Authors — Matt Mulcahey
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“A Very Nostalgic Look at my Childhood”: DP Dean Cundey on Back to the Future
When I saw Back to the Future as a kid in the summer of 1985, the film’s 1950s setting felt as distant and exotic as another century. As the movie celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, I feel both an aching nostalgia and an existential dread at the thought that the 1980s – with its Pepsi Frees, DeLoreans, and Huey Lewises — are now an equally distant and exotic relic. There were few movies that the 10-year-old me loved as much as Back to the Future. And most of them — from The Thing to Big Trouble in Little China — […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 22, 2015 -
“So Much of What You Do is Intuitive”: Roger Deakins on Sicario
In an interview with Variety for his new film Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve claimed that the movie’s cinematographer Roger Deakins “could shoot with a shoe and it would look great.” Hyperbole aside, Villeneuve isn’t far off: if you can affix a lens to it, Roger Deakins can coax lyrical yet naturalistic images from it. Armed with an ARRI ALEXA Studio on Sicario – a slight step up from a shoe cam – Deakins pushed the camera to its boundaries to capture both the cruel harshness of the sunlight and the menacing unknown of the shadows for Villeneuve’s politically and morally complex tale of […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 14, 2015 -
“If That Kid Hits Me in the Face, I’m Going to Hit You in the Face”: Tony McNamara on Ashby
In an early scene in Ashby, an English teacher asks the film’s young protagonist Ed (Nat Wolff) to expound on the themes of Ernest Hemingway. Wolff answers, “Proving you’re a man by trying to get killed,” tossing off the line as if it were an absurd relic of a less enlightened era. He then spends the remainder of the film embracing that antiquated view of American masculinity, whether it be in pursuing classmate Emma Roberts, taking a hit on the football field or befriending his terminally ill, ex-CIA assassin neighbor Ashby (Mickey Rourke). Ashby writer/director Tony McNamara describes the film as […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 5, 2015 -
“30 Years Ago I’d Put Together a Scene with Scratches and Splices Jumping”: Editor David Rosenbloom on Black Mass
David Rosenbloom calls them “movie moments,” those ephemeral slivers of magic discovered amongst the voluminous footage he sifts through in his role as an editor. They can be as small as a glance or as large as a cackle from Whitey Bulger. The latter can be found in Black Mass, Rosenbloom’s second collaboration with director Scott Cooper following 2013’s Out of the Furnace. The film traces the true story of Irish gangster Bulger’s thirty-year reign in Boston, abetted by his role as an FBI informant. Rosenbloom talked to Filmmaker about his start as an editor, his software of choice for […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 29, 2015 -
“Found Footage with Style”: Cinematographer Maryse Alberti on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit
As a teenager in the south of France, Maryse Alberti’s first two trips to the cinema led her impressionable eyes to Duel and Harold and Maude. If she’d instead began her cinematic journey with The Barefoot Executive and Escape From the Planet of the Apes, maybe she wouldn’t have become the cinematographer of The Wrestler, Happiness, When We Were Kings and Crumb. But the combined spell cast by Steven Spielberg and Hal Ashby – the great populist entertainer and the iconoclastic humanist – set Albert on a path that has led to a four-decade career pivoting between documentary and fiction. Alberti’s latest straddles […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 21, 2015 -
“We’re Making Fat Cells, Arteries, and a Heart:” Bill George on Innerspace
Today teenagers interested in the world of special effects are a few tutorials and some affordable software away from getting their feet wet. In 1977, the requirements were a bit more elaborate. It involved woodshop, sheets of styrene, and maybe a few surreptitious pictures taken at a screening of Star Wars. That’s how a teenaged Bill George got his start – making models from scratch dedicated to George Lucas’s space opera. Four years later, George was working on the crew of Return of the Jedi. Now in his 33rd year at Industrial Light & Magic, George has been a part […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 16, 2015 -
“I’ve Gotten Carried Away with Graininess in the Past and I Probably Will Again”: DP Sean Price Williams on Queen of Earth
The major studios’ current preference for selecting the shepherds of their franchise properties is to pluck directors from the relatively obscurity of indiedom. Colin Trevorrow went from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World. Josh Trank moved from Chronicle to Fantastic Four. Jon Watts leaped from Cop Car to the reboot of the reboot of Spider-Man. Alex Ross Perry opted for the opposite approach. After his breakthrough film Listen Up Philip, Perry stripped down his budget, cast, and crew for a character piece about a pair of female friends (Elisabeth Moss, Inherent Vice’s Katherine Waterston) whose relationship unravels during a week-long […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 10, 2015 -
Thinking of Tarkovsky While Making New Zealand Look Russian: DP Tim Orr on Z For Zachariah
The settings for Craig Zobel’s 2012 behavioral experiment Compliance and the director’s new post-apocalyptic tale Z for Zachariah couldn’t be more different. The former takes place almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a fast food restaurant’s employees-only areas. The latter unfolds amidst lush, bucolic tranquility. Yet at the heart of both films is a study of group dynamics. Set in an idyllic valley mysteriously immune to an extinction-level catastrophe, Z for Zachariah begins as a two-hander featuring Margot Robbie as a Christian farm girl who believes she’s the last person on earth until the arrival of an atheist scientist […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 4, 2015 -
Hitchcock + Haneke: DP Edu Grau on The Gift
Amongst a summer movie season awash in sequels, remakes and presold tentpole properties, it’s rare to find a sleeper at the multiplex, an unknown quantity with the ability to surprise an audience. Such is The Gift, an unnerving psychological thriller that begins as a post-Fatal Attraction variant before veering into the domain of Roman Polanski and Michael Haneke. Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall star as a married couple leaving behind personal tragedy in Chicago to start a new life in Los Angeles. Shortly after their arrival, Bateman bumps into former high school classmate Joel Edgerton, who begins to insinuate himself into […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 27, 2015 -
How to Fake a Movie That Takes Place Entirely on a Laptop: DP/Producer Adam Sidman on Unfriended
My gripe with most found footage horror films is that the subgenre strips away so many of a filmmaker’s paintbrushes in the name of verisimilitude. Score, editing, composition and lighting are sacrificed at the altar of faux reality. Unfriended strains under some of those same constraints, but the film diverges in the way it uses perspective. Instead of limiting point of view to a single shaky handheld camera wielded by one of the characters, Unfriended unfolds entirely on the Mac laptop of Blaire, a high schooler who, along with five or her friends, is terrorized by the spirit of a […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 13, 2015
