Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? One of our sets burned down the week before we were supposed to film there. It was a bar location at a theater warehouse. We were like, “Okay, what now? We don’t have a set.” It was also tricky because we were filming at another part of that location already, and another company move would have killed us that day. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2023Founded in 1927, the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition provides the dramatic stage for Jakub Piątek’s Pianoforte. Tracking some of the talented performers from around the world entering the competition, Piątek’s crowdpleasing documentary, which premiered at Sundance 2023, is lensed by his longtime collaborator Filip Drożdż, who discusses his work on the project below. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Drożdż: I’ve known the director, Jakub Piątek, for a long time. We used to work on many different projects together […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Director Raine Allen Miller brings a fresh feeling to the traditional romcom with Rye Lane, her Sundance 2023-premiering film set to drop on Hulu later this year. Following accountant Dom (David Jonsson) as he spends a day walking-and-talking around south London, a la Before Sunrise, with free-spirited costumer designer Yas (Vivian Oparah). Below, editor Victoria Voydell discusses her work on the stylish feature debut. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Boydell: I had mentioned to my agent that I was […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Collateral meets The Desperate Hours against the backdrop of issues of Vietnamese immigration and assimilation in this Orange County-set thriller that marks the feature directorial debut of music video director Sing J. Lee. Below, cinematographer Michael Fernandez discusses his work in filming this Sundance 2023 premiering thriller, in which an elderly Vietnamese cab driver is taken hostage by three recently escaped prisoners. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Fernandez: I had a built a relationship with the director over the last […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? One of the obvious obstacles for us was lockdown. We are telling a mosaic story with different protagonists and, during the process, we found out that we couldn’t visit some of them because of COVID and really long quarantines in some countries. We asked our friends from the Film School in Łódź for help and built local teams to replace […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? We were on an extremely tight 19-day schedule with a large cast of children who had limited hours they could work. The cameras basically had to be constantly rolling to maximize every second. One day, there was a COVID scare that put a two-hour hole in our day. We spontaneously made up a scene where our characters are writing the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023The subject of a bidding war after its premiere before selling to Netflix for a reported $20 million, Chloe Domont’s twisty thriller Fair Play owes much to the work of editor Franklin Peterson in establishing the deliberate pace necessary to suck viewers in. Below, he offers (spoiler-free!) insights on his work on the film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Peterson: I was offered an interview with Chloe, the writer-director, for the position, as she responded to my […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023One of the best-reviewed films at this year’s Sundance, Ira Sachs’s Passages sold to MUBI for four territories, including the US and UK, shortly after its premiere. The drama is fueled by the love triangle that emerges when film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) cheats on artist husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) with teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The Paris-set drama marks Sachs’s first time working with French cinematographer Josée Deshais (Saint Laurent), who discusses her work on the film below. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? Deshais: Ira approached me because of a French film I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? For weeks before production, the film’s cinematographer Josée Deshaies and I begin a long process of creating a storyboard for the film. At some point, after we’ve established our own rhythm, we invite an illustrator—in this case, our production manager Marianne Germain’s brother Gabriel—to join us to translate our conversations into images. The work of the three of us then […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? When we started production on Fancy Dance, we had originally planned to shoot our powwow scene at a community powwow, but as the shoot dates got closer, Oklahoma hit a spike in COVID cases and we were forced to rethink our plan. With COVID protocols in place, the only way to safely shoot the scene was to throw our own […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023