Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Taiwan Food Adventures: “Lynn Chen Bites, Episode One”
I first met actress Lynn Chen when executive producing Alice Wu’s feature film, Saving Face, and, since then, I’ve followed her work across film and TV — from Dave Boyle’s features to the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead — but also podcasting and social media. A body image activist as well as actress, Chen has the most varied social media footprint of anyone I know. She’s recently carved out a second career as food blogger through her website and podcast, The Actor’s Diet, as well as food videos for Buzzfeed, where she’s scored over one million views in a […]
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Trailer Watch: Blue Velvet Revisited, Directed by Peter Braatz
Marking the David Lynch film’s 30th Anniversary, this Fall will see the release of Peter Braatz’s Blue Velvet Revisited, a feature-length documentary consisting of Super 8 footage the director shot on the North Carolina set of Blue Velvet. Braatz previously made a short film out of this material, No Frank in Lumberton, but now he’s pulled out all the stops, commissioning a brand-new soundtrack that excites me just as much as this footage does. That soundtrack, featuring new work recorded in 2015 by Tuxedomoon, Cult with No Name and John Foxx, is already available for pre-order on Amazon and iTunes. […]
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Watch: Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia vs. the Original
In his latest video essay, Kevin B. Lee places the original 1997 Insomnia (directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg) on the left and Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Hollywood remake on the right. Juxtaposing the same sequence, Lee textually annotates the many differences in tempo, shot choices, framing et al., making it easy to see how two very different sensibilities approach the same sequence. More from Lee at Fandor.
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Watch: Diametric Composition in Two Days, One Night
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are consistently lauded for their naturalistic brand of social realist dramas, but this video essay from Marshall Shaffer digs a little deeper, putting forth Two Days, One Night as an argument for the brothers’ masterful (and largely undiscussed) use of composition. Through varied backdrops and physical obstacles, the brothers repeatedly cleave their frames in two, reflecting the emotional discord between Sandra (Marion Cotillard) and her co-workers. The favoring of subtle and organic barriers, Shaffer argues, provides a nice contrast to the exacting compositions of Kubrick, Anderson, and other directors who are frequently cited as the gold standard.
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Watch: Jafar Panahi Speaks in Favor of the Iran Deal
Jafar Panahi has succeeded in making three features since being sentenced from filmmaking for 20 years, and now he’s contributed a brief video statement to We Support Iran Deal, a self-described group of “Iran’s pro-democracy & human rights activists, prominent artists, & cultural figures.” A full translation can be found here.
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Watch: Mel Brooks on Working with Orson Welles
In this short interview snippet, Mel Brooks holds forth about his experience working with Orson Welles on History of the World, Part I. What did Welles intend to spend his fee on? 100 Cuban cigars and Sevruga caviur – not Beluga, since Sevruga was good enough and half the price.
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Watch: How to Shoot a Road Movie
The road movie is a frequently tread subgenre, rife with comedic, episodic and dramatic potential. It can also pose a challenge for those seeking a varied mise-en-scene, and in this deconstruction of Dominga Sotomayor’s Thursday Till Sunday, Kevin B. Lee looks at the 83 ways in which the characters are framed in their rather contained environment. It’s a good primer on how to read a scene’s construction, and, from a directorial stand point, how to keep a static environment fresh.
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Watch: Edward Norton Introduces Fight Club
In this brief introduction to a screening of Fight Club at Locarno, Edward Norton recalls that the film premiered to boos at the Venice Film Festival in 1999, a far cry from its assured cult status at this point. He then goes on to compare the film’s initially poor reception to what it must’ve been like to watch Rossellini’s Rome, Open City one year after the end of World War II, as something too raw and recent to process. The comparison’s probably ill-advised, but there you go.
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Trailer Watch: Todd Haynes’ Carol
Here’s the first teaser for Todd Haynes’ Carol, the Cannes hit starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as star crossed lovers in 1950s Manhattan. Conveyed through glimpses and gestures, the trailer boasts the characteristically stunning cinematography of Ed Lachman and Haynes’ deliberate direction. Carol opens from The Weinstein Company on November 30.
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Watch: “A Conversation. With Walter Murch”
This year, the legendary Walter Murch received a “Vision Award — Nescens” from the just-completed Locarno Film Festival, and this neat short film was presumably made to accompany the presentation. Director Niccolò Castelli places Murch in a warehouse very much like Harry Caul’s setup in The Conversation. Murch plays with previously recorded analogue tape of him talking about how we’re introduced to the concept of music while in the womb, then talks about the process and history of the manipulations he just executed on the Revox. It’s a typical combination of Murch’s trademark bigger-picture thinking and acute technical knowledge.
