Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: David Call’s Short Film Cole
One of the very best shorts of the year has made its way online. Actor David Call wrote, directed and stars in Cole, an elliptical drama about a combat veteran who’s suffered a traumatic brain injury and is struggling to reintegrate himself into the working world. With a steady, almost minimalist approach, Call relays the quotidian rejection that his character faces to heartbreaking effect. Check it out above.
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Watch: The Beginning and the End: Legendary Filmmakers’ First and Last Shots
From Troiscoleurs (Nicolas Longinotti) comes this sublime supercut based around a beautifully elegiac premise: what would be the effect of looking at the first shot of a director’s feature filmography alongside their last? What message is spoken, what story is told, either deliberately or by chance, by a split screen that crosses decades? While many of these filmmakers — who include Hitchcock, Renoir, Fassbinder and Ozu — may not have expected their final film to have been their last, some of these final shots contain more than an intimation of mortality. (The Tarkovsky first-last combination here is particularly striking.) From […]
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Watch: Alexa Lim Haas’s Award-Winning Animated Short, Agua Viva
New York-based animator Alexa Lim Haas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2017 while her lovely short Agua Viva was still in post. With the film appearing on Vimeo this week, where it received a Staff Pick, now both we and all of you can experience it in its fully-inked glory. Agua Viva, which depicts the inner life of an immigrant Chinese nail salon worker in Miami, premiered at Sundance and Rotterdam this year and won jury prizes at SXSW and Dallas. It received quite a bit of support, including the Borscht Corp’s #NoBroZone Grant, the Time Warner 1st […]
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Watch: David Ehrlich’s Best Movies of 2018 Supercut
Indiewire Senior Film Critic David Ehrlich’s “best movies of the year” supercut is always an amazing watch, a video in which individual cuts, sequences, and music intros generate dopamine hits as you silently, or while singing along, endorse and possibly decry some of the individual selections. This year’s edition, at 13 minutes-plus, is no exception. I was happy to see here a number of personal favorites here alongside Ehrlich recommendations that I haven’t seen yet (Paddington 2!) as well an opening section that draws from the trippy ending of Alex Garland’s underrated Annihilation.
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Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)
On the heels of Nicolas Roeg and Ricky Jay, the movies lost another major figure today with the passing of the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. Bertolucci leaves behind something of complicated legacy, especially given Hollywood’s current sociopolitical climate. His treatment of Maria Schneider on the set of The Last Tango in Paris has led some to decry his standing, while others lament that such indiscretions are “in danger of [overshadowing]” his work. Whichever side of the aisle you may fall on, it’s hard to deny his eye for staging a scene. Above is one of the most memorable sequences from one of […]
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Watch: Critic Adam Nayman Discusses the Circularity of the Coen Brothers’ Films
The critic Adam Nayman has a new book out, with the self-explanatory title The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together. It’s one of those large Abrams doorstops, like Matt Zoller Seitz’s books on Wes Anderson and Oliver Stone — filled with glossy, well-chosen pictures as well as thoughtful, eloquent analysis that more than justifies their literal heavy-osity. Nayman has now taken part in a new video for TIFF, where he focuses in on one of the themes running throughout his film-by-film essays: the notion of circularity in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Nayman starts with […]
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Watch: Olivier Assayas Discusses Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Absurdly Important’ Persona
Olivier Assayas speaks eloquently about his own work, able to talk about them both abstractly and practically. No surprise, then, that he’s as sharp when talking about other filmmakers’ films. A new video from TIFF finds the acclaimed French filmmaker — most recently of Non Fiction, Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, and whose 1994 classic Cold Water was reissued earlier this year — talking Ingmar Bergman. Specifically he discusses Persona, the Swedish legend’s game-changing 1966 whatzit, about a caretaker (Bibi Andersson) tending to a damaged actress (Liv Ullmann). Bergman, according to Assayas, showed “that you could be both […]
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Watch: David Lynch’s Music Video, Ant Head
We are something of David Lynch completists here at Filmmaker, hence this posting of Ant Head, a music video (of sorts) combining two tracks — “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” — from Thought Gang, the just-released collaboration between Lynch and his longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch describes the work as “…a short video featuring my friends the ants along with cheese, etc.” As the press release notes, the material from this album hails from the early ’90s but has made its way into almost all of Lynch’s subsequent productions, including Twin Peaks: The Return. From the press release: […]
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Watch: The New ‘Roma’ Trailer
We’ve already been given a trailer for Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s highly acclaimed and hotly anticipated personal epic, and this new one doesn’t feature too much footage that hasn’t already been seen. Still, it’s a beautiful package. Against the strains of Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky,” we get glimpses from a movie culled from its filmmaker’s own memories: running through the streets of Mexico City, a toy train, the home’s housekeeper in private moments of bliss, a tempestuous ocean, the mother grabbing tight on the father, afraid to let him go. It’s a rare case of truth in […]
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Watch: Richard Linklater’s Anti-Ted Cruz Campaign Ad
A new contribution to the Texas midterm battle between Ted Cruz and aspirant challenger Beto O’Rourke, this campaign ad is directed by Richard Linklater. It stars Sonny Carl Davis, something of a legend in Texas film, going back to his roles in Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) and Last Night at the Alamo (1983). The ad does not explicitly endorse O’Rourke; it’s 30 seconds of Davis fiercely trash-talking Cruz in a diner, a chopped-down monologue that plays like an outtake from Linklater’s Bernie. There’s a reason for that: it’s Davis who delivers that film’s monologue breaking down the “five different states” of Texas, and […]
