Movie People: Interviews & More From the Southampton Playhouse

This week's episode features Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez, an East End resident who has spent the past 30-odd years advocating for independent film. As the festival enters its final edition in Park City, Utah, Hernandez shares his insight into the importance of the festival for anyone who cares about film culture -- and what might come next.

This week's episode features veteran sound designer and Sag Harbor resident Leslie Shatz, whose credits go back to Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back. His latest credit, Dead Man's Wire, marks his latest collaboration with Gus Van Sant. In this conversation, he explores on the past and (difficult) future of his profession.

We are wrapping up a busy year with a truly wonderful guest: Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, one of the most celebrated directors working today. From the early genre efforts like Cronos and The Devil's Backbone all the way through Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, del Toro has built a career out of generating empathy for monsters and mining them for all the metaphorical value they offer up. It was only a matter of time before he directed his attention toward the most famous fictional monster at the center of FRANKENSTEIN, as he has done with his new adaptation of the Mary Shelly novel. Del Toro joined us for a conversation about his longstanding obsession with the material, and closed out the chat with a poignant series of observations about the past year and how the movies helped us through it.

Filmmaker Josh Safdie and veteran cinematographer Darius Khondji join the Southampton Playhouse to discuss the new dark comedy Marty Supreme, which stars Timothée Chalamet as ping pong pro Marty Mauser, and share some of the films that inspired them. Then, expert 35mm projectionist James Faller explains his craft and why watching movies projected on film is sometimes better than digital alternatives.

The Playhouse closes out its East End Cinema series with a 50th anniversary celebration of the most famous Hamptons movie of all time, the legendary documentary Grey Gardens. Producer Susan Froemke, co-director Muffie Meyer, and Rebekah Maysles of the Maysles Documentary Film Center joined Playhouse artistic director Eric Kohn to discuss the genesis of the movie and its ongoing legacy.

This week, we're joined by the brilliant author Sigrid Nunez, who has been churning out imaginative stories for over 30 years. However, her work has been adapted to the big screen only recently with two movies both released at the top of 2025: The Room Next Door, the first English language movie directed by Pedro Almodovar, which stemmed from Nunez's novel Where Are You Going -- and The Friend, possibly one of the most underrated American movies of the year, which was adapted into a beautiful and poignant drama starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. 

This week, we're wrapping up a month of Halloween program with a very special conversation about the legacy of one of most resilient horror franchises of all time, Scream. When Wes Craven's movie was released in 1996, the horror genre was in a bit of a dormant phase. That changed rather quickly with this comedic riff on the horror movie formula, a meta take on the genre about a ghost-faced killer stalking teenagers in a small town. We showed the movie at the Playhouse a few days before Halloween. After the movie, we had some wonderful guests onstage to help contextualize the movie's legacy. Cary Woods, the producer of Scream, local filmmaker Sam Pezzullo, and Ashley Cullins, a journalist for the Ankler whose new book Your Favorite Scary Movie chronicles the history of the franchise.

This week, we've got a Halloween season double bill: First, a conversation with NPR journalist Larry Maslan, whose new book Hitchcocktails pairs films from the master of suspense with first-rate drink recipes. Then, we'll hear from a real-life ghost hunter: Michael Cardinuto, co-founder of the Long Island Paranormal Investigators.

This week, we're keeping the spirit of Halloween season alive. First we looked at vampires, then zombies, and now it's ghosts...thanks to this conversation with Black Phone 2 editor Louise Ford, best known for her collaborations with director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, Nosferatu). Tune in to learn more what it takes to cut a good horror movie!

This week, we're keeping the spirit of Halloween season alive, following on recent episode, which focused on the vampire monstrosities of I Am Legend. Now we're moving on to zombies...and, specifically, Zombieland, the 2009 horror-comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg. In addition to looking back on this major turning point in his career, Eisenberg spoke about his unique challenges as an actor and filmmaker over the course of his career.