Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Michael Mann Discusses His Entire Career
As part of their recent retrospective on Michael Mann, BAM had the man himself sit down for a 77-minute talk moderated by critic Bilge Ebiri. They begin, logically, at the beginning, with Mann discussing how growing up in Chicago shaped his visual sensibility, and go from there.
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Watch: “Filmmaking is the Best Actor”
The latest video from the ever-productive Jacob T. Swinney isn’t as punchy as its title would suggest. “Filmmaking is the Best Actor” considers how cinematography, editing, production design et al. help enhance and support the performances of this year’s Oscar-nominated thespians.
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Watch: Roger Deakins and Matthew Heineman Talk Shooting the Drug War
One fiction, one documentary, Sicario and Cartel Land were the year’s two most vivid cinematic vocations of violence surrounding the Mexican drug wars. Here, courtesy of VICE, is a great conversation between Sicario D.P. Roger Deakins and Cartel Land director and cinematographer Matthew Heineman. They get deep into their visual ideas for the film as well as the narrative and moral issues those ideas are designed to represent.
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Trailer Watch: Stephen Elliott’s After Adderall
“What’s the difference between a memoir and life?” “I’m an agent, not a philosopher.” That’s writer/director/actor Stephen Elliott quizzing his agent, played by James Urbaniak, in After Adderall, the director’s feature-length, rapid-response to the strange experience of having his memoir turned into a movie starring James Franco. Elliott has assembled a great cast, including Michael C. Hall and Lili Taylor alongside numerous authors playing themselves (Jerry Stahl, Susan Orlean, Michael Cunningham). The film is currently being submitted to film festivals.
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Trailer Watch: The Marijuana Journalism Documentary, Rolling Papers
The SXSW-premiering Rolling Papers, which opens in theaters today from Alchemy, finds a sharp angle to cover the rise of legal weed in the state of Colorado. Even before recreational marijuana use was legalized in Colorado, The Denver Post launched a department devoted to covering the pot beat, “The Cannabist.” It’s by focusing on editor Ricardo Baca and his team of journalists that producer/director Mitch Dickman tells a story that’s about changing cultural mores, the struggles of print journalism, and getting high in the Mile High State.
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Trailer Watch: Tilda Swinton’s The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
Is there any contemporary filmmaker — or any artist invested in the creation of images — who hasn’t been influenced, at least on some level, by the British writer John Berger? His Ways of Seeing, a semiotics-tinged analysis of imagery ranging from European oil painting to 20th century advertising, is a seductive and accessible introduction to critical theory, feminist film criticism and Marxist cultural commentary. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival is the anthology film, The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. Conceived of by Swinton and producer and literary critic Colin McCabe, the film captures the 89-year-old […]
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Behind-the-Scenes Blue Velvet Footage in Blue Velvet Revisited
Last August we posted the trailer for the reissue of Peter Bratz’s Blue Velvet Revisited, a feature-length, Super 8 documentary on the making of David Lynch’s classic with a new score by Tuxedomoon and Cult with No Name. The footage in that trailer consisted on square, black-and-white video. Now, not one but two new teasers have been posted online with restored, color-corrected footage that reveals the full range of the film, including strange, behind-the-scenes moments, interview footage with Lynch, and the director in a nicely starched shirt buttoned up to the collar. For more on Blue Velvet Revisited, check out […]
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Watch: Sam Scoggins’ J.G. Ballard Short, The Unlimited Dream Company
Having just posted the trailer for Ben Wheatley’s upcoming adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s classic dystopian novel, High-Rise, now’s a good time to check out this considerably more obscure — yet, for fans of the British writer, equally rewarding — film. With a hat tip to Dangerous Minds, check out Sam Scoggins’ rather Ballardian author’s portrait, which mixes interview footage with both imagery and storytelling strategies drawn from Ballard’s work.
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Watch: Costume Designer Sandy Powell on Carol
Yes, it’s a promotional featurette produced by The Weinstein Company, but this video of the great costume designer Sandy Powell talking about designing Carol is illuminating. Powell discusses conceiving clothing for both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara while keeping in mind what their sartorial choices illuminate about their characters. Also, her comment about costuming for the period — that the “look” of a decade doesn’t really kick in until halfway through as people are stuck in the fashions of the previous decade — is spot on.
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Trailer Watch: Ben Wheatley’s J.G. Ballard Adaptation High-Rise
“How’s the high life?” Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is asked. “Prone to fits of narcissism, mania and power failure,” he replies. This new UK trailer for Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise establishes the woozily dystopic tone. (No, Portishead’s much-discussed cover of ABBA’s “SOS” isn’t in it.) “High-Rise begins at the end, with Tom Middleston amidst ruin and bloodstains, roasting the leg of a dog on a spit, so when his character Dr. Robert Laing first moves into the building, we already know where things are headed,” Whitney Mallett wrote from last year’s TIFF. “Sex, violence, and retro-modernism are everywhere, even […]
