Authors — Scott Macaulay
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IFP Screen Forward: 5 Tips on Pitching Web Series
The on-stage pitch has become a staple of documentary film forums, like IDFA and CPH:DOX, and pitch panels long ago snuck into events like IFP’s Screen Forward Conference (previously the Filmmaker Conference). But the on-stage pitching of web series is something relatively new at these more film-oriented events. Befitting the IFP’s conference name change, three filmmakers storytellers took the stage Sunday at noon at the Bruno Walter Auditorium to impress a panel of web content professionals with their ideas of episodic tales to be streamed online. But given the Wild West nature of web series, where buyers, monetization strategies and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 21, 2015 -
Previewing IFP Film Week and the Screen Forward Conference
I wonder what some time-traveling filmmaker would think of IFP’s Independent Film Week, which commences tomorrow up at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Performing Arts Library. The non-profit IFP — formerly “Independent Feature Project” and now “Independent Filmmaker Project” — has done some version of its Film Week for nearly the entirety of its 35-year history. For much of that time it wasn’t called “Film Week,” but, nonetheless, events occurred annually over a few days in the Fall, and these events served to advance the interests of independent filmmakers by, initially, providing them with a market for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2015 -
TIFF: 5 Questions for A Flickering Truth Director Pietra Brettkelly
American independent filmmakers who moan over long-term storage bills, failed hard drives and misplaced optical tracks will receive the corrective they need to their First World Film Preservation problems by viewing Pietra Brettkelly’s new documentary, A Flickering Truth. Receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the picture follows a group of film archivists who have secretly fought to preserve Afghanistan’s storied film culture from the violence of the Taliban era. Below, Brettkelly answers questions about filming in a war-torn country, Afghan cinema and how her own archival practices have changed as a result of making this film. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Meddler Writer/Director Lorene Scafaria
Screenwriter-turned-director Lorene Scafaria burst onto the scene with her screenplay for Peter Sollett’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Since that 2008 film she has bounced between film and television, writing and directing episodes of New Girl while also debuting her first feature, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So it’s fair to ask Scafaria what made The Meddler, a comedy/drama about an intrusive widowed mom (played by Susan Sarandon) and her frazzled Angeleno daughter (Rose Byrne), a story for the large screen instead of the small. That’s just one of several questions she offers cogent answers to in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for Born to Be Blue Writer/Director Robert Budreau
More than three decades after Charlie “Bird” Parker, nearly three decades after Thelonious Monk and just a couple of weeks before Miles Davis, the jazz great whose trumpet style his own owed something to, West Coast jazzman Chet Baker is brought to the screen in Robert Budreau’s appropriately intimate biographical drama, Born to be Blue. I write “appropriately intimate” because the constricted scale of Budreau’s picture, in which Baker’s troubled life is evoked through scenes set at and in the beaches, cafes, apartments, recording studios and even film sets of California’s “cool jazz” scene, scales the trumpeter’s life just right. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: 5 Questions for The Missing Girl Writer/Director A.D. Calvo
A.D. Calvo is known in the independent horror community for frightening features like The Midnight Game and House of Dust, but with The Missing Girl, premiering in Toronto’s Vanguard section, he dials down the jump scares in favor of a bittersweet character study that’s still not without a sense of mystery. Robert Longstreet, who has given indelible performances in films like This is Martin Bonner and Septien, plays a sad sack owner of a comic book store who becomes unhinged when his pretty young employee, played by Alexia Rasmussen, disappears. Below, Calvo discusses his change of direction, his interest in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2015 -
TIFF 2015: Director Avi Lewis on Climate Change Doc, This Changes Everything
The third in what has been dubbed an “antiglobalization trilogy,” Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, strips away the niceties of middle-brow climate change activism. As Klein argues, promoting the type of meaningful change that will lead to the survival of the planet involves more than film festival reusable sippy cups and something considerably different than the pro-market solutions of green business consortiums. Indeed, Klein’s book is subtitled “Capitalism vs. The Climate,” and it directly blames the growth mantra of governments and economic markets for our rising temperatures. Furthermore, it intertwines the fight against global warming with the fight […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2015 -
Errol Morris Asks Donald Trump about the Meaning of Citizen Kane
In this interview clip from a shelved Errol Morris project, businessman and now presidential candidate Donald Trump muses on the meanings of Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane. Trump doesn’t diverge from critical orthodoxy about the film, but it’s still interesting to hear him take away the standard lesson that money isn’t everything. Still, as Jason Kottke notes, Trump can’t just help himself from throwing in conversation-ending misogynistic aside. From Morris’s site: The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 7, 2015 -
Watch: Cruise, Pacino, Travolta and More in a Red-Hued Disco Multiverse
An unintended companion piece to yesterday’s post, “Red Lighting in the Films of Martin Scorsese,” Hells Club is a blood-hued mash-up from Antonio Maria Da Silva in which a host of our favorite cinematic characters all boogie down — and draw their weapons — in the same pulsating nightclub. Writes Da Silva: There is a place or fictional characters meet. Outside of time, Outside of all logic, This place is known as HELL’S CLUB, But this club is not safe TERMINATOR VERSUS TONY MONTANA VERSUS TOM CRUISE VERSUS CARLITO BRIGANTE VERSUS BLADE VERSUS JOHN TRAVOLTA VERSUS AL PACINO VERSUS PINEAD […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 3, 2015 -
Watch (and Listen): Hearing A Nightmare on Elm Street
In our second Jacob T. Swinney video post of the day, here’s the critic and filmmaker’s tribute to the late Wes Craven, in the form of an analysis of the director’s use of sound in his horror classic. From the video’s notes: The first horror movie I ever watched was Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. Being a child, the film frightened me so badly that I didn’t view another horror film until my teen years. Despite the obvious tormentors of a man with a burned face, gravity defying whirlpools of blood, and a dying teen being dragged around […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2015
