Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Michael Mann’s Blackhat, starring Chris Hemsworth
Here we have the first trailer for Michael Mann’s Blackhat, the Heat director’s first film since 2009’s lukewarmly received Public Enemies. Observe Chris Hemsworth as a hacker who enters government service to battle some really dangerous high-level computer shenanigans. The trailer plays adroitly on contemporary paranoia about the real-world fallout of technological malfeasance, and there’s gunplay galore in the director’s trademark digital-blur-at-night idiom. The vibe and visuals are very much in keeping with Mann’s 2005 update of his Miami Vice, complete with Hemsworth’s slicked-back, Colin Farrell-esque hairdo, though the music — Antony & The Johnsons covering “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” — […]
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Watch: John Waters Talks Female Trouble and his Career with J. Hoberman
“Improvisation is like a face lift: if you notice, it’s bad.” John Waters is typically adroit, on-point and witty in this 25-minute conversation with critic J. Hoberman, conducted at Lincoln Center earlier this month on the opening night of the adeptly titled career retrospective “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” Topics of discussion include Waters’ influences, filming Divine in prison, and what it’s like to look back at his past provocations.
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Watch: Roman Polanski on Making Rosemary’s Baby
Got 47 minutes? Good, because you’ll want to watch this documentary from the Criterion Collection about the making of Roman Polanski’s rightly beloved Rosemary’s Baby. Present and accounted for are producer Robert Evans, with his legendary voice still intact, star Mia Farrow and Polanski himself, who recounts how Evans got in touch with him to consider directing Downhill Racer (which became Michael Ritchie’s feature debut) and sent over that script and a galley of Rosemary’s Baby, which the producer asked him to look at first. While the director initially thought it was a “kitchen melodrama for television,” Polanski got sucked […]
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Watch: Sarah Polley Interviews Greta Gerwig for the Criterion Edition of Frances Ha
Kudos to Vice for commandeering a handful of Criterion extras and uploading them to their YouTube channel, Conversations Inside the Criterion Collection. Their most recent addition, from the Frances Ha boxset, is a conversation between Sarah Polley and Greta Gerwig on the process of creating both the titular character and her written foundations. Polley approaches the interview as both a filmmaker and (former) actor, posing astute observations on the registry of Gerwig’s interior monologues, as well as the nuts and bolts behind the film’s climactic dance sequence. The other videos in the series — Wexler on Medium Cool, Polanski on Rosemary’s Baby and Scorsese on Rossellini — […]
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Watch: Martin Scorsese’s Commencement Speech at NYU’s Tisch Salute
Earlier this year, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts took over Radio City Music Hall for its annual separate, not-quite-graduation ceremony, and the honored speaker at the center was Martin Scorsese (class of ’64/’68). Over the course of half an hour, Scorsese recalled how, when he entered film school, the concept seemed suspicious: as he says, when he told people in his neighborhood he wanted to be a filmmaker, they would ask “What are you going to make, celluloid for Eastman Kodak?” A friend of his called film school “a sandbox for the visually excitable and academically compromised.” From those […]
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Trailer Watch: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year
J.C. Chandor is a filmmaker who looks to be carving a rather eclectic oeuvre. The near dialogue-less All is Lost was made in direct contrast to the motormouthed Wall Street floors of Margin Call, and his latest, A Most Violent Year, sees Chandor wading into genre waters. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, the film, which is due from A24 in December, tracks a year in the life of an immigrant couple in crime-addled 1981 New York. Your first look is above.
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Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip
“You sound like you’re bragging,” an ex tells novelist-on-the-cusp Philip (Jason Schwartzman). “That’s because I am bragging,” he answers without missing a beat at the start of this trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s acerbically witty, keenly anticipated third feature Listen Up Philip. Entering limited release on October 17 and hitting VOD four days later, Perry’s follow-up to The Color Wheel has great parts for Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss as his long-suffering girlfriend and Jonathan Pryce as the young writer’s Philip Roth-esque mentor. (Dig the title card font, taken from the hardcovers of Roth’s ’70s novels.) It’s a funny and depressing work […]
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Watch: David Lynch Walks Through his Philadelphia Museum Exhibition
Here’s a change of pace for David Lynch: a video in which he’s silent. Apparently coveting the type of foot traffic drawn by MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective in 2010, which (at least at the time) drew the third-largest attendance numbers in the museum’s history, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is hosting the first big US retro of its alumnus’ artwork. Here, Lynch strides through the museum, looking at the fruits of his work to the strains of his own “The Night Bell With Lightning” from 2011’s album Crazy Clown Time. If you want a quick walk through this part of the art-school […]
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POV Launches Interactive Shorts Including Empire:Cradle
POV, America’s longest running television showcase for non-fiction films, is wading into interactive waters. Yesterday, the doc powerhouse launched an online, short-form transmedia section, with six projects, four of which were created by Hackathon alumni, and three of which will be premiering at NYFF’s Convergence sidebar in the ensuing weeks. The works are driven by timelines, geography, and photography, but my hands down favorite, Empire:Cradle, is fueled by a transcendent moral code. One in a series of four shorts that probes the ramifications of Dutch colonialism, Cradle is shot on location at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Pairing clusters of bystanders who watch the takeoffs and […]
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Watch: Manakamana Mergings, A Video by Kevin B. Lee
When I wrote about Manakamana last year, I noted that it’s a bit disorienting, more so than the “11 rides in a cable car” premise suggests: The car can go up or down and its passengers can sit facing the direction they’re going or with their back toward it, affecting the camera’s placement opposite. Even before considering the number onboard, that’s four variables that make orientation — knowing what to anticipate in the background, which posts will be passed with a clang at what time, whether a village mid-way through the journey will be visible on the left or right, […]
