Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“It Was Important to Me Not to Fetishize a Classic Vision But to Look to the Present for Inspiration”: Director Aaron Katz on his L.A. Neo-Noir, Gemini
His fifth feature, and the first following his co-directed (with Martha Stephens) breakthough comedy Land Ho!, Gemini returns writer/director Aaron Katz to the character-based neo-noir of his earlier Cold Weather but with the cloudy Portland grays of that film replaced here with a sunlit sensuality befitting the picture’s L.A. setting. Indeed, shooting in his new hometown for the first time, Katz looks for inspiration to the kind of ’80s thrillers — American Gigolo and Bad Influence in particular — that found their treacheries and ambiguities within the city’s sunlit highways, dark nightclubs and oversized mansions. And while city geography is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2018 -
“When I Write a Script, I Am Making a Hypothesis of What the Film Could Become”: Laurent Cantet on The Workshop
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop boasts a concept that in another picture might result in a piece of twisty, intellectualized metafiction: a semi-successful novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), teaches a writing workshop to a multi-racial group of young students in La Ciotat, a small town just south of Marseille. She encourages the students to explore the concept of genre — to conceive of a murder mystery — and to also connect to the working-class history of the place itself. One student, a young white teenager named Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), seems both engaged and roiled by the assignment; his cooly disturbing writings sit […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Ryan Koo’s Amateur
Filmmaker and No Film School founder Ryan Koo — one of our 2008 25 New Faces of Independent Film — has been working on his debut feature for years. His extremely successful Kickstarter (over $140,000!) launched in 2011, and in a series of updates — and one 2013 Filmmaker interview — he’s been transparent about the long road that developing and making a first feature can become. Well, Netflix ultimately came on board to finance the film, and now there’s a first trailer, with the feature itself set to drop on April 6. You can read more about the film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2018 -
SFFILM Announces Its Launch Program’s 2018 All-Doc Slate
SFFILM announced today the five titles that will comprise its 2018 Launch Program, an initiative intending to highlight for the industry a select group of world-premiering films drawn from different sections of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Films in last year’s Launch Program went on to be bought by distributors includingMagnolia Pictures and Sundance Selects, and SFFILM hopes to build on that momentum this second year. Interestingly, this year’s line-up consists entirely of docs as opposed to the 2017 edition, which featured two of five fiction titles. “We are delighted to shine the spotlight on our second year of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2018 -
The Irish Way
The way writer/director Michael Tully and producer George Rush tell it, Don’t Leave Home, Tully’s new feature, started with the idea of a place and a vibe. The vibe was sophisticated art house horror — something in the vein of Nicolas Roeg’s classic ghost story, Don’t Look Now — where things just feel off. And the place would be Ireland — specifically, Dublin and the spectacular mountains and eerie bogs of County Wicklow, about 40 miles south of the city. But, as Austin-based Tully — whose last feature was the Ocean City, Md.–set Ping Pong Summer — explains, there wasn’t […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
The Explosions Within: Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here
Joe uses a hammer. A tough guy for hire — one who specializes in cases involving pedophilia and child trafficking — Joe owns a gun, of course, and he uses that, too. But for the jobs that truly matter, ones triggering the dark memories that clank painfully around inside his brain, he prefers the brutal simplicity of a simple hammer that can fell an adversary with one silent, well-timed swoop. Arrestingly embodied by Joaquin Phoenix in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s fleet, impressionistic work of hardcore noir, You Were Never Really Here, winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
Leslie Harris’s Return Ticket
“I was looking at old issues of Filmmaker,” says Leslie Harris — director of the 1993 indie drama Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. “There was Quentin, Robert Rodriguez, Nick Gomez, and then Matty Rich and John Singleton. And Juice was just coming out. It was a real male-dominated arena. My impetus was to see a black woman on screen, someone who wasn’t a wife or a girlfriend. Someone who had her own dreams — a strong, confident black woman’s voice.” That voice was Chantel’s — “precocious as hell, sharp as a tack,” wrote Beth Coleman, who interviewed Harris for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance, Redux
“So you didn’t get into Sundance.” That’s the title of a 2009 blog post I wrote for Filmmaker’s website that gets a flurry of hits each December as, yes, a lot of people don’t get into Sundance. My post was written with a tone of plucky defiance — that mixture of self-care and can-do-ism that is the stuff of so much online film advice writing these days. I started by recommending filmmakers change their headspace by going to a museum or walking in the park, and then, a week or two later, dive back into their films by critically rewatching […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
Editor’s Letter
This magazine is called Filmmaker, but even if you’re just a casual reader, you’ll know that we’ve always defined that term expansively. Yes, directors are usually the focus, but we apply the term across the filmmaking spectrum, fully aware of how good work by vital collaborators throughout the production process shapes the finished product — what’s commonly called “the director’s vision.” Midway through our 25th year, we stick to the term “filmmaker,” hoping that it’s elastic enough to include a wide range of visual storytellers, like this issue’s Eliza McNitt, whose VR SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime was one of the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
25 Films and Events We’re Looking Forward to at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival
SXSW, with its tens of thousands of tech enthusiasts and thousands of filmmakers and film fans, kicks off tomorrow with a typically sprawling program that mixes independent discoveries with coolhunting studio films, cutting-edge genre work with artistically-minded episodic series. As always, there is a lot we are excited about seeing, beginning with these 25 films you might put a little digital star next to in your festival app. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable. The great Garry Winogrand — depending on the day, my favorite photographer — is the subject of Sasha Waters Freyer’s documentary, which happens to be the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018
