Filmmaker Videos
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“Too Much Coverage is Exhausting, Especially for the Actors”: Tony Zhou on Ensemble Staging
Tony Zhou’s latest begins with a few stern words from Samuel L. Jackson about his intense dislike for having to repeat his performance over and over for multiple angles of coverage. Given that The Hateful Eight is nothing if not an exercise in ensemble staging, it’s timely that that’s the intro for Zhou’s examination of how this technique works in Bong Joon-ho’s masterful Memories of Murder. Much to chew on here, as ever.
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Michael Mann Interviews Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu about The Revenant
Here’s a pairing! Two notoriously obsessive, driven, perfectionist and demanding directors in an on-stage dialogue. The DGA hosted this talk between Alejandro González Iñárritu and Michael Mann about the former’s epic frontier saga, The Revenant. Says the director of Heat and Miami Vice, The Revenant “embraces the totality of life, nature and experience… not like anything I’ve seen before.” Check out the detailed, candid conversation above or below.
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Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson Talk 70mm on Christmas Eve
One of the nice things about a Weinstein Company Christmas Day release of a film by Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight) is that the accompanying marketing material is necessarily cinephilic. Take this yuletide chat between Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, shot in Tarantino’s home theater and moderated by Deadline’s Pete Hammond. Over forty minutes long, it deals with topics like the lifespan of the celluloid format (Tarantino says it has experienced “a reprieve”) as well why both he and Anderson like using the format for shooting films largely set in interiors. Check it out above.
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Showtime Unveils a New Twin Peaks Teaser
We’ll just start by apologizing up front — at Filmmaker, you know, we don’t report on every trailer, one-sheet or still photo released in support of projects of interest. These things are marketing items, you know? Advertisements. But I suspect we will be making an exception for Twin Peaks, especially now that David Lynch is back behind the camera of this Showtime 25-years-later series. A new teaser has just dropped. It’s not much, but it’s something.
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Watch: What is “Lynchian”?
What defines the unmistakeable cinema of David Lynch? This recent video essay explores this question, using text from David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, the new book by Dennis Lim. “The paradox of the Lynchian sensibility is that it is at once easy to recognize and hard to define,” intones Kevin B. Lee in What is “Lynchian”? over at Fandor Keyframe. From the quaint small towns of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet where darkness lurks beneath the surface to the haunted Los Angeles nightscapes of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s films find skewed perspectives on familiar settings. Returning to certain indelible images, Lynch has mined the same themes […]
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Watch: The Tarantino Death Toll
Ever wonder how many people have died in Quentin Tarantino films? Or what’s behind the director’s seeming obsession with killing? Kevin B. Lee, Chief Video Essayist at Fandor, has tackled the bloody topic with a video essay on the body count in Tarantino’s films. Note the video’s warning: “the following video contains disturbing imagery of extreme violence and death.” In the text essay that accompanies the video (which you can watch above), Lee explains that he created this video after the release of Tarantino’s last film, Django Unchained, but this is the first time it’s being published (read the essay to understand […]
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Short Film Premiere: The Nutcracked (NSFW), by Alexandra Nicole Hulme & Celia Rowlson-Hall
Just in time for the holidays is a new realization of the classic Nutcracker — a NSFW, burlesque-themed version full of seasonal cheer, pasties, stripper poles, classical portraiture and surprisingly high production values — choreographed, directed and performed by Alexandra Nicole Hulme and 25 New Face Celia Rowlson-Hall. Rowlson-Hall’s MA is one of our favorite independent features of the year, so this new short is truly an early present. Here are the filmmakers describing the piece: We have dreamed for years now of creating a two-person Nutcracker in which we perform all the roles. We wanted to take this traditional […]
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Trailer Watch: Tim Blake Nelson’s Anesthesia
Tim Blake Nelson’s last film, Leaves of Grass, was released five years ago. Since then, the award-winning actor, writer and director has been busy acting in indies such as James Franco’s take on As I Lay Dying, big-budget films such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and on Netflix with an ongoing role in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Anesthesia, Blake Nelson’s latest film as writer-director, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year and was later picked up by IFC Films. The drama, starring Kristen Stewart and Sam Waterston, alongside Blake Nelson, Glenn Close, Gretchen Mol, Corey Stoll and Michael K. Williams, will hit theaters and on demand on January […]
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Short Film Premiere: Leah Shore’s Transgressive Cookie-Themed Animated Holiday Film
Who doesn’t love cookies? And who hasn’t eaten too many in one sitting — perhaps even recently? Filmmaker Leah Shore, who landed on our 25 New Faces list in 2013, set out to make a confectionary-themed holiday card when scatological impulses got in the way. Her typically outrageous and beautifully animated 40-second animation, she says, “morphed into a tiny film, a gross pooptastic one.” (Indeed, Shore’s animation features the most novel appearance of a Christmas tree I think I’ve ever seen.) So perhaps be careful who you send this to, and if you have a sensitive stomach, watch before eating, […]
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Watch the New Trailer for Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next
The new trailer for Michael Moore’s latest documentary Where to Invade Next (above) positions the guerrilla filmmaker as “America’s secret weapon” and “the only one who can save us.” The film tracks Moore as he travels around the globe and explores social programs and policies that work well in other countries (while criticizing school lunch and highlighting other problems in the U.S.A.). Luckily, these days, Moore is feeling like a “crazy optimist.” As Moore explains in the trailer, “Three years ago, gay marriage in the United States was outlawed. Now it’s the law of the land. It really proves anything can happen.” […]
