Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship
Following its well received world premiere at Sundance 2016, Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s latest comedy of manners, gets its first trailer. Stillman reunites his Last Days of Disco co-stars Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny for this adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan. Beckinsale plays the titular Lady Susan Vernon, “the most accomplished flirt in all England,” who visits the estate of her in-laws where she schemes to marry off her daughter and perhaps find her own husband. Sevigny plays her visiting American friend. Xavier Samuel, Stephen Fry, Tom Bennett, Jemma Redgrave, James Fleet, Justin Edwards and Emma Greenwell round out the cast. As Filmmaker‘s Vadim Rizov notes […]
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Watch: What Does a Camera Operator Do?
A reader, Dylan Toombs, passes along this video shot earlier this month at the The Banff Centre for Story Summit 2016 and featuring his interviews with three top Hollywood camera operators: Mitch Dubin (Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies), Steve Fracol (Songs of Anarchy, Scandal), and Dave Thompson (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook). At the head of the video, Dubin offers perhaps the most concise description of the camera operator’s job that I’ve every heard, and the rest of the short, four-minutes-and-change interview contains other perceptive insights into how these three men view the nature and definition of their job. […]
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Trailer Watch: Colin Farrell Seeks a Mate in the Absurdist Cannes Hit The Lobster
Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps) makes his English-language debut with the absurdist comedy The Lobster, which premiered at Cannes 2015. The satire stars Colin Farrell as a newly single architect looking for love. The newly released trailer depicts a bizarro world in which a seemingly ordinary hotel serves as a twisted dating service of sorts. Unless guests hook up with a mate within 45 days, they’ll be turned into an animal of their choice and released into the wild (Farrell’s character chooses a lobster, thus, the film’s title). In his report from Cannes 2015, Filmmaker‘s Aaron Hillis called the film a “wickedly laugh-out-loud, quasi-dystopian […]
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Joel and Ethan Coen Discuss How Their Editing has Evolved Over Thirty Years
“I think it’s absurd to say there isn’t a difference” between shooting on film and on digital, says Joel Coen in this short interview found on Adobe Create and filmed in the cutting room of the Coen Brothers’ latest, Hail, Caesar! Coen goes on to say that he hopes for a kind of format-neutral future, where choices of all sorts can be made on purely artistic grounds. That said, neither filmmaker is naive, and they realize that digital technology provides the new standards. As Ethan goes on to say, one of the reasons they finally began cutting on a digital […]
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The Arbalest, TOWER Win Top Prizes at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival
While screenings continue throughout the week, 2016 SXSW Film Festival had its official awards ceremony last night, with director and comedian Mike Birbiglia — whose Don’t Think Twice was well received at the festival — hosting. Awards went to features about a famous mass shooting, a misfit romance and the KKK while, as always, the festival gave prizes as well to shorts, music videos and poster designs. In addition, Austin favorite Lee Daniels, well known for his work with Rick Linklater, received a special cinematography award for his lensing of Laura Dunn’s The Seer. Our friends at Keyframe have assembled […]
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Olivia Wilde Directed This Music Video on an iPhone 6S Plus
When actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde signed on to direct No Love Like Yours, the latest video from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, she knew she wanted to shoot the project on an iPhone for both financial and stylistic reasons. But her DP, Reed Morano (who directed Wilde in last year’s Meadowland), a self-described film snob, initially resisted, fearing the quality would be sub-par. But eventually, Morano came around to the idea of shooting on an iPhone 6S Plus along with a makeshift camera rig and the Filmic Pro app, the anamorphic adapter which was used to shoot Tangerine. In the resulting 6-minute video, lead singer Alex […]
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Trailer Watch: Hany Abu-Assad’s The Idol
Two-time Academy Award nominated director Hany Abu-Assad follows up Paradise Now and Omar with The Idol, which now has a U.S. trailer. Inspired by the true story of Palestinian Mohammad Assaf, who was crowned Arab Idol champion in 2013, the film focuses on Assaf’s childhood in Gaza where he dreams of a successful musical career. The Idol, which premiered at TIFF 2015, was partially filmed on location in Gaza, the first feature to be shot there in decades. Adopt Films will release the film in New York on May 6 and nationwide on May 13.
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Watch: Nicholas Winding Refn’s Hypnotic Hennessy Ad
Via Nowness comes this 1:44 second Hennessy advertising from Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn. In no less than seven chapters (!), its fragmented narrative is burnished with the hyper-sensuous glow found in the director’s underrated Only God Forgives. From Nowness: For their most daring campaign to date, Hennessy gave carte blanche to filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn to explore the layered experience of tasting the brand’s classic drink, the Hennessy X.O. “We were given the keys to the kingdom,” says the Only God Forgives director. “It was extremely brave of Hennessy to trust me with so much: For me this is […]
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Join Alien, James Bond, Scarface, Kurtz and Jennifer Beals in a Return Visit to Hell’s Club
Hell’s Club, the mind-boggling mash-up of pop culture mise en scene, has spawned a sequel: Hell’s Club, Part Two: Another Night. Director and editor Antonio Maria da Silva has summoned a follow-up that’s even trippier than the original, if possible. Once more, icons from our cinematic imagination boogie down (and shoot each other up) in a red-lit disco. The music oscillates between dance-floor thump and lyrical balladry, and the range of characters has grown to include Captain Kurtz, Ridley Scott’s Alien, three different James Bonds, a flashdancing Jennifer Beals, Jack Nicholson’s frustrated Shining author, Jack Torrance, and, of course, Tony […]
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Watch: Martha Colburn’s Donald Trump Animation, Drumpf and Bass
In this very short video, experimental filmmaker Martha Colburn processes the madness of our current presidential election by vivisecting the applause lines of the current Republican frontrunner and setting them to a skeezy electro beat. Oh, and there are toads — “probably from the Middle East!”
