Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Filmmaker‘s Fall Issue, with Laura Poitras Cover Shot by Jacob Appelbaum, Online Now
Activist, hacker and computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, a subject in Laura Poitras’s riveting and important CITIZENFOUR, shot Filmmaker‘s Fall issue cover — an eerie portrait of Poitras at home in Berlin, filmed on discontinued Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film. Here, via email, is Appelbaum on the photograph: I have been shooting with Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film for the better part of a decade thanks to a kind introduction to the medium by Canadian artist Kate Young. Sadly shortly after discovery of the film, I learned that it was discontinued by Kodak. The film was given an extra lease […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Editor’s Letter
“Monsieur Godard, are you more interested in making films or social commentary?” the French director was asked at a 1968 symposium on his work. “I see no difference between the two,” he replied. This anecdote was recounted in a winter 2011 column for this magazine by director Zachary Wigon, who wrote about the outsized role cinema and politicized filmmakers had in the cultural conversations of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Where are today’s filmmakers in the dialogues of our moment? Three years later, it’s a question echoed by Anthony Kaufman in his Industry Beat column. Focused more broadly on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
In the Eye of the Storm: Laura Poitras on CITIZENFOUR
Red tail lights glow in an inky black tunnel. In voiceover, a woman’s voice softly reads. “Laura,” the email begins. The sender writes of encryption, passwords, the government documents he intends to send and the reason he addressed this email to her. “You’ve been selected,” Laura speaks, as the sender goes on to explain that every phone call she makes, trip she embarks on, person she befriends will be observed, recorded, surveilled. “This is a story few but you can tell.” With this cool, measured voiceover, drawing us into her life at the moment it changed forever, documentary filmmaker Laura […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Positive Trauma: Editor Mathilde Bonnefoy on CITIZENFOUR
Paris-born editor Mathilde Bonnefoy has criss-crossed documentary and fiction, working with directors such as Wim Wenders (The Soul of a Man) and, most prominently, Tom Tykwer. Her first feature editing credit is the director’s time-bending international hit Run Lola Run, and she has continued to work with Tykwer on Heaven, Three and The International, among others. Long based in Berlin, Bonnefoy, as she relates below, was sought after by Poitras because of her work on Tykwer’s films and the “thriller” nature of CITIZENFOUR’s source material. Below, in the final days of post-production, I speak to Bonnefoy about encrypted workflows, working […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Digital Tableaux: Cinematographer Dick Pope on Mr. Turner
“Turner was progressive,” says cinematographer Dick Pope. “He was not a Luddite. He was very forward-looking. And if he was making the decision today, whether to shoot on film or digital, with all the tools and control of the palette [digital] offers, Mike and I felt that he would choose digital.” “Mike,” of course, is Mike Leigh, and “Turner” is J.M.W. Turner, the 19th-century painter of roiling seas and fiery vistas containing a near-religious quality of apocalypse. Together, Leigh and Pope have made Mr. Turner, a rare artist biopic that imbues within its visual strategies a sense of its subject’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Parting Shot
When it came time for writer/director Zachary Wigon to cast the mysterious heartbreaker of his cyber-age romantic thriller The Heart Machine, he immediately looked not to one of the current crop of chirpy uptalkers but to an actress who has brought an unusual gravity and intensity to several distinguished recent independent films, Kate Lyn Sheil. In Wigon’s picture, Sheil is the IP address-obscured object of desire, playing a geolocational game of hide-and-seek with a hipster Harry Caul, played by John Gallagher Jr. Of whether the film’s virtual romance (the couple fall for each other via Skype) is “real,” she told […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Afternoon Smackdown: Pre-Vis’ing a Fight Scene
Action cinematographer Lawrence Ribeiro forwards this short video of an afternoon’s work — literally. Below, he explains how, with a camera and two top stuntmen, he can mock-up a dynamic fight scene. From Ribeiro: Here’s a chase and fight sequence we shot, in five hours, using two top stunt professionals and one camera. In 2nd unit, we’d consider this type of shooting a level above pre-visualization (previs). Previs is a critical tool for designing action sequences. Sometimes all a script will say is, “…and they fight.” So videos like this allow us to experiment with choreography, and save time and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 19, 2014 -
See No Evil 2 Directors The Soska Sisters on Collaborative Directing
In the upcoming issue of Filmmaker, Esther Robinson writes about directors who work in pairs. Robinson’s focus is on how two directors is better than one when it comes to navigating the development and financial aspects of being a director, and she surveys a number of them on how they structure their work. But then there’s the also the basic question: how do they actually do it? Is everything discussed jointly? Does one talk to the actors and the other direct the camera? Is one more dominant in production and the other in post? In this short clip, Jen and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2014 -
Five Questions for St. Vincent Writer/Director Ted Melfi
With his debut feature, St. Vincent, Ted Melfi may seem like one of those out-of-nowhere independent sensations that pops on the scene a few times a year. But as he explains in the interview below, he has actually been behind the camera for years — shooting all styles of commercials and music videos — and has been producing independent films for even longer. (And, as he further explains, all those out-of-nowhere people — they didn’t come from nowhere either.) For St. Vincent, Melfi drew on his own family experiences — and star Bill Murray’s unique mixture of irreverence and poignancy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2014 -
“We’re Doing All the President’s Men, and Then We’re Doing The Parallax View“: Michael Cuesta on Kill the Messenger
Although it is a ’90s-set story dealing with an ‘80s political cover-up, Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger, the true story of journalist Gary Webb, couldn’t be more of the moment. When filmmaker Laura Poitras is documenting the work of a new breed of crusading journalists, it’s enlightening to revisit the work of a writer like Webb and to remember the opposition he faced from not only the U.S. government but his fellow scribes in the mainstream press. In Kill the Messenger, Jeremy Renner delivers a quietly gripping turn as the San Jose Mercury News reporter who comes across information revealing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 15, 2014
