Matt Stawski (Blue's Big City Adventure)

11/18/22 • 26 min

Matt Stawski grew up a Detroit punk fan, shooting his friends' bands with equipment from a local TV and radio station. So of course he was the ideal person to direct Blue's Big City Adventure, the new Blue's Clues movie.

It's actually not as weird as it sounds. Blue's Big City Adventure is packed with light, color, and music. And Stawski found his way to it after directing videos for bands like Anti-Flag, which led to jobs directing videos for Fall Out Boy, Snoop Dogg, and CeeLo Green — including the latter's giddily colorful 2010 video for "Forget You."

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Sylvia Caminer (Follow Her)

Follow Her director Sylvia Caminer knows all the potential pitfalls of making a psychosexual thriller: cheesy sex scenes, falling into tropes, and at worst, actors who feel exploited. She avoids them all in Follow Her, a film written by and starring Dani Barker, a former influencer herself whose script skillfully subverts cliche in favor of a meta exploration of the genre.

In this episode, Caminer — a documentarian and producer as well as a first-time feature director — also talks about social media cautionary tales, stealing shots in NYC, and going on the road with Rick Springfield.

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Next Episode

Nick Richey (1-800-HOT-NITE)

Nick Richey, director of 1-800-HOT-NITE, is as cooly understated as he is full of surprises. The new film is about a teenager in trouble (Cobra Kai star Dallas Dupree Young) who gets surprisingly good advice from a phone sex operator (Aly Richey) on a wild night with his friends.

The film is inspired by Richey's own tumultuous early years, growing up on the edge of trouble in Vancouver, Washington, near Portland. Many of his scary childhood experiences — like a weird encounter with a reptile — made it into 1-800-Hot-Nite. So did his and his friend's habit of calling phone sex lines.

The film, which premiered to acclaim at the Deauville Film Festival in France, has completed a U.S. festival run that included the Heartland International Film Festival and Austin Film Festival. It's now available everywhere on VOD.

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