Authors — Meredith Alloway
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Beautiful Abyss: Eliza McNitt on her Visionary VR
Filmmaker Eliza McNitt’s second VR film, SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, has made history as the first VR film to sell at Sundance. CityLights, a VR financing and distribution company, acquired the project as a three-part series for a significant seven-figure deal. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, SPHERES is inspired by the recent discovery that gravitational waves make their own music, and it visualizes the collision of two black holes that produce these movements. With the Oculus Rift headset and hand controllers, the viewer uses their voice and body to interact with the cosmic landscape, drawing stardust circles while being pulled into […]
by Meredith Alloway on Mar 8, 2018 -
What is Producing? A Group of Sundance Producers Share Insights on Financing, Selecting Projects and Making a Career out of Making Movies
What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]
by Meredith Alloway on Feb 7, 2018 -
“Things Happen that are Too Big for You…”: Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan on the Director’s Cut of his Masterpiece, Margaret
Margaret may be one of the best movies you’ve never seen. It’s the second film from writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose first, You Can Count On Me, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000, and third, Manchester by the Sea garnered two Academy Awards for Lead Actor and Original Screenplay. But Margaret suffered a different journey, shooting in 2005 and being released much later in 2011 for a very limited run — and a cut 36 minutes shorter than the one Lonergan preferred. As part of its series, “The Way I See It: Directors’ Cuts,” the Quad in New […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jan 15, 2018 -
Tall Trees and Inner Lives: Kate and Laura Mulleavy on their Debut Film, Woodshock
A24 is having a good year. Again. After last year ushering Moonlight to Oscar gold, they are now poised to do the same with Lady Bird, Good Time, The Disaster Artist and The Florida Project. If they were distributing Call Me By Your Name, they’d have a monopoly on hip films of the season. Indeed, the distributor has a knack for creating pop-culture phenomenon out of independent films that might have been buried by other distributors. I’ve really been enjoying the “Lady Bird for President” posters and seeing pink hair trending. But what happens to the films in their packed […]
by Meredith Alloway on Dec 6, 2017 -
Revisiting History at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival
Sante Fe has archeological sites that date back 13,000 years. As we drove to my hotel from the Albuquerque airport, almost an hour-long trek at midnight, my driver told me about the history of the city, rooted in Native American culture, that I had no idea dated that far back. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said. After spending a weekend at the Sante Fe Independent Film Festival, the thought felt applicable — the lineup of films demonstrated the cynical nature of oppression, struggle and minority battles that indeed continue in familiar patterns. Set on […]
by Meredith Alloway on Nov 15, 2017 -
“The Movie Industry Doesn’t Have Any Etiquette, Just Fear”: Director Nathan Silver on Thirst Street and Making Eight Features in Eight Years
Nathan Silver has made eight films in eight years. That doesn’t include other shorts he’s written or executive produced. For anyone not in the business of film, that might seem standard. For anyone who is, it’s wildly impressive, especially taking into consideration the inclusion of pre-production time, when a script is written, money is raised and all the frustrating puzzle pieces of building a team have to fall into place. Silver’s latest film, Thirst Street, centers on Gina (Lindsay Burdge), an American flight attendant who becomes entwined in a toxic obsession. After landing in Paris, she falls for Jerome (Damien […]
by Meredith Alloway on Sep 28, 2017 -
Challenging Five Untruths about Women in the Film Business at IFP Week’s Persona Project Panel
It’s been a wild summer for the film industry — and for anyone who has fucked with females. At IFP Week, I was happy to see Filmmaker contributor Taylor Hess touch, ever so delicately, on some of the issues around discrimination and mistreatment that have been plaguing us all. She hosted a panel version of her Persona Project column, which celebrates up-and-coming women in film. On the panel were Sara Kiener, head of distribution strategies at Cinereach; Taylor Shung, co-producer, A Woman, a Part; Aijah Keith, manager of acquisitions & production at IFC; and Dana Vladimir, head of communications and […]
by Meredith Alloway on Sep 24, 2017 -
Reed Morano on Successfully Pitching for and Directing the Intense Dystopian Drama, The Handmaid’s Tale
Reed Morano was told she wouldn’t get to pitch on The Handmaid’s Tale: “Don’t get too excited about it.” Someone showed her the pilot just so she had an idea of what Hulu was up to, but there was already a “very big male director” they were out to, as Morano discussed at an IFP Q&A earlier this year. When Morano heard that her long time collaborator and friend Elisabeth Moss was attached as the lead of the show, she reached out — not taking no for an answer. “A week and a half later, I got a call: ‘The producers […]
by Meredith Alloway on Aug 18, 2017 -
Nostalgia for Blockbuster Video Covers: Kyle Mooney on Brigsby Bear
If you haven’t watched Kyle Mooney’s early work, you’re missing out — it’s a healthy crop of innovative character work made with comedy group Good Neighbor. Mooney has also, along with fellow members Beck Bennett and writer Dave McCary, brought some of the best sketches to SNL in years. There’s the Kanye vs. Kyle bit and Mooney’s romance with Leslie Jones; often the best sketches are the ones that are cut for time (Ryan Gosling is a gem). When it was announced that Mooney and McCary’s first feature film, Brigsby Bear, would premiere at Sundance, there was anticipation around how they […]
by Meredith Alloway on Aug 2, 2017 -
Inclusive Feelings at the Oak Cliff Film Festival
There’s an argument happening at the bar of the Texas Theater. No, it’s not about politics, as one might guess with a liberal film crowd taking over a small pocket of Texas. This is Oak Cliff, the blossoming cultural community north of the Dallas Trinity river, and no, the conversation is not about karaoke either. The Oak Cliff Film Festival opening night party was at Barbara’s Pavilion, a dive bar in a re-purposed home. As the film festival crowd rolled in around midnight, badges and conversations about Lemon and 35mm making the nerd fumes quite potent, the argument was about […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jul 19, 2017
