Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Watch: Sean Baker’s Short Film for Khaite’s Fall ’21 Collection
Inspired, he says, by Walter Hill and, as obvious from the title treatment, The Warriors title designer Dan Perri, Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) has directed a blast of a fashion short for Khaite, a girl-gang fantasia evoking the cinema as well as streets of ’70s and ’80s New York. Shot by Sean Price Williams, the short compresses the attitude, abandon and confrontations of some imagined and long-lost work of downtown cinema (you’ll pull your own set of references — mine included Ms. 45, Liquid Sky, Paris is Burning and Wild Style) into a brisk four-minutes scored to Ace Frehley’s New […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2021 -
“The Strange Beauty of our World, the Strange Disaster of Our World”: Chris Peters on His Slamdance AI Short, 24,483 Dreams of Death
A spectral and hypnotic entry in this year’s Slamdance Film Festival is Chris Peters’s “film experiment,” 24,483 Dreams of Death, which uses a Mario Bava film (Mask of the Demon) as the sole source material for an A.I.’s imagination of our visual world. Over six days, Peters — a filmmaker, painter as well as software engineer — fed the frames of the film into the computer, producing images that represent, he writes, “… the machine’s neural network forming in real time, not footage in the traditional sense of photographed scenes, but footage of the internal experience of a new intelligence […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2021 -
“…I Asked If She Was Up for Hauling a Mattress and Screaming Bloody Murder for a Short Film…”: Adinah Dancyger On Her Hannah Gross-Starring Short, Moving
The transportation of an object from point A to point B — it’s one of the most basic of human endeavors, and one that provides both story and a bit of mystery to Adinah Dancyger’s rich and elegant short, Moving. Starring Hannah Gross (Mindhunter, I Used To Be Darker) and winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short at the Slamdance 2020 festival, Moving, with much physical action and minimal dialogue, focuses on a young woman moving a mattress across town and up a flight of stairs to an empty apartment. Moving in New York City is a nightmare […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2021 -
The Doors of Our Mind: Director Florian Zeller on Memory, Mystery and The Father
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 print edition. Among the techniques used to remember is one dating back to the Ancient Greeks: the Memory Palace. Facts, people, life events are “placed” within the rooms of a building, preferably a real one the remembering person is very familiar with. To summon the memories, the person mentally strolls from room to room, allowing the individual locations within the building to trigger the images placed inside. The Memory Palace’s ability to associate memories with place is given a devastating twist in French director Florian Zeller’s debut picture, The Father, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2021 -
Advance Team
“I suppose you want to talk about her process,” says producer Dan Janvey when I tell him I’d like to learn about the producing team’s work with Chloé Zhao on Nomadland. Well, yes, I say—but not because I and Filmmaker readers aren’t familiar with it. After all, Filmmaker has covered Zhao’s work since 2013, when she appeared on our 25 New Faces list before the production of her debut feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. We spoke with her for a feature interview about that film and for her follow-up, The Rider, our spring 2018 cover feature, watching her develop […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2021 -
Editor’s Letter
I spoke to a writer/director friend last week who lives in Los Angeles, where, at the time, coronavirus case numbers were still escalating. My friend hasn’t shot anything during the pandemic but has been using these months to work on a new script and develop a TV show. But in the last few weeks, this writer/director has been getting urgent calls from execs to board shows and features that are financed and ready to go. It’s a bit of a whiplash, my friend said—trying to remain cautious, to be cognizant that the pandemic is still ongoing, but while grappling with […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2021 -
Post Empire
Empire, Nevada, “felt like a town suspended in the 1950s, as if the postwar economy had never ended,” writes Jessica Bruder in her nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. The small mining town consisted of four main roads, lined with homes populated by the workers of United States Gypsum, the manufacturer of Sheetrock. Subsidized rents were as low as $250 a month, the company covered TV and internet and, as one resident told Bruder, there were “no gangs, no sirens, no violence.” But economic forces caught up with Empire. In 2011, U.S. Gypsum, a company with a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2021 -
Coda, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) Take Top Prizes at The 2021 Sundance Film Festival Awards
“When we dreamed this idea, this is what we dreamed, but you all made it a reality,” said Sundance Festival Director Tabitha Jackson during the introduction to this evening’s 2021 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony. Like the festival, the ceremony was a smoothly running virtual one, connecting the at-home Sundance directors and programmers with the filmmakers similarly ensconced around the world (or, in the cases of Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, All Light, Everywhere director Theo Anthony and Users director Natalia Almada, respectively, in a car on his way to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2021 -
20 Anticipated Films and New Media Works at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
“It’s about energy — how do we preserve the energy around the work and the artist?” That’s Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson speaking this morning at Sundance’s opening press conference about the thinking that went in to this year’s necessarily altered pandemic edition. With a slimmed-down schedule and screenings happening through the Sundance platform as well as at various “satellite screens,” Sundance has fully embraced the challenges and potentials of translating the Sundance experience to the ways in which we are living our (viewing) lives now. But several principles guided the Sundance team, said Jackson. One was the concept […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 138: Nicole Beharie
Some actors go through a transformation to the point where the word “performance” feels inadequate. “Embodiment” is more apt. Nicole Beharie transforms into Turquoise Jones in Channing Godfrey People’s film Miss Juneteenth. It’s a wonder to behold. On this episode, she talks about the immersive preparation work that went into her Gotham Award-winning performance, how the opportunity to take her time and “own the space” affected her work in a deep way, and the substitutions necessary to create the motherly bond so central to the film. Plus we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of unanswered questions in a performance, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2021
