Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Jim McKay on His Return to Feature Filmmaking, the Soccer-Themed Drama, En el Séptimo Día
The following interview with director Jim McKay was published during last year’s BAMcinemafest and is being rerun today as his feature En el Séptimo Día is in release from Cinema Guild. The film can currently be seen at the IFC Center in New York and the Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. Many other cities are scheduled over the next two months, including, on Friday, the Roxie in San Francisco. Jim McKay, whose early, mid ’90s/early-aughts features (Girls Town, Our Song, Everyday People and Angel) were empathetic and involving New York dramas suffused with a love of neighborhood and feeling for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2018 -
Back Page
Not too long ago, I watched Kevin Smith talk about having a near-fatal heart attack. It was from his hospital bed, streamed on Facebook Live, the day after doctors put a stent in his left anterior descending artery—the so-called widowmaker that felled writer John Gregory Dunne in the opening pages of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Smith’s a great storyteller, so his recounting was hilarious, full of dick jokes and such—his quick mind had already assembled the events of the previous 24 hours into the funniest PSA for cardio health ever made. And indeed, by the time […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Class Review
When it came time for A.B. Shawky to make Yomeddine, a road movie about a leper trekking across Egypt in search of lost relatives, he turned to his NYU Tisch School of the Arts colleagues and faculty for advice. After all, the movie is both his first feature as well his NYU thesis film. Unlike many film schools, “NYU encourages you to do features for your thesis project,” Shawky told Filmmaker’s Tiffany Pritchard, explaining that the school granted him an extra year on top of the two normally allowed to complete the arduous production. The school also granted him key […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Editor’s Letter
Despite best-laid plans and as much early assigning as possible, a portion of this magazine’s every issue comes together in the final days. A bit of procrastination is most certainly involved, but, honestly, I don’t think it’d be different if we were a weekly, a monthly, or even an annual—there’s always that rush to the finish. It’s like that in filmmaking, too. Those of us who worked on Harmony Korine’s Gummo, for example, look back and recall that half the film was shot on the last day. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s also got some truth to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Complicated Grief: Ari Aster on Hereditary‘s Family Nightmare
There are films that scare you, and then there are films that do something more. The former are easy to name—maybe you remember a particular jump scare or chilling scene—but the latter are more difficult to describe. These are films that dig deep into your subconscious, films that identify a weakness or fear and prey upon that with their cinematic imagination. You’ll remember scenes from these movies in detail, too, but also how old you were, and where you were, and what was going on in your life when you saw them. You’ll remember how they made you feel, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Wearing a Sandwich Board to Promote Your Movie: Tips from Bernard and Huey Director Dan Mirvish
There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 6, 2018 -
IFP Announces 12 Episodic Projects for Female-Driven 2018 Edition of Screen Forward Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, has announced the 12 serialized projects comprising its 2018 Screen Forward Labs. Now in its fourth year, the Screen Forward Labs were created to support the increasingly large number of early-career creators making web, series or app-based work. Notably, says IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in the press release, 73% of this year’s projects are from female creators, and 50% are led by all-female teams. For the first time this year, fiction and non-fiction projects co-exist in the same program, and genres and themes include post-apocalyptic science fiction, a personal drama involving […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 4, 2018 -
Watch: Falz the Bad Guy’s Childish Gambino Riff, This is Nigeria
Back in 2002, Filmmaker covered Nigeria’s “Nollywood” film scene, which producer Jeremy Nathan wrote, could be compared to the American no-budget movement of the ’80s and ’90s with its inventive, low-cost non-industry production models. Nollywood would go on to receive much international press over the years, with articles describing the interplay between Hollywood hits and the Nigerian variants they would inspire. The latest noteworthy example is actually not a movie or TV show but a music video. Nigerian rapper Falz the Bad Guy, a former lawyer, has released a riff on Childish Gambino’s This is America, in which the song […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 3, 2018 -
Anticipating an Exciting (?) Cannes: Films We’re Looking Forward to in the 2018 Edition
I was talking with some French producers recently, and they were seriously looking forward to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And they were miffed by some of the preview articles that have been posted, including Todd McCarthy’s piece questioning the firepower of this year’s line-up. For years people have been wanting the Festival to be more adventurous, they told me, and now, when they are, Cannes is being criticized for not having the new films of the familiar auteurs who have appeared in the main selection so many, many times. I heard similar comments from a Latin American producer, who […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Kyle Henry’s Rogers Park
A slightly belated posting here to recognize 25 New Face filmmaker Kyle Henry’s latest feature, the Chicago-set relationship drama Rogers Park, which is extended at Cinema Village through this coming Thursday, May 10. After theatrical openings in New York and L.A., the film has cemented a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Glenn Kenny writing in the New York Times, “The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.” Henry has been in the independent trenches for nearly two decades, with features including the superb psychological drama Room and […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2018
