Filmmaker Videos
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Rest in Peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman
I spent most of yesterday caught in a self-centered malaise upon hearing that one of my favorite actors had passed away. An outpouring of eulogies — each distinct and personal, though unanimously carrying that sorrowful, grateful conclusion — drifted onto the internet, while I reflected in the only way I knew how: by watching his work. It takes more than a few hours or a days to wind your way through Philip Seymour Hoffman’s filmography, as he was not just blessed with great talent, but also, great taste. Nelson Carvajal of Press Play and Fandor has put together a nice […]
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Trailer Watch: Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy Starring Jake Gyllenhaal
The cover story of our current issue, Enemy is Denis Villeneuve’s brooding adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double, his second collaboration with Jake Gyllenhaal following last year’s Prisoners. Today, the busy bees over at A24 debuted a trailer in advance of the film’s March 14th release that also showcases an impressive supporting cast in Isabella Rosselini, Melanie Laurent and recent Cronenberg favorite, Sarah Gadon. The film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, is another entry in cinema’s long-running fascination with doppelgängers, and apparently, a rather successful one at that. Prior to interviewing Villeneuve for the Winter issue, Brandon Harris raved the film in his […]
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Trailer Watch: Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin Starring Scarlett Johansson
If you’ve been wondering where on God’s green earth Jonathan Glazer has been for the last decade, then April should be a very fine month for you. Come the 4th, A24 will release Under The Skin, the Englishman’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth. As transparently plotted as that Nicole Kidman-starrer was, Glazer (with significant assistance from Harris Savides) demonstrated a clean handle on its foreboding mood, a trait that has apparently carried over to his latest. In this teaser, cut by Glazer himself, we can barely glimpse Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial stalker for more than a second a piece, but the atmosphere pulses […]
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Trailer Watch: David Michôd’s The Rover
The awesome upstarts at A24 Films made three smart pickups at Sundance (Obvious Child, Laggies and Life After Beth), and have a pretty formidable slate of films upcoming include Denis Villenueve’s Enemy, Steven Knight’s Locke, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and, maybe most excitingly, David Michôd’s The Rover. The follow-up to the superlative Animal Kingdom, this outback thriller looks to be a departure from the urban crime drama of the Australian director’s feature debut. (According to A24, the plot is as follows: “10 years following the collapse of society, a man will go to any lengths to take back the one thing that still matters to him.”) In […]
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Trailer Watch: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II
Swapping Rammstein for The Talking Heads, the trailer for Volume II of Lars von Trier’s nymphomaniacal, five-hour affair is considerably more dialed down than its predecessor. Favoring mood and quiet exchanges to the sexed-up, melodramatic hysteria that’s categorized the majority of Nymphomaniac‘s elongated marketing scheme, this new trailer puts its best ensemble forward with glimpses of Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, Shia Labeouf, Stellan Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Stacy Martin, and of course, the titular Charlotte Gainsbourg. The U.S. had its first glimpse of Nymphomaniac: Volume I at Sundance’s secret screening last week, and Magnolia Pictures will release Volumes I and II to the rest of […]
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The Conquest of Happiness: Drugs on Film
For nearly as long as there have been moving pictures, there have been drugs moving through their frames. The Conquest of Happiness, a 2005 pastiche by the German artist Oliver Pietsch, examines the patterns of drug use and representation on film. Compiling hundreds of clips over the course of two years, Pietsch “[aimed] to mirror the subject drug by aiming for a similar absorbing and lulling effect.” In an interview with Carroll/Fletcher earlier this month, Pietsch remarked of his piece that “the structure of repetition goes well with the principle of drugs.” While the obvious titles like Requiem for a Dream and Scarface make their […]
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Trailer Watch: David Gordon Green’s Joe Starring Nicolas Cage
Joe, David Gordon Green’s adaptation of the Larry Brown novel, sees the peripatetic filmmaker returning to the Southern-fried family drama of his Undertow days, if not with considerably more grit. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where Tye Sheridan — riffing off the remnants of his Mud daddy issues — scooped up the Marcello Mastroianni prize for Best Young Actor, Joe follows the eponymous cypher, played by Nicolas Cage, who takes Sheridan under his wing and away from his troubled home life at the local lumber company. As you may glean from the trailer, Sheridan’s father doesn’t take too kindly to the boy’s new […]
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Lena Dunham and Hamish Bowles in a Vogue Short
As you may have heard, Lena Dunham recently took some time out of her stacked schedule to appear on the cover of Vogue. As is the magazine’s custom with women who weigh more than a hanger and call comedy into their line of work, the spread lacks any semblance of effort, though the article is worth a read. A couple days ago, Vogue released a supplementary short, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, that plays up this indulgent image of Dunham as a clumsy thing, lost in the world of high fashion. The sitch is this: Dunham is so nervous the […]
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Watch Sarah’s Uncertain Path: An Op-Doc from the Directors of Rich Hill
For their Op-Doc collaboration with Sundance Institute grantees, The New York Times tapped 25 New Face Andrew Droz Palermo and his cousin Tracy Droz Tragos, filmmakers behind the Sundance title Rich Hill, to produce a short profile of Sarah, a pregnant Midwestern teen, struggling to strike out against her familial trajectory. Sarah’s Uncertain Path acts as a microcosm for what Droz Palermo and Droz Tragos call “a myth in America.” “If you have a strong moral compass, work hard and make good choices, you will have equal opportunity,” they write of this unfulfilled promise. “But after two years of listening to and documenting low-income […]
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What If Fight Club Had No Tyler Durden?
Editing Tyler Durden out of a Fight Club sequence may seem like a (spoiler alert) self-explanatory hijink, but Richard Trammell, the man behind “Fight Club Minus Tyler Durden” actually cooked up the idea while watching the trailer for Lawrence of Arabia. “I thought it would be funny to take Peter O’Toole out of it,” says Trammell, “Before I realized it would be more interesting to remove a character who doesn’t really exist within the world of the movie.” Trammell then perused Fight Club for scenes in which Brad Pitt’s character did not obscure the background, before taking to AfterEffects. “I made freeze frames of […]
