Authors — Scott Macaulay
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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 -
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
