Authors — Scott Macaulay
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Girl Unbound Director Erin Heidenreich
Erin Heidenreich brings the documentary Girl Unbound to the Toronto International Film Festival as a first-time feature director, but she’s already amassed a great amount of experience in the world of independent film. She’s been a documentary producer, executive producer, second-unit director as well as an original employee of Cinetic Media, where she was involved in the sales of many of the most successful independent films of the ’00s. Girl Unbound follows squash player Maria Toorpakai as she competes internationally, representing her native Pakistan in tournaments around the world. But Girl Unbound isn’t simply a sports doc as Toorapaki hails […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Buster’s Mal Heart Writer/Director Sarah Adina Smith
“There are a lot of places people can go to find simple stories. My brain is just not one of them.” That’s writer/director Sarah Adina Smith talking about her filmmaking sensibility, which gravitates towards psychological mystery and cinematic mindbenders. She follows up her haunting, SXSW-premiering drama The Midnight Swim with Buster’s Mal Heart, a movie dealing with psychological breakdown set against the expansive natural spaces of the Montana wild. In a time-skipping narrative, Mr. Robot star Rami Malek plays an eccentric fugitive who breaks into luxury mountain homes while their owners have decamped for the winter. As we learn, he […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea Writer/Director Dash Shaw
Where is all the great independent animation? While Pixar and LAIKA are spinning out animated classics for a new generation, and independent filmmakers are putting their own idiosyncratic spins on nearly every genre, there have been relatively few animated independent features in recent years. And this is despite a boom in quality graphic novels and the new talent that creates them. It’s too early to know whether or not My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is the beginning of a new movement in independent animation, but the feature, premiering tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival, brings with […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2016 -
Five Questions for Lady Macbeth Director William Oldroyd
With William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth now in U.S. theaters, we’re resposting this interview that originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Heading into its world premiere today in the auteur-centric Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival with considerable buzz is the feature debut of acclaimed theater director William Oldroyd, Lady Macbeth. Adapted by the young British playwright Alice Birch from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a work compared in its day to another work of literature with a strong female protagonist, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, published just a year later. A Director in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
The Orchard Releases Detailed Distribution Revenue Figures for Cartel Land, Launches New Film Analytics Dashboard
Distributor The Orchard launched today what they are calling “the industry’s first fully-transparent dashboard for film analytics.” Using figures for their recent release, the Oscar-nominated doc Cartel Land, the dashboard provides hard figures for film revenues across both different platforms and then tracks and projects them over time. Simply put, this is extraordinary. The lack of digital reporting figures has been cited repeatedly in Filmmaker and elsewhere as an impediment to filmmakers seeking to create business plans for their films. The Cartel Land example posted today provides significantly more granular detail than is typically reported in the trades, and dynamic […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Tramps Writer/Director Adam Leon
Adam Leon’s fleet-footed Gimme the Loot was a giddy discovery out of SXSW in 2012. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize there, it went on to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and announced Leon as a promising new voice in American independent film, one who married specificity of character and location with keen storytelling chops. Four years later, Leon has made a follow-up feature, Tramps, which premieres in Toronto in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Once more, there’s a man and a woman — in this case, rising stars Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten — and a peripatetic caper. Here, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Barry Director Vikram Gandhi
Barack Obama has four months left in office, and no matter one’s politics, one can already detect a wistfulness, a nostalgia, even, for the charismatic, complex and quite human figure at the center of his administration. In a year that’s already seen one Barack Obama picture (Southside with You) go from festivals to theaters, another — one that goes even further back in time — premieres today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Vikram Gandhi’s Barry looks at Obama’s pre-Barrack early years, when he was defining himself intellectually and forging his identity while a student at Columbia University. The film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for ARQ Writer/Director Tony Elliott
Orphan Black screenwriter Tony Elliott makes his feature debut with the time-twisting dystopian thriller ARQ, premiering today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Employing the now venerable time-loop trope, ARQ features a couple trying to figure out why their world is repeating, and what that has to do with the giant multi-national they were both involved with. Below, Elliott talks about his various cinematic inspirations, what he learned from writing Orphan Black, and how he made a futuristic science fiction film on a very low budget. Filmmaker: Your short film, Entangled, dealt, in part, with quantum physics. Tell me about […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for The Levelling Director Hope Dickson Leach
In 2007, Hope Dickson Leach landed in the pages of Filmmaker Magazine as part of our annual 25 New Faces list. Her darkly comic brother-sister relationship drama, The Dawn Chorus — about siblings who recreate the plane crash that killed their parents — had been tearing up the festival circuit, and the Columbia Film School grad was developing a feature about a teenage girl who blames Princess Diana for her parents’ divorce. Dickson Leach had been working as an assistant for Todd Solondz on his film Palindromes, and her work was occasionally thought of as having the same satiric stripe. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 8, 2016 -
Ten Films Not to Overlook at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off today, and I’m flying up this weekend for what is probably my 20th or so trip. Managing Editor Vadim Rizov arrived yesterday, and he’s already posted his first Critic’s Notebook, a “Zero Edition” in that it surveys four Toronto selections that have premiered elsewhere. As for me, I’ll continue my tradition of forgoing the traditional curtain raiser, focusing instead on ten or so films, mostly premiering American independents, that either I have a strong feeling that you shouldn’t miss or else have some element — director, cast or simply catalog write-up — that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 8, 2016
