Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“I Play a Little with Fire”: Photographer and Director Stacy Kranitz on She Does Podcast
Stacy Kranitz is a documentary photographer who explores history, representation and otherness. She has developed her style, one that is full of movement, emotionally raw, gritty and features individuals in high-octane environments. These individuals are sometimes new subjects and other times her longtime friends, folks she has been documenting since she started her work in Appalachia in 2009. Stacy’s photos are sometimes bloody, many times violent, often sexualized, occasionally drug-induced and always causing a stir. She has documented people and places all around the world, including snake handlers in Appalachia, cockfighting in Louisiana and black metal bands in Norway. Her […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2015 -
IFP Screen Forward: 5 Questions for SXSW Film Director Janet Pierson
As Head of SXSW Film Janet Pierson relates below, her Austin-based festival has, for several years, showcased the work of television creators alongside works by feature filmmakers. For SXSW, throwing television into the mix is not so unnatural — the festival is a sprawling behemoth with not only music and film but interactive, gaming and sports. But other festivals, like Tribeca and Toronto, have jumped into the mix too, and some critics — like producer Mike Ryan in a recent Filmmaker article — have been calling for film festivals to focus on cinema and forgo small-screen work that is hardly […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2015 -
IFP Screen Forward: 5 Questions for Producer Peter Phok about Crowdfunding’s Aftermath
Producer Peter Phok (The Sacrament, The Innkeepers, V/H/S) is one of five professionals this morning at an IFP Screen Forward panel titled “Bridging the Gap after Crowdfunding.” The title of the panel is an interesting collision of terms as only recently has crowdfunding been factored into independent film financing equations alongside terms like “mezzanine,” “senior debt” and “tax credit monetization.” But, indeed, crowdfunding is part of many independent films’ financing schemes, and its success — or failure — has much to do with a film’s greenlight. Below, Phok answers questions about film and crowdfunding. Filmmaker: Your panel is called, “Bridging […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2015 -
IFP Screen Forward: 5 Questions for Documentary Producer Julie Goldman
One of the most prolific documentary producers around, Julie Goldman, takes the main stage this afternoon at IFP’s Screen Forward conference to talk about the evolving practice of non-fiction production. With producing credits going back to 1997, Goldman has produced or executive produced such notable films as Buck, Beware of Mr. Baker, 1971 , Best of Enemies and Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden. She’s currently producing through her production company, Motto, which has allowed her to increase the quantity of her production, just one of several topics she discusses below. Filmmaker: Your producing credits go back to 1997, yet […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 22, 2015 -
IFP Screen Forward: 5 Tips on Pitching Web Series
The on-stage pitch has become a staple of documentary film forums, like IDFA and CPH:DOX, and pitch panels long ago snuck into events like IFP’s Screen Forward Conference (previously the Filmmaker Conference). But the on-stage pitching of web series is something relatively new at these more film-oriented events. Befitting the IFP’s conference name change, three filmmakers storytellers took the stage Sunday at noon at the Bruno Walter Auditorium to impress a panel of web content professionals with their ideas of episodic tales to be streamed online. But given the Wild West nature of web series, where buyers, monetization strategies and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 21, 2015 -
Previewing IFP Film Week and the Screen Forward Conference
I wonder what some time-traveling filmmaker would think of IFP’s Independent Film Week, which commences tomorrow up at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Performing Arts Library. The non-profit IFP — formerly “Independent Feature Project” and now “Independent Filmmaker Project” — has done some version of its Film Week for nearly the entirety of its 35-year history. For much of that time it wasn’t called “Film Week,” but, nonetheless, events occurred annually over a few days in the Fall, and these events served to advance the interests of independent filmmakers by, initially, providing them with a market for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2015 -
TIFF: 5 Questions for A Flickering Truth Director Pietra Brettkelly
American independent filmmakers who moan over long-term storage bills, failed hard drives and misplaced optical tracks will receive the corrective they need to their First World Film Preservation problems by viewing Pietra Brettkelly’s new documentary, A Flickering Truth. Receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the picture follows a group of film archivists who have secretly fought to preserve Afghanistan’s storied film culture from the violence of the Taliban era. Below, Brettkelly answers questions about filming in a war-torn country, Afghan cinema and how her own archival practices have changed as a result of making this film. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Meddler Writer/Director Lorene Scafaria
Screenwriter-turned-director Lorene Scafaria burst onto the scene with her screenplay for Peter Sollett’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Since that 2008 film she has bounced between film and television, writing and directing episodes of New Girl while also debuting her first feature, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So it’s fair to ask Scafaria what made The Meddler, a comedy/drama about an intrusive widowed mom (played by Susan Sarandon) and her frazzled Angeleno daughter (Rose Byrne), a story for the large screen instead of the small. That’s just one of several questions she offers cogent answers to in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for Born to Be Blue Writer/Director Robert Budreau
More than three decades after Charlie “Bird” Parker, nearly three decades after Thelonious Monk and just a couple of weeks before Miles Davis, the jazz great whose trumpet style his own owed something to, West Coast jazzman Chet Baker is brought to the screen in Robert Budreau’s appropriately intimate biographical drama, Born to be Blue. I write “appropriately intimate” because the constricted scale of Budreau’s picture, in which Baker’s troubled life is evoked through scenes set at and in the beaches, cafes, apartments, recording studios and even film sets of California’s “cool jazz” scene, scales the trumpeter’s life just right. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Missing Girl Writer/Director A.D. Calvo
A.D. Calvo is known in the independent horror community for frightening features like The Midnight Game and House of Dust, but with The Missing Girl, premiering in Toronto’s Vanguard section, he dials down the jump scares in favor of a bittersweet character study that’s still not without a sense of mystery. Robert Longstreet, who has given indelible performances in films like This is Martin Bonner and Septien, plays a sad sack owner of a comic book store who becomes unhinged when his pretty young employee, played by Alexia Rasmussen, disappears. Below, Calvo discusses his change of direction, his interest in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2015
