Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
Lookbook Case Study: The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me
Writer/director Cedric Cheung-Lau says the initial version of the script for his in-development debut feature, The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me, consisted solely of 44 images. Then came the words. For the lookbook, Cheung-Lau took sentences from the finished script and married them to images of his location, the Annapurna section of the Himalayas. The script tells the story of a grieving older woman and a young Nepalese man who meet in the mountains and go on a journey together, and Cheung-Lau stresses the importance of the setting to the story. “The landscape surrounding them is real,” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Lookbook Case Study: 306 Hollywood
“With our lookbook, we wanted to capture our visual aesthetic and emphasize the importance we place on images,” write directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarín about the presentation deck for their hybrid documentary, 306 Hollywood. A work years in the making, the doc details the sibling filmmakers’ excavation of their grandmother’s New Jersey home in the years after she died. The archeological metaphor here is intentional; the Bogaríns describe the house in their 2017 Filmmaker 25 New Faces profile as “a microcosm, a universe… The whole history of the 20th century can be found in the layers of this house.” 306 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Lookbook Case Study: A Woman, A Part
“I knew from looking at lookbooks that people pull images from online, but I didn’t see the point of doing that,” says writer/director Elisabeth Subrin. “Because then you are just saying, ’I want my film to look like someone else’s film.’” For the lookbook for her first feature, A Woman, A Part, Subrin says, “I thought it would be fun to see if I could create the images from the script that I had in my head for years.” (Disclosure: I produced A Woman, A Part along with 2019 Film Independent Producers Award winner Shrihari Sathe.) Subrin, previously best known […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Lookbook Case Study: About a Mountain
“Because I was a no-name filmmaker,” says Lily Henderson, who made Filmmaker’s 2014 25 New Faces list on the strength of the lookbook and demo reel for her forthcoming documentary, About a Mountain, “I felt I needed to go to Nevada on spec and shoot some images for myself to see whether it was worth it to make the film.” Her initial trip was a fruitful one, generating footage—shot on the URSA Mini—and photos that captured both the lonely, dry heat and consumerist fantasy world that would be the stage for her film. As she writes in the lookbook’s introduction, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Income Forecasting
“There’s a great infrastructure, and the credit is solid,” said Entertainment Partners (EP) executive vice president, John Hadity, in these pages one year ago about the New York State Film Production Tax Credit Program. Governor Andrew Cuomo had just extended its sunset date until 2022, with $420 million in annual funds appropriated. “That means television series that do their planning 18 to 24 months in advance have certainty that the program is going to be around for another few years,” he said. But just a year later, Hadity cites the New York program as one of his worries when surveying […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Editor’s Letter
Ask me what’s changed the most regarding pitching independent film over the years and the first thing I’ll say is the rise of the lookbook. In the 1990s, lookbooks were exotic things. A few directors had them, but the cost of making them made these collections of reference images, and sometimes original art, stand out for their uniqueness. I remember a French auteur who sent us one at our Forensic Films office—a 100-or-so pages of smeary screen grabs and disturbing pornography/pop-culture collages—that was like a perfect-bound art book. Then there was the filmmaker with an excellent script whose lookbook had […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
“… The Smallest Budget I Have Worked With, and Yet It Felt the Most Ample”: Five Questions for Hilary Brougher About Her SXSW-Premiering South Mountain
A welcome sight on the SXSW feature list is a new film from Hilary Brougher, who has been making inventive, emotionally acute independent film across three decades now, always working in some degree of low to ultra-low budget. Her debut, Sticky Fingers of Time, was lo-fi sci-fi with a time-travel hook that might remind you of Looper but with a feminist slant. Stephanie Daley, starring Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, followed in 2006, a mystery both legal and existential about an unwanted pregnancy. And now there’s South Mountain, which finds Brougher working with her smallest budget yet but with a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2019 -
“Spontaneity is Very Much a Part of My Process”: Five Questions for Margarita Jimeno About Her Cinequest-Premiering Grind Reset Shine
Following her vibrant and raucous concert doc, Gogol Bordello Nonstop, Colombia-born, New York-based filmmaker Margarita Jimeno makes her dramatic feature debut with the Cinequest-premiering Grind Reset Shine, another story about an art and artmaking but one that unfolds in a very different way. From the press release: When the worlds of a struggling artist and a nun entangle, how will they break free? Peter is a struggling artist who moves from New York to Berlin to explore his luck and join an art collaborative. Alicia, preparing for nunhood in a remote Polish village, tries to decipher the existence of Satan […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 10, 2019 -
13 Films and VR Pieces to Anticipate at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival
With SXSW already underway, here’s my quick list of films of interest at this year’s edition of Austin’s annual tech, music and film festival. The Beach Bum. Harmony Korine’s latest, The Beach Bum, which time travels the stoner comedy ethos of ’70s Cheech and Chong to the upscale mansions and beer-soaked boardwalk of contemporary Miami Beach, is sure to be a SXSW standout this year. Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, a cheerfully debauched would-be poet whose writer’s block is more a product of his 420 lifestyle than existential exploration. “The idea of getting wasted is a virtue to Moondog, living in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2019 -
Watch: Caspar Newbolt’s Dreamlike Short, Leaving Hope
Version Industries designer Caspar Newbolt — who, in addition to being Filmmaker‘s print magazine designer (along with Charlotte Gosch), has designed some of the more striking independent film posters of recent years — has just premiered his first short film over at NoBudge. (You can watch it above as well.) It’s an eerie and dreamlike NYC drama that has, in addition to a compelling performance by Laine Rettmer, bravura final sequence that illustrates Godard’s (or is it Griffiths’s?) dictum of the minimum requirements for a film. From the description at NoBudge: Suffering a loss, a woman finds a mysterious book […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2019
