Authors — Meredith Alloway
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“Music Will be a Prism That You Can See the Whole Movie Through”: Director Zachary Wigon on Story Beats, Miles Davis and His BDSM-Themed Thriller Sanctuary
The poster for Sanctuary features a blonde Margaret Qualley whispering to a mysterious Christopher Abbott. Its imagery — a seeming femme fatale, an unknowing male prey and all the imagined chaos in between — evokes the height of the cinematic erotic thriller era. But the strength, elegance and wit of Micah Bloomberg’s (TV series Homecoming) script and Zachary Wigon’s (The Heart Machine) direction is their interest in subverting your (and the characters’s) expectations at every step. In Sanctuary, Abbott plays Hal, a hotel mogul’s son and heir. He has ordered a fancy meal to a decadently opulent hotel suite where […]
by Meredith Alloway on May 31, 2023 -
Filmmaker‘s Quarantine Mix Tape, Volume 1
It’s 9:00 PM on a Friday night about two weeks back (could have been three, but who keeps time anymore?) when I found myself turning off the TV after two films and sitting at my desk. My brain couldn’t focus on another movie, and I felt inspired — wanting to get some writing done. Normally, I’d put on a coat and pop across the street to The Roost, my coffee/wine spot in New York’s East Village for late night writing. Alas… here we are. I realized how difficult it can be to “switch modes” when we can’t switch spaces. Whether […]
by Meredith Alloway on May 14, 2020 -
“What If This is the Goal? This is Everything?”: Writer/Director Edson Oda on His Sundance Hit, Nine Days
Ever so often you’ll have a film at Sundance that hits at the right time, place and with the right crowd — so that you feel the theater buzz. The last moment of the film, before it cuts to black, rings out over silence (aside from the sniffling of a handful audience members.) For me this year that film was Nine Days on Monday night at the Eccles theater. A feature debut from director Edson Oda, the expansive piece is equal parts grounded sci-fi, drama and a delicate exploration of emotion and existence. Let’s just say you don’t want to […]
by Meredith Alloway on Feb 1, 2020 -
“We Have a Relationship with Fear from an Early Age… We Understand What It Means to be Prey”: Jennifer Reeder on Her Female Teen Horror Film, Knives and Skin
Genre filmmaking is arguably one of the most exciting and provocative sectors of cinema right now, with fresh perspectives and elevated messaging challenging the screen and its audiences. Case in point: Jennifer Reeder’s new feature, Knives and Skin. The filmmaker, who has crafted a number of successful short films over the past few years, has a bold aesthetic and isn’t afraid to put complex characters — especially young women — in bizarre and provoking situations. “I love seeing so many women not just like reclaiming, but claiming,” says Reeder about women in horror. Women have often been the subject of so many […]
by Meredith Alloway on Dec 11, 2019 -
Trauma & Transformation: Alma Har’el on Her Shia LaBeouf Drama, Honey Boy
Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy is an emotional prism, generating moments that are warm, traumatic, unsettling and scarring. So, it’s no wonder that the process of constructing such an intimate and emotionally shattering film was equally grounded in feeling. Har’el’s narrative feature debut (her previous features are the documentaries Bombay Beach and LoveTrue) contains Shia LaBeouf’s most gripping performance to date and showcases the two collaborators’ ability to make art containing expressive power and emotional wisdom. In Honey Boy, also written by LaBeouf, we meet Otis (Lucas Hedges), a movie star who’s sent to rehab and forced to confront his childhood […]
by Meredith Alloway on Sep 4, 2019 -
Emotional Exploration: Cinematographer Natasha Braier on Shooting Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy
Knowing that Alma Har’el worked in a fluid, in-the-moment fashion, and that dancing with the actors in the scene was key to the story, DP Natasha Braier started prep by going through the script and asking the director for each scene, “Describe the scene with a feeling.” During prep and while shooting, Braier always wanted to root the camera in the emotions of each scene. In her previous work on films like The Neon Demon and The Milk of Sorrow, Braier tapped into her ability to capture human experience with stylized camera work and expressive lighting. We discussed how she […]
by Meredith Alloway on Sep 4, 2019 -
From All Angles: The Groundbreaking Volumetric Filmmaking of Scatter
“If you look at any discipline through the lens of emerging technology, you’ll find a group of people who are exploring what’s next for that discipline,” said James George, cofounder/CEO of Scatter, sitting across from me in its Bushwick studios. “For us, it’s filmmaking.” George and his eventual Scatter cofounder and CPO, Alexander Porter, whose background is in photography and documentary film, began collaborating—hacking and modifying cameras—back in 2010. “I reached this place of feeling constrained with those [conventional filmmaking] tools,” Porter told me. The third cofounder and CMO, Yasmin Elayat, a trained computer scientist and artist, joined the team […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jun 19, 2019 -
“I Don’t Want to be Brought on to This Just Because I’m a Female…”: Emma Tammi on Directing Her Horror Western, The Wind
It’s not until you approach a genre of film from a new perspective, and as filmmaker Emma Tammi puts it, flip “the camera 180 degrees,” that you see how one-sided that genre’s films have been. In her narrative feature debut The Wind, out now in theaters, Tammi brings a unique point-of-view to the 1800s American frontier story and all of its psychological terrors. Combining well-crafted scares with the complexity of Teresa Sutherland’s script, the film takes us on a journey of solitude, loss and the demons that can be dredged up in the Wild West. Lizzy (a wonderful Caitlin Gerard), […]
by Meredith Alloway on Apr 11, 2019 -
Oxford Film Festival 2019: Diverse New Voices in Faulkner Country
Saturday night at the 16th annual Oxford Film Festival was prom—not an actual prom, but a sweet sixteen-themed awards ceremony complete with fried chicken and sangria, hosts in ballgowns and an electricity in the air where you felt the nostalgia of your own teenage dance. If you grew up in the south, like I did, your prom may not have felt anywhere as progressive as this one, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the packed auditorium of the awards that I realized I had mostly seen LGBTQ, minority-focused and movies with a female gaze at the festival, which […]
by Meredith Alloway on Mar 18, 2019 -
On Decks: The Art (and Necessity) of the Independent Film Lookbook
Lookbooks are an increasingly vital part of the filmmaking process. A good lookbook can make a pitch, just as a bad one can dissuade an investor, producer or financier from a project. Yet the creation of lookbooks is rarely discussed. The topic is missing from the many labs and tutorial programs set up to help first-time filmmakers—even though a good lookbook is perhaps the quickest way for a project to stand out. Simply put, refined visual knowledge and the skillful conveying of that knowledge is power for a director. When we interviewed Reed Morano last year about her work on […]
by Meredith Alloway on Mar 14, 2019
