The Criterion Collection

Criterion’s release in a DVD box set of the trilogy Letters from Fontainhas is making director Pedro Costa’s name familiar to a wider audience than ever before. These days, you can learn a lot about the Portuguese director, once one of contemporary art cinema’s best-kept secrets, as he’s been speaking about his work in a handful of revealing interviews. To Interview’s Eugene Kotlyarenko, he talks, appropriately, about Andy Warhol, the magazine’s founder, whose durational films, Kotlyarenko proposes, provided inspiration for Costa and others of cinema’s later formal minimalists. He touches on his more traditional narrative influences, including Hawks, Ford, and Anthony Mann, in a conversation with Patrick Z. McGavin for the blog Light Sensitive, as well as muses about where he might go now that the Fontainhas trilogy is “a memory.” To Neil Karassik in Toronto’s Eye Weekly, Costa has some intriguing things to say about the use of digital video by such contemporaries of his as David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami, as well as the conception of the Fontainhas films. And a podcast phone interview with Costa by GreenCine Daily’s Aaron Hillis covers topics from his discarded idea of remaking Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie to the process of working with his “real” collaborators—the denizens of the Lisbon slums where he shot the fiction-documentary hybrids in the trilogy.