Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: A 33-Minute Dustin Hoffman Interview from 1975
Today is Dustin Hoffman’s 77th birthday, as good an opportunity as any to post this 33-minute interview from 1975. Conducted with patient professionalism and minimal intrusiveness by veteran interviewer Michael Parkinson, the conversation starts with lots of long pauses and deadpan stares from Hoffman, who claims his real name is Clare Boothe Luce. Loosening up, he deadpans that his “first fantasy was to be a sex symbol film star,” discusses how he drew upon his high school fear of buying “male prophylactics” for the scene in The Graduate when Benjamin Braddock nervously checks into a hotel, recounts his first sexual […]
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Trailer Watch: Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery
Wiseman’s At Berkeley was a favorite of mine last year, and I’m just as eager for his follow-up, a three hour rumination on London’s National Gallery. Here’s our first look at the documentary, en route to TIFF and likely NYFF after its Cannes premiere, which covers the visiting public, the curators, the staff and, of course, the art, with Wiseman’s characteristic brand of watchful analysis. It’s all faintly reminiscent of the Bruegel room conversation in Museum Hours, in the best possible way. Watch above.
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Trailer Watch: The Fix
Fresh out of AFI Docs is Laura Naylor’s The Fix, a character-based documentary about Bronx-based IV drug users with Hepatitis C who organize to fight this epidemic. The film screens in New York September 5 at 6:00 PM at Lehman College’s Lovinger Theater in a screening organized by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and the Public Health Program at Lehman College. It is free and open to the public.
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Trailer Watch: The Theory of Everything
The life of Steven Hawking is given what looks like a gauzy, romantic approach in this trailer for The Theory of Everything, directed by Man on Wire‘s James Marsh. Eddie Redmayne stars as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his love, Jane Wilde. The film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and is in theaters November 7 from Focus Features.
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Watch: Robert Greene on “The Art of Nonfiction”
Last week, Sight & Sound released their poll of the top 50 documentaries of all time, sourced from 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers. The list includes seminal films such as Nanook of the North, Sans Soleil, Man With a Movie Camera, and Salesman, as well as recent, form-pushing works in The Act of Killing and Leviathan. Robert Greene took time out of his impressively hectic schedule to craft a video essay that is a send up to said titles and more, examining documentary for its inimitable, observational approach, and noting that “the art of nonfiction lies in the tension between chaos and structure.” Head over to Sight&Sound to view it.
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Short Film: Sam Green’s Lot 63, Grave C
Thanks to The Seventh Art for flagging this haunting 2006 short documentary from Sam Green, a belated inquiry into the murder of Meredith Hunter at the 1969 Rolling Stones concert in Altamont. Green’s presentation of the bizarre silence surrounding Hunter’s identity at the time of his death is relayed through archival newspapers, footage from Gimme Shelter, and a tour of his unmarked gravesite in California (a proper headstone was purchased in 2008). Despite its brevity, Lot 63, Grave C is a fascinating look inside the metaphorical end of an era.
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Watch: Enrique Pacheco’s Tips for Time-Lapse Photography
Thanks to our friends at No Film School for pointing us to this useful video from DSLR workshop instructor Enrique Pacheco, which covers the basics of time-lapse photography in under three minutes. His useful tips include the importance of checking the position of the sun, moon and stars before shooting, why you should use an intervalometer, how to avoid flicker, and the importance of a simple ND filter.
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Not So Fast: A Short Film With G&E Equipment Sourced From Ikea
In his short film Not So Fast, filmmaker David Sandberg managed to achieve a dramatic tunnel effect with no more than a few Ikea products and the free 3D modeling app, Blender. The very embodiment of DIY ethos, Sandberg fashioned a portable light — enclosed in a trashcan — to his dolly — a bit of shelving — and orchestrated the action atop his PVC pipe track. Granted, his battery pack and Black Magic Cinema Camera don’t exactly run cheap, but the homemade equipment used to relay his protagonist’s sleepwalking probably rounded out to no more than $30. Watch Sandberg break down his […]
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Watch: David Lynch’s New Rouge Louboutin Commercial
David Lynch recently confirmed that he has no plans to direct a new film, but he’s still available for commercials. Rouge Louboutin is a $50 nail polish inspired by the Ballerina Ultima, the tallest shoe Louboutin has ever designed. You can see where this is going: the video is about as festishistic as it gets, filled out by CGI landscapes that look more like The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus than anything in Lynch’s filmography.
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Short Film: Lost Arts, by Peter Mattei
Inspired by Ira Sachs’ Last Address, filmmaker (Love in the Time of Money) and novelist (The Deep Whatsis) Peter Mattei made this short film, Lost Arts, in 2010. Sachs’ film — which he discusses in the current issue of Filmmaker — looks at the final addresses of a generation of New York artists who died of AIDS. With Lost Arts, Mattei has taken Sachs’ formal approach and applied it to the real estate of arthouse cinema. For those who have long lived in New York, see how many of these Duane Reades, health clubs and Apple stores evoke any hint […]
