Hannah Fidell is a writer, producer, and director. Her feature films include A Teacher (2013 Sundance Film Festival) and 6 Years (2015 SXSW Film Festival). In 2016, Fidell was inducted into the Director’s Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The Long Dumb Road, her third feature and her first comedy, stars Tony Revolori and Jason Mantzoukas and premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival; it is being released theatrically in November.
The latest episode of the Talkhouse Podcast is a conversation recorded at Sundance 2018 between directors Josephine Decker and Hannah Fidell, who were at the festival with, respectively, Madeline’s Madeline and The Long Dumb Road. The fact that Decker’s and Fidell’s movies are so radically different – the former is an intense, female-centric drama about a young woman of color with mental health problems, the latter a fun, masculine road-movie comedy – is a focus of their discussion, but they also find points of connection in the incredible care they took in telling the stories of people of color — and also the remarkably creative storytelling games they played in their youth. Their talk also touches on their upcoming TV projects, how failure and success feel remarkably similar, silencing exercises, clown breakdowns, and much, much more. Madeline’s Madeline is in select theaters from August 10 through Oscilloscope, and The Long Dumb Road is forthcoming in November through Universal. For more filmmakers talking film and TV, visit Talkhouse at talkhouse.com/film. Subscribe now to stay in the loop on future episodes of the Talkhouse Podcast.
The music featured in the podcast is as follows:
1. Intro / outro underscore: “Plastic Man vs. the Giant Red Phase of the Sun” – Iced Ink
Episode engineered by Nick Dawson and co-produced by Mark Yoshizumi. The Talkhouse Podcast’s producer is Elia Einhorn.
