Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: “The 25 Best Films of 2015: A Video Countdown”
Every year David Ehrlich does a bang-up job editing his personal top 25 into a finely-assembled supercut. This year is no different, regardless of how you feel about his commendably-wide-ranging picks. As he notes: this may contain Phoenix spoilers.
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Trailer Watch: Todd Haynes’ Carol, Final Trailer
What an exquisite final trailer for Todd Haynes’ Patricia Highsmith adaption, Carol! Haynes’s film, a story of forbidden love set in a 1950s’ New York, is pure cinema, every moment carefully calibrated and achingly expressed. Carol is Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2015 cover story — an interview of Haynes conducted by Kim Morgan — and the Weinstein Company has just released this last trailer, posted above.
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Trailer Watch: Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, Once Again Starring Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon has been in each Jeff Nichols feature so far, and with Midnight Special the director/star duo of Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud graduate to (seemingly) big-time studio money. (The actual number, per this interesting article, is a relatively modest $18 million.) It’s a sci-fi chase movie — the trailer gives off the general vibe. The film drops March 18.
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Short Film Premiere: Francesca Coppola’s Jonny Come Lately
“What can be said of a connection that seems to border on captivity? Where does the line between violence & intimacy exist?” That’s how Francesca Coppola introduces her sophomore short film, Jonny Come Lately, further described as focusing on “a fragile, complicated, volatile union between two lovers.” The film features Deragh Campbell, Kentucker Audley and Evan Louison, it was shot on 16mm, and it premieres online today via Filmmaker and courtesy of 1985. Last year, Coppola wrote about her film on the occasion of its Kickstarter launch. Here, she describes what the film means to her and, hopefully, for you: […]
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Watch: Charlie Lyne’s Copycat, A Short Film About the Proto-Scream
This short film by Charlie Lyne (whose zippy, highly enjoyable essay/compilation film about teen movies, Beyond Clueless, is still available on Netflix Instant) tells the story of Rolfe Kanofsky, a pioneer who maybe got scalped. Barely out of high school, Kanofsky made a meta-reflexive horror film, There’s Nothing Out There, that bears a suspicious relationship to Scream. Did Wes Craven’s son having seen it have anything to do with it? Whatever the case, Copycat is a fun watch; bonus points for making the whole thing plausibly seem as if it were being watched on a beaten-up VHS.
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Watch: Martin Scorsese Talks Film’s Fragility for his 73rd Birthday
It’s Martin Scorsese’s 73rd birthday, and the BFI has cannily leveraged the date to boost attention for a brief video of the preservation-minded director making a pitch for donations. As usual, Scorsese stays on message, talking loss and the importance of archival practices. Should you feel moved to make a donation or read up more on the BFI, you can do so here.
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Watch: David Lynch Talks Saving Twin Peaks on Letterman, 1991
While Lynchians wait patiently for the 2017 return of Twin Peaks, a good way to pass the time might be with Dennis Lim’s new book on the director. Numerous extracts from David Lynch: The Man from Another Place have been shared online, and this part on Twin Peaks, recently published on Slate, is a fine place to start. As Lim writes: In what was widely seen as a bid to euthanize the show, ABC moved Twin Peaks to the television wasteland of Saturday night at the start of the second season. Ratings continued to decline, and in February 1991, the network put the show on hiatus, to the […]
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Watch: Joe Dante on The Mask (1961)
Joe Dante is one of the collaborators behind the site Trailers From Hell, which regularly posts videos of directors speaking about films of their choice. For this video, Dante himself appears to give a little history on the 1961 horror film The Mask. Topics of discussion include anaglyph 3D, the rise of Canucksploitation, and the exploits of late publicist Jim Moran (who once sat on an ostrich egg for 19 days until it hatched as part of a publicity stunt).
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Watch: Robert Altman Directs Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi for Tanner on Tanner
No idea where this footage surfaced from, but here’s Robert Altman on the set of the 2004 series Tanner on Tanner directing Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi as themselves. Scorsese has dialogue input and Altman doesn’t know how to pronounce Buscemi’s name.
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Watch: An Andrew Bujalski Book Trailer for Karen Olsson’s All the Houses
We don’t normally post book trailers over here, because a) that’s not our remit b) they are, by and large, perfectly dreadful. This is a little different though, since it’s been made by Andrew Bujalski to help promote his wife Karen Olsson’s second novel All the Houses — as he wrote in an email, “I directed a ‘book trailer’ (not that anyone seems to know what a ‘book trailer’ is).” The novel concerns a family haunted by the father’s involvement in Iran-Contra. That makes for an excuse to playfully intercut between questions to Olsson (who sometimes cracks up at her inability to […]
