Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Phantom Thread Camera Tests with Paul Thomas Anderson Commentary
Paul Thomas Anderson gets super-technical about the stocks and lenses used in these Phantom Thread screen tests. Includes an in-character food fight between Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville.
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Watch: “David Lynch: The Treachery of Language”
“In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature.” Building off that observation, among others, from Dennis Lim’s fine work on David Lynch, video essayist Grace Lee examines the director’s ambivalent/averse relationship to language.
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Watch: Pure Flix and Chill: The David A.R. White Story
Several months ago I got an email with the subject line “Pure Flix and Chill,” which raised three possibilities a) I was on the receiving end of algorithmic spam cycling through the tail end of the least plausible word combinations b) I was being targeted by an especially inept publicist c) someone had, as they say, “seen me.” The last option was correct: to my equal gratification and shame, the email cited my “appreciation for Pure Flix and the genre of ‘Evangelical Cinema’ as evidenced in your many thoughtful AV Club reviews.” This is true: I do write for other […]
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Watch: Isle of Dogs Cast Interviewed as Stop-Motion Dogs
This is clearly promotional material, but it’s good: the cast of Isle of Dogs doing their regular EPK interview duties, but animated as stop-motion dogs. See Jeff Goldblum sing Duke Ellington as Duke the dog! See Bill Murray talk about the sacredness of dogs in a weirdly Manakamana-esque setup on a cable car! The press release notes this took three months to shoot, and it shows.
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Trailer Watch: Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca’s The Pearl
“Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie,” wrote Vadim Rizov out of True False in 2016, “all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community.” That community is one of older trans women living in the Pacific Northwest and coming out for the first time in their fifties and sixies, and LaMarca and Dimmock’s is indeed a beautifully shot and empathetic portrait. The film was selected for our 2016 “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, when we wrote: Dimmock and LaMarca’s debut feature documentary is an intimate portrait of a […]
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“Letting Emotion Dictate the Scenes”: Breaking Down Reed Morano’s Direction of The Handmaid’s Tale
Meredith Alloway’s interview with director and DP Reed Morano (one of our top posts of the year), where Morano explains the exhaustive preparation that led her to be hired to direct the pilot of Hulu’s Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, also contained a section where the director broke down the camera and direction decisions she made for one crucial scene. Now, Nathalie Sejean at Mentorless has taken that section and turned it into a concise visual essay that allows you to see for yourself the work that Morano described to Alloway. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Beuys
A German fighter pilot shot down over Crimea, rescued by nomadic tribesmen. A chronically depressed veteran, in near total isolation in the wilderness. A difficult pupil turned iconoclast pedagogue. Whether apocrypha or self-imposed legend, all these identities defined the persona of artist Joseph Beuys, arguably one of the most relevant and revolutionary forces in modern and post-modern art in the 20th century. A former soldier of the Third Reich, rehabilitated through a lifelong commitment to innovation, Beuys redefined the artist’s role in society as the ultimate act of public penance. From renowned pieces such as “How to Explain Pictures to […]
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Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson, Production Assistant, 1992
Paul Thomas Anderson held a Reddit AMA today, where the subject of a video from 1992 came up. In the video, Anderson wanders the set of the Robert Conrad movie Sworn to Vengeance, asking various crew departments about their work and which one is the most important while generally being very snarky and making Clinton jokes. It’s a fun curio.
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“ARRI is a Woman…”: Christopher Doyle on Finding a Film and the Gender of Cameras
Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s interview with Kaleem Aftab was one of our most highly-read pieces of last year, and in this concise interview posted at the ARRI channel, he discusses specific aspects of his methodology, including adapting his approach to his physical surroundings and the importance of camera ergonomics.
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The Art of Being Alone: Brian Bolster’s Elegant Short Doc, Winter’s Watch
A hotel left empty during wintertime, a stormy island and a lone caretaker are the poetic elements of Brian Bolster’s elegant Winter’s Watch, a short documentary screening on the Atlantic Selects. For 19 winters photographer Alexandra de Steiguer has worked as a caretaker of the Oceanic Hotel, an imposing structure located on Star Island, 10 miles off the New England Coast. The island’s lone inhabitant, she sinks into her solitude and makes images, although, it is clear that, in this instance, her artistic practice is a byproduct of her need to escape the noise of the mainland and exist, one-on-one, […]
