Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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“I Never Had Any Interest in Becoming a Cinematographer Until 1965, When I Met Stanley Kubrick”: A Rare Profile of d.p. John Alcott
Here’s a true deep cut, evidently taped off New Jersey’s WNET and now resurrected on the internet. This ’80s profile of d.p. John Alcott (A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon) features a lot of on-set footage of the cinematographer plying his craft; if you’re a big Beastmaster fan, this is for you. If just interested in the Kubrick stories you may want to skip to the 8-minute mark (where the d.p. talks about his initial collaborations with the director) and then to 14:20 or so, where Alcott discusses waiting patiently to capture very particular wind and cloud changes on the set of Barry […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 18, 2015 -
Watch: Two Scenes from Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the Iranian Director’s Third Feature Made During a 20-Year Ban
“Either you have to escape the country or start hoping to go back to jail,” a woman sitting in the passenger seat tells Jafar Panahi in the first clip shared from the Iranian director’s latest feature Taxi. Driving a cab through Tehran and conversing with passengers, Panahi is again the star in his third feature since a 20-year-ban on filmmaking imposed by the Iranian government. In another clip, a young girl reels off a checklist of guidelines necessary to make a distributable film in Iran (headscarves on women, no relations between the genders). The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 17, 2015 -
Watch: Rio de Janeiro in 10K Timelapse
Shot by Joe Capra, this five-minute test video shows off the super-hi-res capabilities of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera (more information on that here). This timelapse footage of Rio de Janeiro from a variety of vantage points is meant to serve several purposes. As Capra writes: Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920×1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 12, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, with Amy Schumer, Bill Hader and LeBron James
The first trailer for Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck is just fine, setting up its premise clearly — Amy Schumer is a professional success despite her monogamy-repelling sleeping-around, which is refreshing — and its romantic throughline with sports doctor Bill Hader. It looks more disciplined than usual visually, with Ballet 422 co-director/Afterschool cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes behind the camera, and LeBron James seems like he’s about to outdo Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the basketball player-turned-onscreen-comic sweepstakes.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 11, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Michael Tyburski & Ben Nabors’ Actor Seeks Role, Starring Alex Karpovsky
Writer/director/producer duo Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors — 25 New Faces alums from 2013 — have a trailer for their new short film. Actor Seeks Role stars another alum — director/Girls regular Alex Karpovsky — as a struggling thespian who takes on a job as a medical actor, exhibiting symptoms he doesn’t possess for student doctors to test their diagnostic skills on. (Shades of Leslie Jamison’s essay on the topic.) The film hopes to launch online later this spring.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 11, 2015 -
“I’m Scared of Everything”: Alfred Hitchcock’s BBC Interview About Psycho, 1960
In this fairly typical Hitchcock interview from 1960, the director adjusts his tie and sits down for a brisk promotional session for Psycho, describing the plot with typical drollery and running through some of his greatest soundbite hits: the oft-told story about how he was imprisoned briefly as a child at his father’s request, qualifying his statement that actors should be treated like cattle (“You mean you want to make them larger cattle than they are?”), and whether he’s ever wanted to be an actor himself (“Nothing so low as that”).
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 9, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Kathleen Collins’ 1982 Milestone in Black Film, Losing Ground
Lincoln Center’s vital series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986” kicks off today, including a week-long debut theatrical run of Kathleen Collins’ 1982 Losing Ground. Believed to be the first African-American woman to direct a feature film (1980’s The Cruz Brothers and Mrs. Molloy), Collins’ 1982 second and final feature has never received a regular theatrical run until now. The story of a philosophy professor (Sereh Scott) and her landscape painter husband (Ganja and Hess director Bill Gunn) in the middle of a transformative vacation in upstate New York, the film is described as a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 6, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Magic Mike XXL Looks Very Soderbergh-y
Magic Mike XXL is not directed by Steven Soderbergh, who has retired from feature filmmaking. But what’s in a name? Magic Mike XXL is directed by Gregory Jacobs, Soderbergh’s regular 1st AD since 1993’s King of the Hill, is crewed by Soderbergh regulars (production designer Howard Cummings and set director Eric R. Johnson have been onhand since Contagion), and was shot and edited by the man himself. The trailer’s color palette — muted and dark, with strong golds and shadows — is accordingly exactly what you’d get from a Soderbergh film, and it even opens with the same ’70s WB Saul Bass-designed logo that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 4, 2015 -
“I Ripped Up Millions of Sprocket Holes”: George Lucas at Sundance on Building His Empire
“Why should we use all this equipment and all this stuff when we can make it better?” In this excerpt from a recent Sundance panel on “The Power of Story,” George Lucas once again attempts to explain how his loathing for the Hollywood apparatus led to the creation of a special effects empire that enabled a whole new super-strain of Hollywood blockbusters. In his narrative, Lucas had to create a special effects house because none existed, and he had to get into the toy licensing business to prolong the life of his movies inn the market place, and he had to create […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 3, 2015 -
Watch: :: kogonada on Wes Anderson’s Symmetrical Compositions
We’re big :: kogonada fans here at Filmmaker Magazine and are still catching up with his past work. This video focuses on Wes Anderson’s penchant for symmetrical compositions, dropping a line down the middle of the screen to better see on what is and isn’t exactly symmetrically balanced in his frames.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2015
