Filmmaker Videos
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Short Film: ornana’s All Your Favorite Shows
ornana’s latest short form outing, All Your Favorite Shows, might just be my favorite yet. Length notwithstanding, it features some of the most exacting and exhilarating editing you’re likely to see anytime in the near future, as it seamlessly shifts from film clips to Danny Madden’s original animation in the blink of an eye. I asked Madden to elaborate on his collaboration with editor Mari Walker in designing the film and stringing together its “found imagery”: The clip selection began at the storyboards. I laid out these high energy action moments that followed as many modern film and television tropes as I could […]
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Watch: 69 Ways to Break the Fourth Wall
A couple of years ago, Leigh Singer shared a supercut of 54 instances of the fourth wall being broken. Now here’s the sequel, Breaking the 4th Wall II: Break Harder, which assembles another 69 examples. The editorial work done here is above average for this kind of supercut, with extended sections dilating on various films’ tampering with the 20th Century Fox logo across the decades and different varieties of product placement. Anything that allows a segment from Gremlins 2 to speak for itself at extended length is definitely a good thing. As is often the case, hat-tip to Fandor’s David Hudson for the tip.
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Watch: Mel Gibson and George Miller Talk Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985
Given how much public perception of Mel Gibson has shifted in the last 30 years, this 1985 interview with the star and director George Miller is kind of a trip. Sitting down together to discuss/promote Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the duo are first asked to describe each other’s strengths. Gibson says Miller is so focused you could drive nails through his feet while he was working and he wouldn’t notice; for his part, the director says Mad Mel is an actor, not just a “personality.” It’s a relaxed, collegial sitdown. Other highlights: Gibson on getting into a harness and discussing the finer […]
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Watch: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Orson Welles at 100
Today would’ve been Orson Welles’ 100th birthday, so to commemorate here’s a new video essay made by Kevin B. Lee with critic/avowed Wellesian Jonathan Rosenbaum. This clip-heavy overview argues that it’s more productive to think of Welles as a successful independent filmmaker who sometimes used Hollywood equipment rather than a failed prodigy who got himself kicked out of the studio system. Along the way, Rosenbaum touches on Welles’ views on actors, dislike of Antonioni, the way he stages combat scenes as if from a child’s point of view, and much more.
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Watch: Insanely Physical Stunts and On-Set Footage of Mad Max: Fury Road
Many on-set, behind the scenes videos alternate extremely mundane footage of the business of getting coverage with actors rotely reciting how amazing and wonderful everybody involved in this production is. Not so this casually intense assemblage of work on Mad Max: Fury Road, which begins with a car flipping over. What follows is not quite as routinely life-threatening, but it’s still incredibly physical filmmaking. $150 million, it seems, will buy you the budget to stand in the desert, sling a camera around on a very flexible boom, and have some guys swing around on poles.
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Red Band Trailer Watch: Sean Baker’s Tangerine
Sean Baker’s Tangerine went into Sundance with two secrets of sorts kept firmly under wraps. Festival materials noticeably left off that the film starred two transgender actresses and — the eventually headline grabbing news — that it was shot on an iPhone 5S. The first red band trailer gives you a square look at both starring components, as the added graphics and musical effects play its kitschy style to the hilt. An episodic comedy about a jilted prostitute on the hunt for her pimp, Tangerine is set for release by Magnolia on July 10.
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Watch: Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Stop
A selection of this year’s Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Stop is now available online, courtesy of Conde Nast’s steaming platform The Scene. As intimated by the title, Green’s short is a very topical examination of stop and frisk policies, told over the course of one evening as a pair of friends are intercepted by the police on their way home, in a display of economical and emotionally weighty filmmaking. Check it out above.
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Kickstarter: An Exclusive Clip from Laundry Day
Director Randy Mack is quoted in my “How to Find a Producer” article, discussing the production scene in his hometown, New Orleans. Now, he’s on Kickstarter raising funds for the completion of his dark comedy, Laundry Day. Set over the course of 24 hours in a New Orleans bar, the film is, says Mack, a something cross between Magnolia and Barfly. In an email, he writes, “Laundry Day is a feature-length dark comedy about a bar fight in a 24-hour bar/laundromat/night club between a musician, a gutter punk, a drug dealer, and a bartender. The nonlinear story explores the incident […]
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Watch: David Lowery’s Pioneer
Technically speaking, not much happens in Pioneer, David Lowery’s 2011 short about a man who tells his son a bedtime story. The action is confined to one room as it cuts between the two actors, but the yarn spun by Will Oldham’s character, and the subtle inflections in the pair’s performance along with a textured sound design, make the film as charged as any meticulously choreographed exchange. Listen closely, and you can even discern some early seeds of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints in the mix.
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Trailer Watch: Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
It’s here, it’s unavoidable, and it won’t tell you much unless you want to see how Harrison Ford and Chewbacca are looking these days. It’s the second trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, which will open December 18, and it’s just fine.
