Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.

Today we speak to Nancy Savoca, the great filmmaker whose sophomore feature Dogfight is now available via Criterion. The digitally-restored, director-approved Blu-Ray includes new commentary from Savoca and producer Richard Guay, a new interview with Savoca and actor Lili Taylor conducted by filmmaker Mary Harron, and a great essay by film critic Christina Newland, among other features.

We speak with Savoca about Missing Movies, her mentors John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, her first film True Love, directing singular performers like River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, and the HBO creativity boom of the mid-to-late ‘90s (including Carl Franklin’s Laurel Avenue and Cher and Savoca’s If These Walls Could Talk), and lesser-seen gems of Savoca’s that she hopes viewers will be able to see soon (including Dirt from the early 2000s an the recently restored and released Household Saints from 1993).

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