Filmmaker Videos
-
Trailer Watch: David Fincher’s Mank
Netflix has just dropped the first teaser for Mank, David Fincher’s first film since 2014’s Gone Girl. Working from a script by his late father, Jack, Mank re-examines the writing of Citizen Kane. Its title hints at the presumed agenda, which is to re-litigate the issue of whether screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true force behind Orson Welles’s debut. It’s worth noting that Jack Fincher never had a screenplay credited to him in his life, although his IMDb page claims that “He once wrote a Howard Hughes biopic before it was decided to go with John Logan [sic] script for The Aviator (2004) instead.” Mank is […]
-
Trailer Premiere: Ham on Rye
We’re pleased to share the exclusive trailer premiere for Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye, which will be released virtually on October 23rd in 20+ theaters nationwide. An unorthodox teen coming-of-age movie with an increasingly sinister twist whose details are best left unspoiled, Taormina’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival before making its international premiere at Locarno. DP and co-producer Carson Lund wrote an essay for us last year about the film’s microbudget production, and specifically four lessons learned from the process of making Ham on Rye, which deployed over 100 cast members on a number of outdoor locations with […]
-
Watch: Producers and Executives Discuss the Reality of Production During the Coronavirus Pandemic
People are shooting again. And as film production lurches forward amidst a mass of new protocols and restrictions, Film Finances has brought together members of their own working group — both company executives and producers — as well as producers who have been working in the field to discuss shooting in the age of coronavirus. Among the topics discussed in this very informative webinar are: * What percentage of a film’s budget should be allocated towards Covid-19 compliance? * What’s the job of the Health Safety Supervisor, and what should their team look like? * The use of apps to […]
-
Watch: Experimental Filmmakers Imaginatively Respond to the Pandemic in Cinema-19
In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Highlights include Courtney Stephen‘s poetic essay film on irises, hundreds of which she encountered on walks in the five-mile radius she and her mother were confined to during quarantine. (“This is a trick,” she says in voiceover. […]
-
Trailer Watch: Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks
In what looks like a bit of a spiritual sequel to Somewhere — if you add a couple or more decades to each of the characters — Bill Murray plays a womanizing dad concerned about the possibly adulterous activities of his daughter’s husband (Marlon Wayans) in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Rashida Jones plays the disbelieving daughter in a picture sure to bring the feels for the beauty of a pre-pandemic New York City. The film is forthcoming as the first venture between Apple TV+ and A24 and will be in theaters and online in October.
-
Watch: Lydia Cambron’s One-Woman 2001 Homage, 2020: an isolation odyssey
Brooklyn-based designer Lydia Cambron — whose commercial work focuses on retail environments and who is fascinated, according to her website, “in the narrative ability of products and objects” — has used her quarantine days to make a witty and poignant one-woman/one-apartment homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. From Cambron: 2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors. This […]
-
Watch: Kirby Ferguson’s Conspiracy Explainer, Trump, QAnon and the Rise of Magic
Kirby Ferguson, who landed on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2011 following this Everything is a Remix web series, is back with a new work that explains the QAnon phenomenon and places it in larger political context. For anyone who found themselves Googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” this morning (Or was perhaps mystified by a colleague’s late-night email screed), the video offers a bit of a primer on the internet phenomenon as well as analysis. As Jason Kottke summarizes at Kottke.org, Ferguson sees QAnon as a form of magical thinking, breaking down six specific characteristics: 1. Obsession with symbols and […]
-
Watch: Michel and Oliver Gondry’s Music Video for “Model Village,” by IDLES
Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]
-
Trailer Watch: Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things
A long, progressively disorienting drive across a snow-battered landscape leads to a relationship milestone — meeting the parents — in the latest from writer/director Charlie Kaufman. For Jessie Buckley’s unnamed girlfriend character, Jake (Jesse Plemmons) is someone promising even as the film’s serenely despondent title functions as her mantra-like internal dialogue. Awaiting in a house that seems unmoored by time are Jake’s mom and dad, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Said Kaufman to Entertainment Weekly, “The house represents the imagined interaction between someone you bring home to your parents — that panic that is twoheaded at that point. […]
-
Watch: Exquisite Shorts, 19 Filmmakers Participating in Collaborative Filmmaking Game
In a project led by series producer and editor Ben Fee, 19 filmmakers have turned the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” creation method into a “collaborative filmmaking game,” Exquisite Shorts, that you can watch above. Previously used throughout the 20th century to create poetry and artwork, the method lends itself beautifully to collaborative filmmaking, particularly when the creators are as inventive as the ones in this group. (Names involved who are familiar to Filmmaker readers include Travis Stevens as well as Courtney and Hillary Andujar, who appeared on last year’s 25 New Faces list.) In the 12-minute piece they mix short visual […]
