Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: David Bowie on Making Movies, 1983
Short and sweet: in this brief clip from a 1983 CBC interview, David Bowie — who turns 68 today — talks about wanting to be an actor and his “pretensions” of wanting to direct. “The inherent problem of being a rock star who wants to be a legitimate act or legitimate anything else, I think, is that the parts are restricted from the beginning,” he said, noting he’d been confined to a run of “green-eyed, out of space, rock-playing freaks.” That year, Bowie had a hit record with Let’s Dance and a very different kind of role in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; five years […]
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Watch: David Fincher on Actors and His Movies
The emphasis in this edited series of highlights from David Fincher’s recent BFI talk is, refreshingly, more on the actors than on his much-dissected, formidable technical acumen. One key takeaway from this brisk trot through his career is Fincher’s take on his infamous penchant for endless takes. “My philosophy is, you spend $250,000 on a set,” he explains. “Put it on a soundstage, it costs you $5,000 a day. You’re gonna put $8,000 of lights and you’re gonna bring a $150,000 crew in. You’re gonna bring actors in from all over the world, you’re gonna put them up in hotels, […]
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Watch: Auteur in Space, ::kogonada on Tarkovsky’s Solaris
“It is art that triumphs here, that speaks to the mystery of existence,” suggests the narrator of this new video essay from ::kogonada on Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Envisioning the filmmaker’s psychological meditation in stark contrast to the purported gadgets and gizmos of 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Auteur in Space” breaks down the humanity and pathos at the center of this most unusual sci-fi. Head to Sight&Sound to watch.
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Trailer Watch: The Frankensteined Remains of David O. Russell’s Nailed
You may remember this one: six years ago, Nailed, David O. Russell’s proposed follow-up to I Heart Huckabees, had massive financing problems. The would-be political satire about a waitress (Jessica Biel) who gets a nail to the head was ultimately scrapped and lain aside. In the meantime, the once-galvanizing director embarked on his Huckabees‘ apology tour, going from the not-bad The Fighter to the increasingly dispiriting (but renumerative) The Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Now whatever footage was shot (it’s unclear, though the Internet says crucial plot parts were never filmed) has been cobbled into some kind of grotesque thing that walks the earth, with […]
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Watch: Alfred Hitchcock’s Visual Gallery
Here is a rather comprehensive look at the visual motifs apparent throughout the formative years of Alfred Hitchcock’s illustrious career, from 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much to 1976’s Family Plot. Whether staging action around a staircase or riffing on the illusion of free fall, Hitchcock revisited and realigned techniques from one decade to the next. This compilation from Steven Benedict breaks down the visual grammar of 42 of the filmmaker’s features, stitching together his preferred still images with his swooping camera techniques, including a personal favorite: Gregory Peck’s POV as he drinks a glass of milk in Spellbound.
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Watch Burst, Celine Tran’s Bid to Become an Action Star
It’s fascinating to watch how DIY production possibilities are changing the nature of the resume and showreel. A couple of months ago we posted this video by Lawrence Rebeiro about how he was able to use a small crew to pre-viz a fight scene. Now, via James Marsh at Twitch comes this impressive fight scene produced by French/Vietnamese performer Celine Tran (formerly the adult actress Katsuni and featured in Gaspar Noe’s episode of Destricted) showcasing her knife-fighting and martial arts abilities. It’s just one of several videos created as standalones showcasing assorted fighting styles and intended to launch her as […]
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How to Borrow from Yourself: This Smart Video Reveals Martin Scorsese’s Enduring Style
If you’re going to borrow, borrow from yourself… For an example, check out this well-done video by Milad Tangshir that finds visual, editing and storytelling parallels between Martin Scorsese’s 1964 student short, It’s Not You, Murray and his most recent film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
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Watch: Why Are Christmas Films So Bleak?
Five days behind schedule, here’s a great Criterion essay from Michael Koresky on the bleak sentiments behind some of cinema’s classic and overlooked Christmastide tales. Suggesting the holiday’s proximity to winter solstice, and thus, the death of light, Koresky explores the backwards tendency to characterize a time of joy and harmony with mortality, existential crises, and dysfunction in Mon Oncle Antoine, My Night at Maud’s and A Christmas Tale. I’d scarcely be the first to suggest how peculiar it is that the quintessential all-ages Christmas film, It’s A Wonderful Life, is centrally preoccupied with suicide.
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Watch: Honesty, Directed by Mark Pellington
Feature and music video director Mark Pellington has released via Nowness a short film, Honesty, that adapts the words of poet David Whyte. Here’s Pellington: “The words written by David blew me away. They don’t preach but they speak their own beliefs in a very strong and challenging way. Each person was cast randomly having no knowledge of the essay. They were only asked if they had experienced loss. They entered the room four at a time and were asked to simply walk forward, stand in front of the camera and listen to the soundtrack–the poem read by David accompanied […]
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Watch: What Makes a Video Essay Great?
As our attention spans grow increasingly shorter in the age of information, there appears to be a growing audience for a form of film criticism beyond the written word. More precisely, for the video essay. Kevin B. Lee, the video essayist at Fandor, provides a nice inquiry into the state of the video essay today in his year-end recap, spotlighting the efforts of Tony Zhou and ::kogonada, while musing on what viewers respond to in their works: decisive analysis, politics, or the occasional cinephile fetishism. Further, Lee considers how even a narration-less supercut can adhere to its maker’s perspective based […]
