Filmmaker Videos
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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 […]
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Kimberly Peirce, Natasha Lyonne, Lena Dunham and More Talk Therapy with Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks
Disclosure: I’ve never done therapy, although it has certainly been suggested over the years. Any recent therapy-curiosity was tempered by watching a couple of episodes of the Naomi Watts/Netflix series Gypsy, which made seeing a therapist seem like being the unwitting subject of a Sophie Calle art piece. Offering a point-of-view both more optimistic and realistic is, timed to National Therapy Day, a set of six new shorts from directors Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks in which five women and one man discuss their various experiences in therapy. Director Kimberly Peirce talks about an experience in couples therapy, author Susan […]
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A DIY Feature with a Crew of One: Jamie Stuart Trailers A Motion Selfie
Filmmaker readers have long known the work of Jamie Stuart, whose inventive, deadpan dissections of film festival customs and rituals as well as elegantly lensed interviews graced our (web) pages for years. If you haven’t seen his byline around here much recently, there’s a good reason for that: he’s been making a feature. And now you can see some of it. A Motion Selfie is Stuart’s long-form debut, and he wrote, directed, starred, shot, scored, edited, color corrected…. well, you get the idea. Yes, A Motion Selfie is as DIY as you can get, with Stuart literally being his own […]
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Watch: Donald Trump’s Deplorable Camera Placement and Cutting Errors
There’s already enough documentation on the Trump presidency to fill a university library (and we’re just getting started), but a few aspects have, I think, been underdocumented. One is Our 45th President’s almost endearing habit of asking, during his ex tempore rambles (politely, euphemistically and implausibly labeled “Remarks” on the White House website, as if they were full of stand-alone aphorisms that should be recorded for future circulation a la Oscar Wilde), where someone is: “Where is Reince?” “A couple of my friends are out in the audience today—Ike Perlmutter, Laura Perlmutter. Where are they? Where are they? Where are […]
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“He’s More a Painter, Maybe, Than a Director”: Jean-Luc Godard on Jerry Lewis
Amongst the many tributes pouring out today to the late, great Jerry Lewis, slot this interview clip of Jean-Luc Godard from The Dick Cavett Show in 1980. Seeing him as continuing the great physical comedy tradition of Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton, Godard goes on to extoll Lewis’s precise framing and sense of geometry. “But do you find him funny,” Cavett asks, and the answer is worth rolling this clip.
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Watch: :: kogonada’s Video Essay on Bresson’s Doors, Once There Was Everything
In this video essay, :: kogonada returns to the films of Robert Bresson (which he previously explored in this video essay on the director’s use of hands), this time looking at his use of doors.
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Watch: David Lynch’s Bonkers MacDowell Colony Medal Acceptance Speech
David Lynch is an alumni of MacDowell, the storied New Hampshire artists colony. He was awarded this weekend their MacDowell Medal in a ceremony hosted by author and MacDowell Colony chairman Michael Chabon but, due to a prior engagement, was unable to attend. He did send, however, a personalized, appropriately Lynchian video thank-you. Watch it above.
