Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2018 Feature Film Lineup
The Tribeca Film Festival has just unveiled the feature film lineup for its 2018 edition. The closing night film is Liz Garbus’s The Fourth Estate, about the New York Times’s coverage of President Trump’s first year in office, the centerpiece is Drake Doremus’s sci-fi romance Zoe, and among the others are a slew of films we’ve been tracking here at Filmmaker. Work by former 25 New Faces like Eva Vives, John Maringouin, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck, new movies by Miguel Arteta and Mads Brugger, the first feature by interactive superstar Meredith Danluck, Nancy Schwartzman’s campus rape doc Roll Red […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 7, 2018 -
San Francisco International Film Festival Announces its 2018 Golden Gate Award Feature Competitions
The San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards Feature Competitions were announced today, and the 20 films span many well-received pictures we’ve had our eye on here at Filmmaker over the last year. These include 25 New Face RaMell Ross’s Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, Mila Turajlić’s The Other Side of Everything, Jordana Spiro’s Night Comes On, and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers. There are two world premieres: a US/Ghana production by Bay Area directors Zachary Fink and Alyssa Fedele, The Rescue List, about a safe house for kids escaping the country’s child labor system; and Tre Maison Dasan, US […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2018 -
The Challenge of Making Fiction Podcasts Discussed as IFP Expands into Audio Storytelling
“Podcasting has just been invented as a medium, and no one knows what a fiction podcast is,” said John Dryden, Director of Scripted Content at Panoply Media, at last week’s IFP Audio Thought Leader Summit at the Made in New York Media Center. “It’s just not a radio drama. Radio drama has been dead in the U.S. for 50 years, so we are starting from scratch.” Dryden was speaking along with Leital Molad, First Look Media’s Executive Producer, Podcasts, on a panel titled “New Fiction: Developing Scripted Narrative Podcasts,” moderated by the Media Center’s Programming Producer Bill Curran. Between the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2018 -
“Being a Filmmaker Wasn’t Something It Occurred to Me… You Could Be”: Film Journalist Neville Pierce on His Path Towards Directing
Over nearly 20 years, film journalist Neville Pierce has collected bylines at most of the U.K.’s top film publications, including Empire (where he’s a contributing editor), Total Film (where he was the editor) and The Guardian. And while he worked as a reviewer early in his career, he’s best known for his long-form profiles of actors and directors, pieces that are deep dives into the art and craft of subjects like Michael Fassbender, Mark Romanek and, most consistently, David Fincher, whose sets he has visited and written about no less than seven times. But since 2011 Pierce has been building […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca’s The Pearl
“Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie,” wrote Vadim Rizov out of True False in 2016, “all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community.” That community is one of older trans women living in the Pacific Northwest and coming out for the first time in their fifties and sixies, and LaMarca and Dimmock’s is indeed a beautifully shot and empathetic portrait. The film was selected for our 2016 “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, when we wrote: Dimmock and LaMarca’s debut feature documentary is an intimate portrait of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2018 -
“Letting Emotion Dictate the Scenes”: Breaking Down Reed Morano’s Direction of The Handmaid’s Tale
Meredith Alloway’s interview with director and DP Reed Morano (one of our top posts of the year), where Morano explains the exhaustive preparation that led her to be hired to direct the pilot of Hulu’s Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, also contained a section where the director broke down the camera and direction decisions she made for one crucial scene. Now, Nathalie Sejean at Mentorless has taken that section and turned it into a concise visual essay that allows you to see for yourself the work that Morano described to Alloway. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2018 -
“Maybe When We’re Performing We Feel More like Ourselves than We Do in the ‘Real World'”: Josephine Decker on her Sundance Hit, Madeline’s Madeline
Three fascinating but very different actresses star in Josephine Decker’s exhilarating Sundance feature, Madeline’s Madeline. There’s Molly Parker, the exceptional film and television actress currently seen in Wormwood, who plays Evangeline, an experimental theater director who develops her work out of immersive performance workshops, challenging her company to mine their own feelings and experiences while creating new ones through the sometimes cringe-inducing exercises that can be the stuff of the improvisatory creation. Miranda July, an artist, writer, director and one of the most significant performance artists of the last 20 years, plays Regina, the frazzled single mother of a teenage […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2018 -
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Kailash Take the Top Awards at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Desiree Akhaven’s drama about teenage gay conversion therapy, and Kailash, Derek Doneen’s documentary about Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi took home the two top U.S. prizes, the U.S. Dramatic and U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prizes, at tonight’s 2018 Sundance Film Festival closing night ceremonies. Nearly 30 awards were given out throughout the evening, prompting emcee Jason Mantzoukas, star of Hannah Fidell’s The Long Dumb Road, to chant, “10 more days, 10 more awards!” at the end of an evening that saw much diversity in the juror selections: Four out of the five top U.S. awards […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2018 -
“The Chaos of the Race Track Was a Constant Challenge”: DP Gregory Kershaw on The Last Race
The documentary debut from fine art photographer Michael Dweck, The Last Race screens five times in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film tells the story of Riverhead Raceway, a decades-old race track on Long Island. At one time Long Island hosted roughly 40 such tracks; today, Riverhead is the only one that remains. Filmmaker Gregory Kershaw served as both cinematographer and co-producer on the film. Below, he spoke with Filmmaker about the physical toll of filming at a loud and fume-filled race track, the influence of Errol Morris’ early films and the logistical madness of having “10 cameras mounted on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2018 -
25 Films We’re Excited about at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance starts tomorrow, and just before the curtain raises we’re squeaking in with a list of films our correspondents — Vadim Rizov, Meredith Alloway and myself — are excited to see. I’m about to start packing, and colleagues from other magazines and companies are Facebooking their SARS-mask covered faces on their way to the influenza petri-dish of Park City. I could spin this intro out longer — quote Sundance festival director John Cooper on how this year’s festival is full of “alternative voices” — or perhaps left-turn into some metaphor or another, but I’ll just do what we do here […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2018
