Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“We Wanted the Film to Feel Like a Memory, a Dream of Childhood…”: Director James Ponsoldt on His Coming-of-Age Neo-Noir, Summering
In Summering, James Ponsoldt‘s return to cinema following several years of episodic television work, four young girls, best friends about to enter different junior high schools, find their final moments of group bonding upended by a shocking discovery: a dead body. Encountered near a secret spot they dub Terabithia (after the YA novel and film Bridge to Terabithia), the gruesome find turns into a challenge. What if rather than calling the police or telling their parents these friends could actually solve the mystery of this deceased middle-aged man’s identity and cause of death? It’d be both a kind of end-of-summer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2022 -
“The ‘Broken Heroine Narrative’ — That’s Something I’m Very Interested in Subverting”: Lily Baldwin on Her Audible Podcast, Stories of the Stalked
Director, choreographer and dancer Lily Baldwin has appeared in these pages several times over the last decade in interviews about her work across both short film and virtual reality. But throughout this time, one project — alternately creatively compelling and deeply distressing — has been a persistent focus. In a story she details in our interview below, it began as Glass, an autobiographically-inspired thriller about a woman being stalked, that placed in the IFP (now Gotham) Emerging Storytellers program in 2014. It then morphed into a multi-part documentary TV series before finally now hitting download queues as a six-part Audible […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2022 -
Remembering Director of Photography Tom Richmond, 1950-2022
This piece has been updated after publication with comments from Keith Gordon. — Editor Director of photography Tom Richmond, who shot numerous seminal features that launched many directorial careers, died yesterday in New York City. He was 72. Tom’s career began in the early ’80s. After graduating Harvard with an undergraduate photography degree and then going on to study at AFI, he worked second camera on Alex Cox’s Repo Man and was camera operator on Oliver Stone’s Salvador, among other credits. After several low-budget comedy and horror films, Tom was director of photography on two higher-profile films: Cox’s Straight to Hell […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2022 -
“I Want to Be the Rod Serling of Cinematography”: An Interview with Little Odessa DP Tom Richmond
The following interview with director of photography Tom Richmond appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1995 issue. Richmond died yesterday in New York at the age of 72, and this interview is now published online for the first time. — Editor “I want to be the Rod Serling of cinematography,” says Tom Richmond, whose distinctive and varied lensing has graced three recent films: the “Tex Avery meets Bonnie and Clyde” Love and a.45; the hyper-realist heist noir Killing Zoe; and Little Odessa, James Gray’s intimate epic about Brighton Beach’s Russian mafia. “The way Serling could get into you…”Richmond continues. “I want [my […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2022 -
“We Can Shoot the Sun and the Characters Dramatically, but the World is Humble”: Writer/Director Max Walker-Silverman on A Love Song
The sun is harsh in Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song. Intense in the mid-day, it beats down on Faye (Dale Dickey) — ruddy, her face lined by hard living, her blonde hair lightened further by all the incandescent days. Ensconced in her small trailer sitting in a lakeside patch of dirt somewhere in Colorado, the widow waits for a man, also familiar with loss, she knew decades ago. She wrote to him — will he show up? It’s not a spoiler to reveal that he does, in the form of Wes Studi, and theirs is a bittersweet, gently melancholic connection […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Andrew Dominik’s Ana de Armas-Starring Blonde
“Ms. Monroe, it’s time,” are the first ominous words heard in the just-released trailer for Andrew Dominik’s long-awaited Netflix production, Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s book about actor and movie star Marilyn Monroe. Ana de Armas plays Monroe in the dark drama. In addition to first glimpses of de Armas’s performance, among what’s striking about the trailer is Chayse Irvin’s cinematography, which, across scenes, instantly recalls the different period photographic styles — in cinema, paparazzi shots, and media and magazine coverage — associated with Monroe’s depiction. Interestingly, Blonde is Irvin’s second credit this year. The BlacKkKlansman DP also shot […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 28, 2022 -
Film Writer and Curator Travis Crawford, R.I.P.
Film writer and festival curator Travis Crawford, who worked extensively with various home video labels in the restoration of classic foreign-language, independent and genre work, died this week, I was saddened to learn via social media. He was 52. Crawford, who for many years curated the Philadelphia Film Festival’s Danger after Dark series, wrote extensively for Filmmaker over the years, predominantly in the late aughts and early ’10s, when he headed up the print magazine’s “Load and Play” columns. His pieces on Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the seven-disk Criterion box-set, American Lost and Found: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 22, 2022 -
Funding Teaser: Cutter Hodierne’s The Shepherd
Writer/director Cutter Hodierne, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2012 and the director of the short and feature Fishing without Nets, is currently fundraising for a new film, The Shepherd, a UFO thriller to be hot in the Sacred Valley of Peru. Based on a short film currently in post, and co-written with star Amiel Cayo, The Shepherd is about a rural herder searching for his missing daughter who becomes paranoid and beset with visions following a mysterious event. From the press release: The Shepherd is a sci-fi thriller set in one of the most formidable, mystical and lush landscapes on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 22, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
In my recent online interview with Olivier Assayas about his HBO series, Irma Vep, we talked about a certain anxiety around the subject of television—its usurpation of critical and audience interest from cinema, as well as the kind of career imperative young filmmakers today feel about directing for the small screen. So much work is there that most young directors I know feel like they have to try and land series gigs, if for nothing more than to keep a roof over their heads as features take longer and longer to set up. One argument in favor of TV that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 14, 2022 -
“… People Bond with Marcel the Way You Bond with the Ladies in Grey Gardens“: Director Dean Fleischer-Camp on the Winning Animated Feature Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
When I interviewed Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate about their short film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, for Filmmaker‘s 2010 25 New Faces series, both remember the project resulting from a period where they were a little down. Then a couple, Fleischer-Camp described being “unfilled” at work, while Slate said, ‘I was depressed… a little bit. We were at a time in our lives when whatever we made would have a layer of gravity. And the real magic of [the movie] to me is that it has this layer of gravity, but it’s still about an adorable little shell.” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2022
