Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Editor’s Letter
If you’re an obsessive and long-term subscriber to Filmmaker, you’ll note that you’re receiving this spring issue a week or so before you’d normally receive it. And you’ll certainly note when the next issue, our summer, lands in your mailbox almost a month before it’s arrived in recent years. The fall issue will be similarly early, hitting you just after Labor Day as opposed to mid-October. Finally, our winter issue, which customarily debuts in late January, will now reach you in early December. Why the change? Well, first of all, it’s always been a little weird that our seasonal issues […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017 -
Watch: John Wilson’s Escape from Park City
Filmmaker John Wilson — profiled this past year in our 25 New Faces series — covers the Sundance Film Festival for Vimeo with his inimitable lo-fi insight. Here, the glitz and pageantry of the ’17 festival are captured in sludgy grey tones and with a commentary that underscores Park City’s economic divide. The six-minute short, watchable above, is the latest — or, at least, latest publicly available — work of what Wilson calls “documentary memoir.”
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit
From Annapurna comes this first trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s feature follow-up to Zero Dark 30, Detroit. Shot by her The Hurt Locker DP Barry Ackroyd, it’s got an amazing look and Bigelow’s customary immersive, thrilling vibe as it recreates the summer of 1967 when riots rocked the Michigan city. It’s due out in August.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Laura Poitras’s Risk
“This is not the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions…. I was wrong. They are becoming the story,” That’s Oscar-winning documentary director Laura Poitras at the head of this new trailer for her latest feature, Risk, with a voiceover that functions as a new statement of artistic intent. Poitras has been working on this film about Wikileaks and Julian Assange since before CITZENFOUR, but as those words testify, there was more to document since the film’s screening last May at the Cannes Film Festival. That earlier version necessarily ended before the ’16 election, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2017 -
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on Their Noir-ish Stasi Doc, Karl Marx City
Now playing in New York at Film Forum, Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s follow-up to 2013’s The Flag. An entirely different meditation on national identity, in Karl Marx City Epperlein — who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall — travels back to her East German homeland, and the film follows her as she attempts to discover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence that he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to the Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Spettacolo Directors Jeffrey Malmberg and Chris Shellen
In Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 Spirit Award-winning documentary Marwencol, an artist constructs a one-sixth scale imaginary town, populated with miniatures, that is both his creative project and therapeutic enterprise; it’s through this work that he processes a violent attack that left him near-dead and brain-damaged. For the new Spettacolo, Malmberg, this time directing with filmmaker Chris Shellen, has focused on another individual for whom the world is a stage. Here, however, the scope is larger as theater director Andrea Cresti gathers each year the citizens of his small town in Tuscany to make a play based on their lives and histories. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2017 -
The Questions You’re Asked at Film Festivals: On the Meanings and Evasions of Movie Small Talk
Every week I send out an email editor’s letter that isn’t published here on the site. Our weekly newsletter also includes lists of movie openings, festival deadlines and other, hopefully useful, information. I often use the newsletters to riff on ideas or try out topics that might later make their way to the site or print magazine, and I always ask for feedback. A couple of weeks ago I wrote the below piece on the four questions you get asked at film festivals, and it prompted a smart reply from filmmaker and script doctor Fernanda Rossi, printed her with permission. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Heidi Saman’s Namour
Philadelphia-based filmmaker Heidi Saman made our 25 New Faces list in 2014 on the basis of two works, one ongoing and one just finished. The ongoing one is her long-running film Tumblr “Four Eyes,” which consists of elegant frome/quote combinations. The just-finished project is her debut feature, Namour, which is being released March 1 by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY before being available widely through Netflix on March 15. Saman had made a previous short, The Maid, and works as a producer for NPR. From my “25 New Faces” profile: The Tumblr community was among those who supported Saman’s successful Kickstarter earlier […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2017 -
Moonlight Scores a Record Six Independent Spirit Awards, Including Best Picture and Best Director
Moonlight was the big winner at the 2017 Independent Spirit Awards, held this afternoon in Santa Monica, CA. Barry Jenkins’ incisive and complex dramatic triptych won a record six awards, including Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and the Robert Altman Award for its ensemble performers. In this acceptance speech for the Best Director Award, Jenkins confirmed the film’s budget — $1.5 million! — and thanked “anyone whose name was on a call sheet on those 24 hot-ass days in Miami.” The only other multiple winner was Robert Eggers’ 16th-century supernatural horror film, The Witch, which […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2017
