Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the winter 2023 edition of Filmmaker, the second issue of our 30th anniversary year. It’s our annual awards season issue, in which we cover the Gotham Awards and devote a special section to considering our favorite below-the-line contributions of the year, profiles that reveal a lot about the new processes and technologies that inform filmmaking today. For example, in A. E. Hunt’s profile of Gotham Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Paul Rogers, the editor talks about the extensive VFX work in the film, including the use of time-remapping software as well as comping in pictorial elements to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
Artistic Outputs: Filmmakers and Production Designers on Using Generative AI
“An ominous slender figure in the foreground, a gay couple kissing in the distance, alleyway, two-point perspective, at night, a bar crowded, 8K, cinematic, cinematic composition, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, rendered in the Gaspar Noe engine.” Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
An Interview With Glass Onion Producer Ram Bergman
In the early 1990s, the playbook for beginning independent producers used to be this: Find a budding auteur, make their first ultra-low-budget film, sell it at a festival, then partner with the director on larger, increasingly successful projects, allowing both careers to grow symbiotically. Independent film does contain such partnerships—Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes is a notable one and, more recently, the producing team of Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston and director David Lowery—but countless others fizzle out. Sometimes, the stress of a first feature generates behavior from either party that shuts down any thought of future collaboration. Other […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
“How Could One Document the Unseen?”: Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck on Their Haunted Cinema Eye Honors-Nominated Short, The Last Days of August
In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Take Out
Sean Baker’s debut feature was 2000’s Four Letter Words, but it was his second (following his work on TV’s Greg the Bunny), Take Out, directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, that is the most clear antecedent to the neorealist-inflected work he practices today. When I interviewed Baker in 2012 about his Starlet, we began with his origin story, which included this section on Take Out: I was a bit discouraged. I was seeing these filmmakers I’d gone to school with — Todd Phillips, Marc Forster — start to make waves. Their careers were taking off. I wanted to get back to my […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 31, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Eileen Yaghoobian’s Skater Zombies
Director and producer Eileen Yaghoobian followed the release of her 2008 documentary about underground poster design, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, with a number of surprising projects, including Exit the Labyrinth, a short film produced with the Guardian about Berlin’s Labyrinth, and Send Me Your Sexts, an online service that creates short films out of user-submitted erotic chats. She’s now made a short — “a sports action horror film” — that is as well a pitch for a feature. Check out the teaser above, and look for the short on the Skater Zombies YouTube channel on Halloween. Yaghoobian sent the following […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2022 -
Aftersun, TÁR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Inspection Top Gotham Awards Nominations List
Nominations for the 2022 Gotham Awards were announced this morning, with Todd Fields’s TÁR topping the list with five nominations, including Best Picture, Outstanding Lead Performance (Cate Blanchett) and two Outstanding Performer noms (Noémie Merlant and Nina Hoss). But perhaps the biggest surprise is in the composition of the Best Feature category, which omitted a number of presumed awards-season heavyweights in favor of a trio of excellent, smaller-budgeted, pure independent films acquired at festivals. Along with TÁR and the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once, Best Feature nominees are Charlotte Wells’s delicately allusive memory piece, Aftersun, an A24 acquisition out […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 25, 2022 -
Watch: Rachel Gordon and James-Michael Boyer Explain Documentary Educational Distribution
Rachel Gordon, author of the recently published and recommended The Documentary Distribution Toolkit: How to Get Out, Get Seen, and Get an Audience and James Boyer, director of operations at distributor Collective Eye Films, join D-Word founder Doug Block for this useful conversation about documentary distribution and all of its related subjects. In the talk, Boyer talks about things like needed deliverables, how his company makes acquisitions and the role of festivals in launching films, and Gordon talks about the realities of self-distribution, grassroots marketing techniques, and identifying and interacting with educational instructors who may be able to place films […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 25, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
When Irwin Young, longtime chairman of DuArt Film Laboratories, died earlier this year at the age of 94, there was an outpouring of tributes, remembrances and praise for a businessman and technical innovator who was “foundational to the indie film movement,” as David Leitner wrote on our website. “Irwin not only simplified and streamlined postproduction, he stepped to the plate to help ‘impecunious’ (his word) indie filmmakers too many times to count, cutting deals, OK’ing delayed payments, sometimes even investing in the films themselves. As a consequence, iconic filmmakers working today—too many to list here—got a leg up when they […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Antoine Fuqua’s Will Smith-Starring Emancipation
After much speculation over the release date of Antoine Fuqua’s Will Smith-starring Emancipation, Apple TV+ is making something of an awards season play and has dated the film for December 2 in theaters and December 9 on the streaming service. By point of comparison, last year’s Best Picture-winning Coda was released day-and-date in theaters and on the service. From the press release: Apple Original Films’ “Emancipation,” directed and executive produced by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “The Equalizer”) and starring and produced by Will Smith (“King Richard,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Ali”), will premiere in theaters on December 2, 2022, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 3, 2022
