Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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Exclusive Clip: Dennis Hopper in The Last Film Festival, His Final Movie
A few years ago, director Linda Yellen met her hero, Dennis Hopper, at the Sundance Film Festival. As she writes on the Kickstarter page for The Last Film Festival, “Sundance is simply one of the best film festivals in the world, and I wondered what the worst would be like? Dennis turned to me and said ‘That’s a great idea kid, you write the script and I’ll do it.’ And he did!” From the page: The Last Film Festival is a feature length comedy starring Dennis Hopper, written by Michael Leeds and me. Dennis plays Nick Twain, a big-time Hollywood Producer […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 10, 2015 -
Watch: The Creation of “Tondoscope,” a New Aspect Ratio
Scanning the Tribeca slate, it’s hard not to wonder what exactly “Tondoscope” is. The capsule for Gust Van den Berghe’s Lucifer claims this is an aspect ratio of his own devising, and this video provides some clarity on what that mean. You can watch a trailer here, but the basic idea is that Tondoscope is a circle. In this nine-minute video, Van den Berghe explains the origins of his idea, and his DP and assorted representatives of the University of Brussels make it happen. From carving the lens to sound mixing (tricky when characters restricted to a circle move not […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 9, 2015 -
Watch: “The Unloved: The Lone Ranger & Heaven’s Gate“
“How do we define failure when it comes to motion pictures?” Simultaneously defending the more-or-less rehabilitated Heaven’s Gate and the not-so-much The Lone Ranger is a hard task, but presumably someone has to do it. In this video essay, Scout Tafoya gives a surprisingly plausible stab at arguing that both are underrated slabs of greatness with much in common, alternately grimly realistic and expensively glossy takes on the genocide of the Native Americans, presentational flip sides of the same coin.
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 5, 2015 -
Watch: The Subterranean Stadium, A New Errol Morris Short Film
For his next semi-unlikely move, Errol Morris is making six shorts for ESPN Films. This first installment, The Subterranean Stadium, delves into the world of electric football. With guidance from “commissioner” John “Larue” DiCarlo, Morris uses his typically on-point interview skills (and offscreen, typically astonished-sounded questions) to guide us through a game whose players claim, plausibly, is as complex as chess.
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 2, 2015 -
Watch: “Red & Yellow: A Wes Anderson Supercut”
You can’t say that Rishi Kaneria doesn’t know what he’s interested in when he makes his supercuts. Following logically on the heels of “Stanley Kubrick: Red,” which looked at that director’s use of the color, now we have “Red & Yellow: A Wes Anderson Supercut.” Red’s on the left, yellow’s on the right, and there’s an oddly disproportionate emphasis on his 2007 short Hotel Chevalier.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 26, 2015 -
Watch: Objects and Close-Ups in Boogie Nights
This one’s zippy: a two-minute supercut of close-ups of objects and gestures in Boogie Nights, mostly the former. Taken out of context, a formidable amount of art direction and fetishistically shiny framing comes to the forefront. Entitled “Boogie Nights — Close-ups, Objects etc.,” this is the first video uploaded to the Vimeo channel of Justin Barham, who notes, plaintively, “If I knew people were going to actually see it I’d have given it a cool title.”
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 24, 2015 -
Birdman, Boyhood, CITIZENFOUR Top 30th Annual Independent Spirit Awards
Birdman won Best Picture at this afternoon’s 30th annual Independent Spirit Awards. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film scored two other awards — Best Male Lead and Best Cinematography — while its main Academy competition, Boyhood, won Best Director and Best Supporting Actress. Laura Poitras’s CITIZENFOUR won Best Documentary. Held, as always, a day before the Oscars, Film Independent’s Santa Monica beachside awards ceremony also recognized a number of lower-budgeted independents, including Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (producer Chris Olson won the Piaget Producers Award), H. (directors Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia won the Kiehl’s Someone to Watch Award); Dear White People (Best […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 21, 2015 -
Watch: Michael Cimino’s 1967 United Airlines Commercial
In his first interview in 13 years, The Deer Hunter/Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino sounds off on the greatness of American Sniper and why Clint Eastwood should be president, writing novels published in France he’s afraid to have published in the US, and much more. It’s a good time to revisit the start of Cimino’s career, when he was a Madison Avenue commercial director, and a very successful one at that. This 1967 ad was part of a $1.7-million United Airlines campaign and it’s very of the period — literally colorful, musically brassy, casually sexist. More background on the commercial here.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 19, 2015 -
“I Deliberately Cut an Unusual Rhythm”: Graeme Clifford On Editing Don’t Look Now
In this excerpt from the Criterion Collection’s supplements for their now-out edition of Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now, Graeme Clifford discusses the fine art of keeping people off-balance without being too obvious about it. “There is a comfortable way of editing, where people want to be unaware of cuts,” he explains. “In most movies, that’s generally the way you want to go. But in this movie, I deliberately cut an unusual rhythm. I would hold shots when there’d seem to be no reason to do so, or I would cut off them too quickly, or I would cut to things that were […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 19, 2015 -
Watch: A Video Essay on Robert Altman’s TV Work
Robert Altman’s formative years working in episodic television are examined by Violet Lucca in this Film Comment video essay. Highlighting one of his two Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, Lucca argues its foregrounding of a disintegrating female psychopath anticipates Altman’s later studies of women with fragmented psyches (Images, Three Women). After finding his autuerist signature on Bonanza! and examining one of his most famous contributions to Combat!, the essay concludes with a look at Altman’s Bus Stop episode “A Lion Walks Among Us,” controversial enough amongst widespread hysteria about juvenile delinquency and violence on TV to merit Congressional questioning of ABC president Oliver Treyz.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 19, 2015
