Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Behaving Badly in Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven
I love being on set. Mine, yours, whomever’s. I like eating exorbitant amounts of food. I like idle conversation. I like the feeling you get when sleep deprivation kicks in and the dullest minutiae is suddenly hilarious. But mostly I like being around a group of people who have cast aside their better judgement to create something together. So when Nathan Silver asked if I wanted to come to the Stinking Heaven set, I gladly hopped the train to Passaic. I was excited to see how Nathan, who works from outlines and improvisation, constructs a film from the ground up. The following is a loosely timestamped diary […]
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Lauren Wolkstein Talks Stony Brook Southampton and Killer Films’ 20/20/20 Filmmaking Intensive
Stony Brook Southampton’s 20/20/20 intensive filmmaking course offers participating students an opportunity to learn the practical and technical tricks of the trade from Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. Over the course of 20 weeks, the graduate-level program pairs lecture-style master classes from Killer and visiting filmmakers like Todd Haynes with development and production workshops so that each writer-director walks away with her own completed short at the end of a 20-day boot camp. Lauren Wolkstein, one of our 2013 25 New Faces of Film, reprises her role this summer as a 20/20/20 mentor for the workshop phase, and spoke […]
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Sympathy, Said the Shark: Shooting in POV
Writer, director and editor Devin Lawrence says that when he set out to make Sympathy, Said the Shark he’d already gone through two projects which had stalled out due to lack of financing, so he decided he had to come up with something where “money can no longer be the ultimate road block.” The resulting project was shot in 14 days and primarily in one location, but it was by no means a simple project to make as much of it was shot using a POV rig built around the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. Lawrence, who works in LA primarily as […]
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“It’s Just a General”: How to Take a General Meeting
At some point in your career, things are going to break your way — you’ll be lucky enough to have your crowdfunded labor of love generate some heat at a big festival. Or your short film will go viral. Or maybe you’ll sell a hot spec or make the Black List. Whatever happens, you’ll land managers and agents, and people in L.A. will want to meet you — and not a minute too soon, because you’re four months behind on rent and need to pay for T-shirts for all your backers. It’s time to meet studio execs looking to hire […]
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Tall Enough and The Short Films of Barry Jenkins
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
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Richard Linklater’s Five Keys to Filmmaking
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood arrives in theaters next Friday, and the press blitzkrieg is well underway. In addition to a recent, incisive profile in The New Yorker, a relatively compact piece popped up in Fast Company that offers insight into Linkater’s process. Less practical than theoretical, the article addresses five bastions of great storytelling, according to the consummate independent filmmaker. I’ve excerpted my favorite points below. Find Your Form First “There are a lot of stories in the world, and I spend all my time thinking about how to tell them. That, to me, is the cinematic element. That’s the hard part: the right narrative form […]
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Jordana Spiro at the Sundance Directors Lab
A little while ago I was sent an email asking me to write this blog sharing my experience at the Sundance Directors Lab. I pretended I didn’t receive it. Communicating in first person without a script is not fun for me. As an actress, I am comfortable doing things in front of a crowd, and I ventured into writing/directing because my longing to express myself is strong. However, to do so without it being through something like the mechanism of film can turn me into a jumble of over-thinking nerves and desire to be liked. Fearlessness is a sexy, powerful […]
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Johnny Ma at the Sundance Directors Lab
It’s Sunday morning, a rare day off during the Sundance Directors Lab to sleep in. Yet once again as the sunlight fills my room at the crack of dawn, I’m wide awake and my mind is ready to go. Back home, whether it is LA, NY, or Shanghai, I am rarely up before 10 am unless it’s a shoot day or I have to meet someone in the real world. However, up here on the mountain, I found a version of myself that didn’t need to check my emails and Facebook or keep up with the latest Buzzfeed post to […]
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Watch: 45 Minutes of Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language
Canon Europe recently conducted a 45 minute interview with Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language and the resulting conversation is pretty incredible. One could parse through the exchange for hours, but it’s best to watch for yourself and hear Godard on the everything from the melancholic underpinnings of “SMS,” the boundary-less nature of 3D, the fickle ways of language (“montage” vs. “editing”) and exploiting spatial imbalances (the creation of reverse shots). The interview also features a few short clips from Goodbye to Language and the following comment on its title: “When I say ‘farewell’ to language, it really means ‘farewell,’ meaning to say goodbye to […]
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Extrapolation over Return to Form: We Are The Best! and Show Me Love
We Are The Best! may not be one of the “best” films in recent memory, but it is one of my favorites. I’ve spent the last week reading innumerable reviews that deem Moodysson’s latest a “return to form,” harkening back to the heyday of his debut Show Me Love. The majority of the critics in question are less concerned with elaborating on this “return” than diving into We Are The Best!, so I’m left to assume its of the narrative variety. Yes, both films concern teenaged girls on the fringes, drawn against societal norms as well as their own families, but I like to consider We Are […]
