Filmmaker Videos
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Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road Takes Sundance, Part Two
In part one of this video series, Jim Cummings and his team got ready to go to Sundance with their short. In this installment, they’re on the ground and feeling shaky. Actor PJ McCabe practices his networking skills in front of a mirror, there are arguments about who was supposed to get tickets to the premiere, and of course there are parties. Funny stuff.
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Jim Cummings’s Thunder Road Goes to Sundance
After appearing on our 25 New Faces list in 2012, director, writer, producer and actor Jim Cummings has popped into the page of Filmmaker from time to time, offering advise on making and marketing short films and what filmmakers can learn from South Park. Cummings, who is a producer of two of the past year’s best independents (Krisha and The Grief of Others), has an intriguingly hard-to-pin down filmmaking personality. So, when he suggested that Filmmaker partner with him on a series of videos documenting the journey of his new short, Thunder Road, to Sundance, we quickly agreed. Of course, […]
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Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s Visual References
Jacob T. Swinney scratches the surface of Quentin Tarantino’s copious visual allusions/steals (depending on how you feel about his work) in this neatly split-screened video. Scenes, characters, costumes and even title cards all have their precedents.
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Watch: Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg Talk about Bridge of Spies
Sitting down for an hour-long chat about Bridge of Spies a few months ago, Martin Scorsese noted that he’s already watched the film twice. In the subsequent hour, a lot of ground is covered: sharing memories of growing up during the Cold War, the role of the Coen brothers in the screenwriting process, the movie’s allegorical applicability regarding Guantanamo Bay. There is, of course, mutual admiration: Scorsese’s for this film, Spielberg’s for Raging Bull.
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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 […]
