Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“I Was at a Point in My Life When I Needed to Take a Risk”: Barry Jenkins on his Debut Feature, Medicine for Melancholy
Nominated for Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards for his beautiful and incisive Moonlight, Barry Jenkins has long appeared in the pages of Filmmaker. He was a 25 New Face in 2008 and then, just months later, graced our Winter, 2008 cover for his debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy. Online for the first time, here is my interview with Jenkins about the film, an interview that’s a great read and a fascinating look back at the career beginnings of one of our best directors. Usually lacking the budget to build elaborate sets, independent films have most often been shot […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2017 -
Watch: Lana Del Rey’s “Love”
In Lana Del Rey’s interplanetary music video, directed by Rich Lee, a smile is the most starting special effect.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2017 -
Watch: Jessica Dimmock’s Doc on Senior Transgender Women, The Convention
The Convention is filmmaker Jessica Dimmock’s short documentary about a convention comprised of transgender senior women. She writes: The film explores the annual Esprit gathering, where transgender women in their senior years who have been closeted their whole lives gather for a week of shared experience and understanding in a logging town in Northern Washington. For the attendees, many of whom are not out to their wives or children, this may be the only week of the year that they are not in hiding. I traveled to this event many times over the past years while Christopher LaMarca and I […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2017 -
Five Questions for American Fable Writer/Director Anne Hamilton
The below interview was originally published during SXSW 2016, when debuting filmmaker Anne Hamilton premiered her ’80s-set, gothic thriller, American Fable, which melds del Toro-esque fantasy with a critique of Reagan-era economic policy. The film opens today in New York at the IFC Center. World premiering in the Visions section of SXSW is American Fable, the debut film from 2014 AFI Directing Workshop for Women graduate Anne Hamilton. Before beginning her career in film by working on the set of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Hamilton studied law and philosophy, and, as she relates below, she applied aspects of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 17, 2017 -
5 Questions for Lovesong Writer/Director So Yong Kim
A 25 New Face from 2006, So Yong Kim’s Lovesong premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and opens today in New York from Strand Releasing. The below interview was originally published during the film’s Sundance premiere. While continuing to make subtle, emotional, character-based stories, So Yong Kim’s cinema has been one of change and evolution. Her debut feature, 2006’s In Between Days, spent several days surveying the burgeoning first love of two Korean teenagers living in Toronto. Largely filmed in Korean, and shot on a micro budget with non actors, the film landed Kim on our 25 New […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 17, 2017 -
Why Make a Microbudget Film? Five Questions for Director Paul Harrill on the Virtues of Ultra-Low Budgets
Is there a business in microbudget filmmaking? The question is begged by the title of an upcoming class at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center titled, yes, “The Business of Microbudget Filmmaking.” The program copy reads: In this class, you will learn proven, cost-effective filmmaking and business techniques for producing a $50,000 (or less!) film project. We’ll go step-by-step through the filmmaking process to discover tips and tricks for developing, planning, producing, and distributing a microbudget film. The class — a two-parter taking place February 13 and 20 — is taught by filmmaker Paul Harrill, which is itself […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night
When I interviewed Trey Edward Shults for our 25 New Faces list in 2015, he spoke of his new project: For his next film, Shults is again drawing on a family story — his father’s death. “It’s not a straight drama about a guy passing from cancer,” Shults says. “I’m trying to take those feelings and emotions and put them into something bigger. And, yeah, it’s like my version of a horror movie. People ask, ‘Wasn’t Krisha that?’ But it’ll be even more intense than Krisha.” I don’t know how much those intentions of Shults’s have shapeshifted since our interview, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper
No film has stayed and resonated with me from Cannes this past year as much as Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, an eerie ghost story/character study laced with dark forebodings entirely entwined with our current political moment. IFC has just dropped a new trailer which focuses aptly on Kristen Stewart’s riveting performance as a buyer and stylist to a Davos-set celebrity socialite. Intrigued with the paranormal in all its historical dimensions, Stewart’s character is grieving her recently deceased brother while exploring the possibilities of communication in an age in boundaries are increasingly blurred. IFC releases the film on March 10. (And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2017 -
Watch: Martin Scorsese’s Romance with New York City
This new video essay by Leigh Singer from the BFI posits, not so controversially, that director Martin Scorsese and the location of New York City are one of cinema’s great screen couples: This video essay focuses exclusively on Scorsese’s features and argues that, in his hands, the physical place transforms into psychological space: an X-ray not just of a city’s psyche, but of a nation’s soul. It makes for often brutal viewing, rarely indulging the aspirational side of the American Dream (does the Statue of Liberty feature even once in a Scorsese film?); but few can deny its authenticity. And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 3, 2017 -
I don’t feel at home in this world anymore, Dina Top the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Awards
In a ceremony last night hosted by Jessica Williams — and one marked by presenters, winners and festival reps denouncing, in ways subtle and direct, the Trump administration’s immigration ban — the winners of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival were announced. First-time feature director Macon Blair’s character-based crime thriller I don’t feel at home in this world anymore won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, while Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s comedy-tinged doc about a romance between a couple living on the autism spectrum, Dina, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize. On the World Cinema side, Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2017
