Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“I Do Take Pride in the Fact that All of the Parties Feel Authentic and Accurate”: Jessica Switch on Producing the Sundance Comedy/Drama, Cha Cha Real Smooth
The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
Watch: Exclusive Clip from Christina Kallas’s Slamdance-Premiering Paris is in Harlem
Set in 2017, Christina Kallas‘s Slamdance-premiering latest feature, Paris Is In Harlem, takes place the night before New York’s infamous Cabaret Law was repealed. In a historic Harlem jazz bar, a shooting alters the lives of several strangers who have gathered for the final night of “no dancing.” The filmmaker has provided Filmmaker an exclusive clip, which you can watch above. XYZ Films is handling North American sales on the film.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
Band of Outsiders: A Conversation between Reservoir Dogs Director Quentin Tarantino and In the Soup Director Alexandre Rockwell
The following conversation between directors Quentin Tarantino and Alexandre Rockwell was published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1993 issue, as these films hit commercial release. It is being reprinted today, as Reservoir Dogs celebrates the 30th anniversary of its premiere at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Friendship, loyalty, and honor–all are classic film themes which, ironically, can sometimes be hard qualities to find in the world of filmmaking. For every film that beats the odds and manages to get made, independent or otherwise, there are a hundred shattered deals, broken promises, and crushed filmmakers left in the shadows. This year two filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2022 -
“Being Overwhelmed Doesn’t Have to Lead to Cynicism”: Rachel Lears on Her Climate Change Sundance Doc, To The End
Cynicism is the dramatic foil in To the End, Rachel Lears’s Sundance Documentary Competition follow-up to her 2020 Sundance picture Knock Down the House. In that film she followed four women — political newcomers hailing from diverse walks of life, all motivated to action by the Trump presidency — as they mounted underdog campaigns to win House seats. That one of the women was New York candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave the film a rousingly satisfying ending, even as other women’s losses made clear the forces opposing progressive generational change. Employing a similar structure, To the End follows three young activists […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2022 -
Sundance Curators and Directors Speak, Along with 16 Films Not To Miss
“Making the shift to an online-only experience was a difficult decision, but it was the right one for the full community,” said new Sundance Executive Director Joana Vicente at the top of today’s opening press conference of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. While the contours of last year’s largely-virtual (excepting the Satellite Screen events around the country) event were visible last June and then explicitly stated in early December, 2020, this year’s necessary hard-pivot to a largely virtual edition (again, with the Satellite Screens) happened late, in early January, 2022. So, when, as the various programmers all announced themselves by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Slamdance-Premiering Coming-of-Age Horror Picture, Honeycomb
“Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club” is how 21-year-old director Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb is described. The logline: “Five small-town girls abandon their mundane lives and move into an abandoned cabin. Growing increasingly isolated, their world becomes filled with imagined rituals and rules but the events of one summer night threaten to abruptly end their age of innocence forever.” With K.J.Relth Miller of Slamdance calling the film “a lo-fi achievement that perfectly encapsulates the Slamdance spirit,” the film will premiere at the virtual festival January 27. Check out the film’s first teaser above.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Western Promises: The Power of the Dog Composer Jonny Greenwood
Wailing French horns, recorded in the vastness of an Oxford cathedral; the mechanized sputtering of a player piano; the anxious propulsion of an ascending and descending cello, defamiliarized by being plucked like a banjo—these are some of the seemingly counterintuitive approaches composer Jonny Greenwood took to scoring Jane Campion’s brooding and suspenseful Western, The Power of the Dog. But just as Campion’s film, set in the early 20th century, tacks away from genre signifiers to tell an unexpectedly intimate tale of fraternal rivalry and stifled desire, so too does Greenwood’s score subvert the expectations of a “big sky” Western soundtrack […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
In the Quiet Moments: The Memoria Sound Team of Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Richard Hocks and Javier Umpierrez
“When I work on sound for Joe’s films, it’s very similar to meditation,” says Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for all of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work since Tropical Malady (2004), including his latest picture, Memoria. “I need to be super focused on every detail. Because it’s like meditating when you watch them, we need to mix the film in a kind of line”— here, on a Zoom call, he makes a slow, horizontal motion with his right hand—“so it’s not too much.” Despite the fact that sections of Memoria, which is about a Scottish woman in Colombia attempting to understand mysterious explosions […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
My 2020 pandemic purchase was a new LG TV, replacing the Samsung that was more than a decade old. The new TV is bigger, of course, but it’s also got way more “smart” features than the old one ever had. I don’t use an Apple TV or Roku, and I probably missed a step or two in the set-up process, but when I turn on the TV, I’m launched into a disorienting grid of dozens of channels offering everything from Johnny Carson reruns to celebrity cooking shows to, on NatureVision TV, “soothing, relaxing programs in crystal clear HD.” Oh, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022
