Eigil Bryld must be feeling funny lately. After a career peppered with reality-based dramas (You Don’t Know Jack and The Report), thrillers (Deep Water) and romantic period pieces (Tulip Fever and Becoming Jane), the Danish cinematographer has lightened up with a trio of comedies out this year—The Machine, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and No Hard Feelings. In the latter, Jennifer Lawrence plays a Montauk Uber driver who agrees to seduce the son (Andrew Barth Feldman) of a wealthy couple summering in the quaint Long Island enclave in exchange for a used Buick Regal. Bryld spoke to Filmmaker about lensing the […]
On big budget spectacles, the tail of VFX often wags the dog of principal photography. With The Creator—an $80 million sci-fi epic about a war between mankind and humanoid AI starring John David Washington—director Gareth Edwards sought to reverse that arrangement. The Monsters and Rogue One filmmaker has described the process of meticulously recreating previs on set as painting a target on the wall and trying to fire an arrow into the bullseye. With The Creator, Edwards wanted to fire the arrow first, then paint the target around it, with VFX ideation occurring later in the pipeline after being inspired by […]
Dogleg is one of the best films of the year. A unique and hilarious feat of cinematic inventiveness, it follows amateur director Alan, played by Al Warren, after he loses his fiancé’s dog at a gender reveal party on the day of an important shoot. Warren also wrote and directed the film, which took more than half a decade to finish. On this episode, he tells us why he was in no hurry to complete the film, and why he has taken a much more intentional and meaningful approach toward bringing it to the audience. He takes us back to […]
Aidan Gillen returns to the podcast (first time: Episode 40). You know him from some of the most beloved shows of the century: Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, to name a few. Now he stars in the Irish neo-noir film Barber, where he plays a private investigator hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. He talks about why he doesn’t look at the lines until the day before shooting, how his latest venture on the stage affected his work, why he still doesn’t like rehearsal for film, what bothers him about an “actor-centric” production, and […]
In December of 1964, principal photography finished on the pilot of Star Trek, featuring captain Christopher Pike (played by The Searchers’ Jeffrey Hunter) as the commander of the Enterprise. When the show’s first episode finally aired almost two years later, Pike was nowhere to be found. The initial pilot had been scrapped and re-shot, with William Shatner’s James T. Kirk taking the helm and a different crew boldly going where no man had gone before. However, that wasn’t the end of Christopher Pike. The character returned as a Kirk mentor in the J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films. Now, with the Paramount […]
Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]
The great actor of the stage and screen, Ron Cephas Jones died on August 19, 2023, at the age of 66. On this episode from 2020, he details the value of a true collaborative relationship with the director, why the script never leaves his side in preproduction, talks about what it was like to slowly build “William” on This Is Us through many seasons of that show, and takes us back to his early days at LAByrinth theater in New York City to explain how Philip Seymour Hoffman forever changed his approach to work, plus much more! This is an expanded version […]
These interviews were recorded prior to the SAG/AFTRA strike, in June 2023, as part of the Tribeca Festival. On this special episode of Back To One, actors Sophia Lillis, Hannah Gross and Michael Cera talk about their work in writer/director Dustin Guy Defa’s wonderful new film The Adults. We get a glimpse into each of their general preparation processes before doing a deep dive into their work on this actor-centric production. They each talk about how they built the reality of their complex sibling relationship, why the songs and dances that play such a big part in their characters’ past feel […]
When you make your living in production, the relationship between work and time off can be a complicated one. After months of Fraturdays and Second Meal pizza at 2 a.m., you need to rest, decompress and resume the parts of your life that have been essentially paused during shooting. But stay off set too long and dread can fester—a fear of dwindling bank accounts, falling short on days for insurance and being usurped in your market’s hiring hierarchy. Cinematographer Paul Yee is acutely aware of that delicate balance and how it feels when the equilibrium becomes askew. He took a self-imposed […]
On this special episode, I visit the picket line at each of the four SAG/AFTRA strike sites in New York City, in one continuous, unbroken audio “take.” Actors Michael Gaston, Clarissa Thibeaux, and others talk to me about what’s at stake, and en route to each location I share my own thoughts on the issues at hand, make some predictions, voice concerns, and offer up my total and complete solidarity to the cause, all supported by the loud and never-ending symphony of the New York City streets! Get ready for the strangest, but definitely most sonic-rich, episode of this podcast […]