Filmmaking is a magnificent creative act, one that unites a group of passionate individuals toward the realization of an extraordinary artistic vision. Or, viewed another way, it is simply the effective aggregation and well-planned administration of various creative outputs and intellectual properties. And while there are plenty of books that purport to inspire you toward the former definition, there’s one in particular devoted to the latter that’s recommendable to any producer, whatever their experience level. Clearance and Copyright, first published in 1996 by entertainment attorney Michael C. Donaldson, has been the best single book for navigating readers through the thickets […]
Some set their calendars by January’s Sundance, which like clockwork kicks off each new year of indie releases. For me, these 11 intense days of nonstop screenings are a rich bounty that takes time to digest. Ergo my slow coverage, below. Usually I manage to see about 30 of the 120 features Sundance typically selects. This has always worked out to a quarter of the program. What are the odds someone else saw the exact same combination? My dictum for years now has been that no two people see the same Sundance. Even the most diligent reviewers and audience members […]
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has labeled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most difficult film of his career—a bold categorization, considering the intricate single-take illusion of Birdman and the famously frigid filming conditions of The Revenant, both of which earned Iñárritu Oscars as Best Director. But for Bardo cinematographer Darius Khondji, the lure of the project wasn’t the technical challenges, though they were plentiful (including shooting in Mexico City at the height of COVID with long takes, deep focus photography and surrealistic imagery), but the emotional pull of the material. “Almost every single scene in Bardo was a […]
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So, when she was approached to score Sarah Polley’s drama Women Talking, “after the Oscars were over and I had already given that speech,” the Icelandic composer and cellist remembers being taken aback by her own “knee-jerk reaction” to the project: “Who wants to sit through two hours of women talking?” “I stood up on that stage, urging women to talk, […]
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results for them both. The film is set on a fictional Irish island in 1923, and the combination of wide-open spaces and unfussy but handsome costuming adds visual dynamism to a film whose appeal is largely rooted in whip-smart dialogue. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s filmography includes works by Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto) and Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship), which […]
In this new series of articles, Filmmaker poses two questions to producers, directors and other filmmakers. One question is directed toward the nuts and bolts of filmmaking—questions having to do with terms, practices, legal issues, technology and so on. The second question deals with topics that are softer or more amorphous—questions that necessarily can’t have right or wrong answers and whose replies are based on the personalities and practices of the individual participants. This issue, we directed our questions to producers, both fiction and doc, and asked them: What are points, or backend, and how do they work? What’s your […]
Welcome to the winter 2023 edition of Filmmaker, the second issue of our 30th anniversary year. It’s our annual awards season issue, in which we cover the Gotham Awards and devote a special section to considering our favorite below-the-line contributions of the year, profiles that reveal a lot about the new processes and technologies that inform filmmaking today. For example, in A. E. Hunt’s profile of Gotham Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Paul Rogers, the editor talks about the extensive VFX work in the film, including the use of time-remapping software as well as comping in pictorial elements to […]
“An ominous slender figure in the foreground, a gay couple kissing in the distance, alleyway, two-point perspective, at night, a bar crowded, 8K, cinematic, cinematic composition, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, rendered in the Gaspar Noe engine.” Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking […]
In just three (admittedly, very momentous) years, the marketplace for independent films has completely changed. During previous turning points over the decades, executives would use words like “waves” or “cycles” to describe instances of upheaval, but what’s happening now is more like a comprehensive reset. In a recent online article titled “The Sky is Falling, Take Shelter,” producer Rebecca Green wrote, “This year is unlike anything I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been working in this business.” If Sundance and its films are a barometer for the independent film industry, consider this comparison: The pre-pandemic class of Sundance 2019 […]
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is how the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his early work The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda) is a Senegalese immigrant to France on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, who she left on a beach to be washed out to sea by the outgoing tide. A student, Coly is writing her thesis on Wittgenstein, an academic detail she’s shamed for at the trial. (Why didn’t she write on the work of “someone closer to her own culture,” a professor wonders […]