ing out over lit­tle-seen indie-hor­ror anthol­o­gy Southbound.

The French tele­vi­sion series Cin­e­ma of Our Time was made up of pro­files inspect­ing our great film­mak­ers, every­one from Hou Hsiao-Hsien (by Olivi­er Assayas) to John Cas­savetes (by André S Labarthe). When Chan­tal Aker­man​‘s turn came, how­ev­er, she decid­ed to go a dif­fer­ent route and inter­view her­self. The resul­tant film is brac­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal, a mov­ing self-por­trait in a state of sus­pend­ed auto-inter­ro­ga­tion. From an artist who spent her entire life chal­leng­ing every pre-con­ceived assump­tion about the form and her place in it, we wouldn’t have expect­ed any­thing less.