Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: How David Lynch’s Unmade One Saliva Bubble Shaped Twin Peaks
From the LowRes Wünderbred account comes this video essay, the first in a series that will explore how the unmade comedy One Saliva Bubble — co-written by David Lynch and Mark Frost as a Steve Martin-Martin Short vehicle (!) — shaped Twin Peaks. (The screenplay, at least a version of it, can be found here.)
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Trailer Watch: A Prayer Before Dawn
Director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, whose 2008 debut feature, Johnny Mad Dog, was a thrillingly immersive journey into the world of African child soldiers, makes his long-awaited return to theaters with another picture — A Prayer Before Dawn — set within a violent community: Thai kickboxers in the country’s infamous Bang Kwang Central Prison. Wrote Guy Lodge at Variety upon the film’s Cannes premiere: Competition is stiff for the title of cinema’s most violently harrowing prison drama, and tougher still for the all-time most pummeling boxing movie. Gutsily, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s A Prayer Before Dawn”comes out fighting for both, landing a number of […]
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Recovering Family Memories through The Polaroid Job
I love this short — The Polaroid Job — now up on the New York Times Op Doc page by producer, director and Sundance shorts programmer Mike Plante. A trip home to visit his parents leads to Plante sifting through stacks of their old Polaroids, photos that not only document family moments but also a family business. For a short time, while Plante was 11, his parents had “the Polaroid job,” a gig that involved taking a large-format Polaroid camera to various events — a store opening, a haunted house, etc. — and taking pictures of attendees posing with various […]
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Pink Kittens, Aphex Twin and the Moment of Impact: Thinking about Road Safety
Two things the internet loves — kittens and Aphex Twin — combine in this arresting texting-while-driving PSA scored with a sinewy remix of the classic “Windowlicker” track. Over 100 pink kittens appear in this beautifully art-directed spot, but, in the end, only one really matters….
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Watch: How David Fincher Hijacks Your Eyes
Why is David Fincher’s work so hypnotic? This video essay from The Nerdwriter argues that he matches camera movement exactly to the speed of the characters, placing you more in sync with them both physically and emotionally.
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Watch: Shooting Barry Lyndon with Candles
Barry Lyndon joined the Criterion Collection last week, and they’ve shared an excerpt from one of the disc’s supplements in which focus puller Douglas Milsorne and gaffer Lou Bogue discuss the difficulty of shooting with all those candles — oxygen got scarce on the ground — and surreptitiously bouncing light to provide the necessary amount of illumination. For more, see this video on various DPs discussing the film’s groundbreaking cinematography and Jim Hemphill’s interview with three of the cast members.
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Trailer Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread
“There is an air of quiet death in this house.” In the 1950s London of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis is an exacting dress maker and Vicky Krieps is his latest muse. In these two minutes, their relationship is marked by a guarded formality but there’s just enough here to suggest something more than a stately period romance of sorts. We’ll have to wait until Christmas — or the next trailer — to find out more….
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Watch: Psycho Shower Scene Mash-Up
Via TIFF, this is a nifty mash-up of Psycho‘s shower scene and its many ripoff/parodies — Jamie Lee Curtis, Bugs Bunny and Richard Pryor are among the many to intersect.
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Watch: Roger Deakins on Personal Connection through Cinematography
To supplement Matt Mulcahey’s interview with Roger Deakins about shooting Blade Runner 2049, check out ARRI’s interview with the legendary DP. He starts with a few general anecdotes, notes that he’s not lit the way he’d light a scene, and tells a story about lighting a scene in Prisoners with just a lighter, among other highlights.
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Watch: Gillian Wallace Horvat’s “Raunchy Feminist Comedy,” Whiskey Fist
As her short Whiskey Fist has made its away across the festival circuit, director Gillian Wallace Horvat has penned a couple of essays for Filmmaker amplifying and riffing off of her shorts’ themes. Specifically, she takes aim at the rise of branded content masquerading as short films, critiquing filmmakers who surrender their “authenticity” by imagining that brand sponsorship isn’t affecting their art. Her SXSW-premiering Whiskey Fist, which Horvat says was provocatively submitted to a whiskey company’s branded film content contest (containing a scene in which a man is anally penetrated by a whiskey bottle, it lost, needless to say), is […]
