Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Second-Time Director: Tze Chun and Cold Comes the Night
At Filmmaker we continuously cover the struggles of first-time directors to make their debut pictures. But the second film comes with its own set of unique challenges, issues that will be explored in this five-part series by Kishori Rajan. Below is the first installment, chronicling Filmmaker 25 New Face Tze Chun’s move from the microbudget character drama Children of Invention to a thriller with stars like Bryan Cranston. Look for further articles in the weeks ahead. — SM The late producer Laura Ziskin once remarked that movies “aren’t made, but forced into existence,” an expression never more apt than when […]
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Director John Henry Summerour on Sahkanaga
The following Q&A is an excerpt from a conversation between filmmaker John Henry Summerour and John DeVore, a writer for The Pulse, Chattanooga’s weekly alternative. (DeVore’s Pulse feature on Summerour can be found here.) Summerour discusses the importance of his personal relationship with the South in making his newest film Sahkanaga (“Great Blue Hills of God” in Cherokee), which is inspired by the Tri-State Crematory scandal. In 2002, it was discovered that over 300 bodies that had been committed to the crematory in Georgia for proper disposal were never cremated and instead buried or left in a shed and the […]
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Five Questions with Drivers Wanted Director Joshua Z Weinstein
New York City’s taxi drivers are as ubiquitous as they are invisible. In his new documentary Drivers Wanted, Joshua Z Weinstein takes the passenger seat — often literally — and trains his camera on the men at the wheel, as well as the gristly mechanics and staff who work behind the scenes at a Queens-based taxi company. Though this may be a niche community, larger economic forces are clearly at play: many of the drivers are bankrupt, broke, or struggling to support their families. From the bustle of the garage, full of camaraderie and occasional conflict, emerge several key characters […]
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Five Questions with California Solo Director Marshall Lewy
In California Solo, the latest film from writer/director Marshall Lewy (Blue State), Robert Carlyle plays Lachlan MacAldonich, a former Britpop star, now an alcoholic working as a farmhand in California. After he is caught driving drunk one night, MacAldonich’s legal right to remain in the country is challenged, and he is forced to revisit his former life. Carlyle delivers a wonderful performance, quiet, thoughtful and an altogether different alcoholic than Begbie, the Trainspotting role that shot him to stardom. After premiering at Sundance, California Solo played festivals worldwide (including its European premiere, at Edinburgh where one audience member, and Carlyle […]
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Five Questions with Wagner & Me Director Patrick McGrady
Early in Wagner & Me, a new documentary about the music and legacy of Richard Wagner, English actor and writer Stephen Fry says he’d like to time travel to the 19th century. Once there, Fry continues, he would start a letter-writing campaign, urging the composer to rethink his infamously anti-Semitic essay Jewishness in Music: “I say to him, ‘Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century, and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing, and because of the effect it’ll have.” Wagner, of course, did not […]
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B-Side: How a Bunch of First-Timers Made a SAG Ultra-Low Feature Without Blowing Up the Garage
Nine years ago, I walked into Sound One on my first run at my first internship. This summer, I walked out of Sound One having completed post-production on my first feature, B-Side, less than six months after we began pre-production. It wasn’t just a feature debut for me as a director, but also for our producer, DP, editor, 1st AD, and leading lady. Now rest assured, I could tell you dozens of things we would do differently. Free sample: Don’t shoot anything that will go in a movie’s first five minutes on the first day of shooting. And we have […]
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Growing Up in an American Commune
The following is a guest blog post from the makers of American Commune, which is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to cover post-production costs. — SM When my sister and I started making our documentary about growing up on America’s largest commune, we honestly didn’t intend for it to be a personal story. At the time, we were both working as directors at MTV in New York City and none of our friends or colleagues had the slightest clue we were born on a commune called The Farm. We had left as kids in the 1980s when […]
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Five Questions with Chasing Ice Director Jeff Orlowski
After years of shooting in extreme conditions, National Geographic photographer James Balog finally realized he could no longer ignore the slow disappearance of frozen landscapes he’d come to know and love. In Chasing Ice, director and cinematographer Jeff Orlowski documents Balog’s ambitious plan to install 25 separate time-lapse cameras across the globe in order to record receding glaciers and shifting ice, dire omens of a changing climate with no audience to bear witness. All the while Orlowski follows directly behind, shooting in dog sleds and ice crevasses, capturing the troubles that beset the most impassioned plans and what one man is […]
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A Rogue’s Gallery of Gorgeousness: Charles Atlas and Antony’s Turning
It’s been a banner year for Charles Atlas. In 2012, the filmmaker and video artist was included in the Whitney Biennial, opened his first New York solo show, “The Illusion of Democracy” (the inaugural show of Lurhring Augustine’s brand new Bushwick gallery, no less), had seminal, rarely-screened works revived care of keen programming at local NYC film series’ Dirty Looks and Light Industry, and is now unveiling his long-awaited collaboration with enigmatic singer/musician Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), which opens today at IFC Center. Turning, which had its New York premiere this past weekend at DOC NYC, is […]
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Susan Youssef, Habibi
Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
