Filmwax Radio

Two great personal documentarians grace the podcast: Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) and Michel Negroponte (“I’m Dangerous With Love”). Long friends and colleagues, Ross and Michel come on to primarily discuss the sensitive subject matter behind Ross’ latest film, “Remake” The film begins a theatrical engagement at Film Forum in NYC on 7/10/2026. They are currently screening a 40th anniversary 4K restored print of his seminal “Sherman’s March”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Vph7D_TxY The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies — an afternoon trapping crayfish with his son Adrian, age 4; helping with homework, age 11; discussing career plans with his son, age 24. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, “Sherman’s March”, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality. Ross McElwee is a documentary filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. McElwee has made ten feature-length films. “Sherman’s March” won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the U.S Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.” Bright Leaves premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. McElwee’s In Paraguay premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere Photographic Memory. McElwee has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts and production grants from the LEF foundation. McElwee received the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s Career Award in 2007 and the Pennebaker Award for his career in 2023. In 2024, the French Ministry of Culture awarded McElwee the rank of Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres. McElwee was Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard beginning in 2003 until his retirement in 2024. He is now a Research Professor, Emeritus in the AFVS Department. About Michel Negroponte Michel Negroponte is an award winning filmmaker who has been making feature length documentaries for more than 30 years. He was born and raised in New York City, and studied filmmaking with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. In addition to making his own films, he has freelanced on countless films for HBO, PBS, the BBC, and Channel Four. He has also worked with independent filmmakers like Ross McElwee, Doug Block, Lisa Crafts, D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Christine Choy, Dick Rogers, John Marshall and Al Maysles. His films include SPACE COAST (1979), RESIDENT EXILE (1981), SILVER VALLEY (1984), JUPITER’S WIFE (1994), NO ACCIDENT (1996), W.I.S.O.R. (2000), METHADONIA (2005) and I’M DANGEROUS WITH LOVE (2009). JUPITER’S WIFE, a portrait of a beguiling homeless woman named Maggie, won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the prize for Best Feature Documentary at the Vancouver and the Santa Barbara Film Festivals. The film was also awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Documentary. Originally shot on small format video, it premiered on HBO/Cinemax before getting a nationwide 35mm theatrical release. Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle called it one of the ten best films of the year. John Koch of the Boston Globe wrote, “Negroponte has a painter’s eye and a novelist’s reach; and if there is anything more engaging and satisfying than “Jupiter’s Wife” on television or at the movies these days, by all means tell me about it.” Negroponte’s films have been broadcast in the United States on PBS, HBO, and the Sundance Channel as well as in England, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, The New York Film Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and in festivals in Berlin, Rotterdam, Vancouver, and Japan. Negroponte has also taught in the graduate and undergraduate film programs at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Temple University. Recently, he helped create a new graduate program in documentary filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, which opened in September, 2009. He is part of the faculty there as well.

My guests are documentary filmmaker Robert Stone and NASA Scientist and Science Fiction author Gentry Lee. Lee is the central subject of Stone’s new documentary “Starman” which is in theaters as of Friday, February 6. In this intergalactic biopic, we follow Gentry Lee, Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sci-fi writer, on his journey to space and on Earth. From the Viking and Voyager missions to co-authoring the actual future with Arthur C. Clarke, Lee’s life has been spent with his head in the stars and his feet on the ground. In this visually stunning documentary, the octogenarian Starman reflects on decades of space exploration alongside friends like Carl Sagan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYjTbGLgyhk&t=5s

The filmmaker Dan Mirvish (“18 1/2”, “Bernard & Huey”) is back on Filmwax to discuss his latest project, “Atomic Fondue”. He has launched a Kickstarter campaign which is currently raising initial funds to get the film off the ground and to begin spreading the word. An elevated Cold War thriller/comedy, https://youtu.be/JiDjZ0GjmI4?si=hs4QqgBOSl3538WO “Atomic Fondue” is an upcoming American independent fiction feature film from me – award-winning filmmaker Dan Mirvish – and my amazing team of experienced collaborators. It’s going to be a fun, thrilling, sexy movie that we’re going to film next summer, and we’re excited to have you join the team and get involved!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxMerqB0nrs Palestinian American actor and filmmaker Cherien Debis (“Amreka”, “May in the Summer”) returns to the podcast with her latest film, “All That’s Left of You” which is currently in theaters. A deeply moving, multigenerational drama, “All That’s Left of You” follows a Palestinian teenager who gets swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank and experiences a moment of violence that rocks his family. The film unfolds as his mother recounts the political and emotional threads that led to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, the film traces the hopes and heartaches of one uprooted family, bearing witness to the scars of dispossession and the enduring legacy of survival. Jordan’s Official Selection for the 98th Academy Awards. Cherien’s prior visit to Filmwax Radio in August of 2022.

Returning to the podcast after seven years, the filmmaker Gus Van Sant (“Drug Store Cowboy”, Good Will Hunting”) with a new film called “Dead Man’s Wire”. Based on a true story, the 1977 kidnapping of a prominent banker grips the nation and turns the abductor into an outlaw folk hero. As the media frenzy peaks, the standoff becomes a spectacle of desperation, defiance and blurred justice, which resonates even today. The film stars Bill Skarsgård in the main role as Tony Kiritsis, alongside an ensemble cast that includes Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Myha’la, Colman Domingo, and Al Pacino. “Dead Man’s Wire” opens Friday, January 9th in select theaters and then goes wide nationally on Friday, January 16th. https://youtu.be/42O-lJfP5Lw

The filmmaker Amos Poe was a guest on the podcast on two memorable occasions. The first time we sat was in a podcast studio in the East Village; Episode 385 in the Fall of 2016. For Amos’ second appearance, we sat in the downstairs lobby of the Roxy Hotel in Tribeca outside the screening room; that was Episode 520 in the Fall of 2018. Poe was a major influence in the underground filmmaking scene of Downtown NYC —aka the No Wave movement— beginning in the mid-1970’s. Of that community, which included folks like Jim Jarmusch, Bette Gordon and Eric Mitchell among others, Poe was often credited as being the first to pick up a camera. He would go on to make such films as “The Blank Generation” and “Unmade Beds”. I had heard he was ill for the past bunch of years and had reached out to him about returning, but he understandably had more important things to do with his time. He passed away on Christmas Day after a prolonged battle with cancer and is survived by his wife Claudia Summers and daughter Lisa Poe.