Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Music Video: Beyonce, “Formation”
“I might be a black Bill Gates in the making….” There’s a lot going on in Formation, the new single and music video surprised-released by Beyonce this afternoon. Hurricane Katrina, Black Lives Matter, the antebellum-era American South. Oh, yeah, and Red Lobster in one perversely profane lyric. Plus, the last shot is a fantastic riff on what is a pretty familiar indie-film trope — the actress submerging her face in a bathtub. I’ve been searching around and can’t find a director credit but will add if I come across it. You can download the song for free here.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2016 -
“Flop”: The Conclusion of Short Film Winner Jim Cummings’ Sundance Video Diary
“You won a trophy in a bowling alley — get it together!” Thunder Road short film award-winning director Jim Cummings deals with sudden success in this final installment of his video diary series from the Sundance Film Festival. There are parties and drugs, bad behavior in the snow, nods to Kanye and Birdman, and much more. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2016 -
The Birth of a Nation, Weiner Top 2016 Sundance Film Festival Awards
The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s transporting historical drama about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize as well as the Audience Award last night at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival closing awards ceremony. Josh Kriegman and Elye Sternberg’s Weiner, a documentary about beleaguered NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, scored the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary. With its record-breaking, $17.5 million sale to Fox Searchlight, The Birth of a Nation had dominated conversation at the festival earlier in the week. Said Turner at the film’s Q&A, “I made this film for one reason […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2016 -
5 Questions for Dark Night Director Tim Sutton
After essaying lost teenagers in his poetic debut picture, Pavilion, and a creatively-blocked soul singer in his compelling follow-up, Memphis, New York-based independent filmmaker Tim Sutton ventures into considerably darker terrain with Dark Night, which premiered yesterday at Sundance in its NEXT section. Loosely based on the Aurora theater shootings of 2012, in which a gunman killed 12 and wounded 70 moviegoers attending a screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, Dark Night depicts the moments around such an event, using suspense and foreshadowing to meditate on American violence and spectatorship. Below, Sutton answers five questions about his intention […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2016 -
Street Magic, Bad Robot and Crime: J.D. Dillard Talks His Sundance Debut, Sleight
Premiering in Sundance’s NEXT section is, Sleight, the debut feature of Los Angeles-based screenwriter and music video director J.D. Dillard. A street-wise crime caper about a bustling magician who moves from sleight-of-hand card magic to drug dealing on the boulevards of L.A., Sleight combines a raft of interests, including hip hop and sci-fi, from its young director and his writing partner Alex Theurer. The two have been kicking around the Los Angeles script development scene for several year, with Dillard working at production outfits like Bad Robot while keeping up with his passion for sleight-of-hand, which began as a teenager […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2016 -
Jim Cummings’s Thunder Road Goes to Sundance
After appearing on our 25 New Faces list in 2012, director, writer, producer and actor Jim Cummings has popped into the page of Filmmaker from time to time, offering advise on making and marketing short films and what filmmakers can learn from South Park. Cummings, who is a producer of two of the past year’s best independents (Krisha and The Grief of Others), has an intriguingly hard-to-pin down filmmaking personality. So, when he suggested that Filmmaker partner with him on a series of videos documenting the journey of his new short, Thunder Road, to Sundance, we quickly agreed. Of course, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2016 -
12 Films to Anticipate at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival
As always, Sundance is chock full of anticipated films, many by friends, colleagues and filmmakers we track here at the magazine. Below are 12 films I’m really hoping to see while I’m in Park City. Swiss Army Man. Consider The Daniels’s (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schweine) arresting and surreal string of music videos and short films their very long tease for a debut feature that promises to be one of the Dramatic Competition’s most anarchic entries. The film stars Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano and, explaining the title, Schweine told Filmmaker last summer, when The Daniels made our 25 New […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 22, 2016 -
Parting Shot: Chloé Zhao
When Filmmaker interviewed Chloé Zhao in 2013 for our 25 New Faces series, the Beijing-born writer/director said she was inspired by her childhood in China to set her first feature within the Native American community at North Dakota’s Lakota Pine Ridge reservation. “There are lies everywhere,” she said. “You felt like you were never going to be able to get out.” That feeling of struggle, and of a desire to escape, suffuses Zhao’s evocative Songs My Brother Taught Me, a Sundance Dramatic Competition entry that receives its New York premiere this spring at Film Forum. Her teenage protagonists — Johnny […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016 -
Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on The Girlfriend Experience
Shot in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, Steven Soderbergh’s feature The Girlfriend Experience was a cool movie about a hot topic. Ostensibly about a “new” kind of prostitution, where escorts would simulate the casual intimacy of a real relationship, it starred real-life porn star Sasha Grey even as it contained virtually no sex. But what began as a look at how the Internet enabled a new kind of solo entrepreneur sex worker — “As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything,“ Soderbergh said then — wound up a trenchantly austere […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
I met with a director recently, and as I sat down I asked him about the small book he was reading, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. It’s a philosophical book about climate change, and the thesis is that we’ve passed a tipping point in terms of our relationship with our planet. We’re on the other side — we’re screwed — and we must not only learn to adapt but also to reorganize within new political, social and cultural institutions. We will have to do this in purely practical ways, author Roy Scranton argues, but also in terms of storytelling. We […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016
