Filmmaker Videos
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“Translating Interiority for the Screen”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins on Wong Kar-wai
Criterion has debuted a new video series, “Under the Influence,” in which, you guessed, directors talk the filmmakers who influence and inspire them. Opening the series is Moonlight director Barry Jenkins on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai. Specifically talking about Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, Jenkins hails Wong’s ability to do something “they tell you not to do in film school,” which is to “translate interiority for the screen.” Anyone seeing Jenkins’ Moonlight, winner of the last night’s Gotham Award for Best Picture, will recognize the influence of Wong on Jenkins’ own expressive depiction of internal emotions […]
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Watch: Moonlight Wins the 2016 IFP Gotham for Best Feature
“Holy shit, man” — Barry Jenkins kicked off his Best Feature acceptance speech with a few words of thanks to the IFP and the Gothams, then enthused from the heart. “It’s so humbling to be nominated in a category with people like Kelly Reichardt,” he said. “I’ve seen Meek’s Cutoff at least 7,000 damn times.” He thanked the cast, his producers, his third grade teacher (the first person who told him his story was worth telling), his “friend and confidante on this tour” Mike Mills (director of the forthcoming 20th Century Women). Then he alluded to the unignorable reality of this political moment: “The […]
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Watch: Wes Anderson’s New Branded Content Short Film
No stranger to branded content, Wes Anderson’s latest effort in this area is a four-minute short for H&M, whose logo bookends the film. It’s appropriately seasonally themed and features some very cool lighting effects.
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Watch: Red Eyes in Blade Runner
Rob Ager’s video essay tackles a particular question: what role does the color red symbolically serve in Blade Runner, as manifest in the red-eye effect attached to the replicants? Connections are made to other sci-fi films with a fondness for the red-eye effect, like HAL 9000’s artificial eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Trailer Watch: Brent Green and Sam Green, Live Cinema
What looks to be a stellar high-profile collaboration between two Filmmaker favorites is Brent Green and Sam Green: Love Cinema, running for four nights, December 7 – 10, as part of BAM’s Next Wave series. The two filmmakers aren’t related other than sharing a skill for charismatically fronting live performances blending their movies with live performance and narration. Brent first appeared in Filmmaker way back in 2005, when he led our 25 New Face list that year. We’ve assiduously covered his work since, as we have with Sam Green, whose works include the documentary, The Weather Underground, and then live […]
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Watch: Wes Anderson’s Windows
Clara Podlesnigg gathers the many uses of windows in Wes Anderson’s films in this supercut.
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Watch: A Tribute to Raoul Coutard
The Criterion Collection pays tribute to the late DP Raoul Coutard (who died last week, on election day) with a video collecting remarks he made during interviews for their editions of films he shot. It includes specific comments on Breathless, Jules and Jim and Z, as well as the gorgeous theme for Contempt, which is always welcome.
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Trailer Watch: Pablo Larrain’s Jackie
Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is one of my favorite films of the year. You can read my interview with the director in the current print edition of Filmmaker, and you can see more of the film in this new trailer, just out from Fox Searchlight. It’s more revealing than the earlier teaser trailer Stephen Garrett wrote about here, and, in some ways, quite different in tone, foregrounding the political mythmaking element of the story. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: 95 and 6 To Go, Directed by Kimi Takesue
Screening yesterday at DOC NYC and now headed to RIDM is Kimi Takesue’s 95 and 6 To Go, both personal and metafictional in its story of a filmmaker, Takesue, and her recently widowed grandfather finding common ground within the director’s unproduced featured screenplay. Here’s the film’s synopsis: In 95 and 6 To Go, a resilient widower’s memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay his granddaughter is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination. Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i […]
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Trailer Watch: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
When it played Art of the Real last year, Astra Taylor singled out for Filmmaker the absolutely essential documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. She wrote: Story has crafted a profound and political film that, while not sensational, is quietly shocking — even if you are already steeped in the project’s central theme. By taking an innovative and unexpected approach to the subject of mass incarceration, Story reveals just how deeply entrenched the problem of over-policing is…. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an impressive, genre-subverting work, and one that deserves to be seen on the big screen. It is […]
