Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Collaborative Writing, Discarding a Screenplay and Returning to Russian Literature
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2014 effort Winter Sleep won what is arguably cinema’s most coveted prize, Cannes’ Palme d’Or. Since then, he has been remarkably quiet. So it was with some anticipation that the 57-year-old Turkish director delivered a master class at Qumra, an industry event taking place in Doha at which filmmakers funded by the Doha Film Institute present their projects to the great and good of the film industry. During the master class, Ceylan revealed that he had discarded a script that he had spent a year slaving over after his Cannes victory. That was just one of many tidbits that Ceylan […]
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Here’s How to Direct Catherine Hardwicke-Style
With Twilight in 2008, Catherine Hardwicke became the first female director to launch a successful blockbuster movie franchise (the film grossed $400 million worldwide). But rather than direct the sequel films in the blockbuster series, Hardwicke opted to take on more daring fare, such as Red Riding Hood, a dark re-telling of the fairy tale. But when that 2011 film was both a critical and financial disappointment, Hardwicke found she was no longer a hot commodity in Hollywood. Unlike male directors who are allowed a flop or two, female filmmakers are held to a higher standard, she quickly found. Instead of vying for the next superhero […]
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“Treat Me Like a Man”: K8 Hardy on Outfitumentary
“I wanna be where the boys are…” sings K8 Hardy as she makes her way to the final TigerPro discussion at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival. She’s a panelist in a 90-minute panel discussion, “Commodifying the Queer,” and her attitude walking in is guarded. “Lately, my perspective is just, you know, treat me like a man,” she sighs before the panel begins. Gender, feminism, queerness, and identity are all subjects in Hardy’s work as an artist and filmmaker, but being “called upon as the radical feminist lesbian,” as she says once the panel begins, is stifling. “It’s so minimizing […]
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Cracking Eggs: Looking for Financial Stability Outside of Independent Film
Though Elijah Wood beat us in the Moon Pie eating contest (five pies in two minutes), we took home the prize for best feature. We’d just premiered our second film, Tex Montana Will Survive!, at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where we stood in the hallway — too nervous to sit within the crowd — waiting to hear if anyone would actually laugh. The first joke lands with an uproar they could probably hear over the bombast of Furious 7 in the theater adjacent. Our fears were thankfully unfounded. Tex Montana was as funny as we thought it was… and we […]
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Can She Pull It Off? (Or, How to Hire Women Directors)
When I started working in film in 1995, there weren’t many women in the business overall, and women directors were almost unheard of. Twenty years later, I’m still here, but, despite gains in a variety of other fields from pharmacy to law, women directors are not getting any more work than they did when I was starting out. During the last several months we have enjoyed what you might call a consciousness-raising moment in show business, with a variety of folks sounding the alarm all over social media about Hollywood’s sustained resistance to bringing in new faces. (For example, check […]
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Six Filmmaking Takeaways from a Novelist-turned-Director
The path that finally led to the making of The Removals — a feature-length paranoid lo-fi thriller and love story produced by Two Dollar Radio — was a very, very long and twisty one. As it probably is for many films. I spent five weeks in the summer of 2015 with an amazing crew and actors making a film that I had been dreaming about and plotting out in fits and starts since I was about 20-years old. And I’m 50 now. I basically had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about the creative process. Here are a few […]
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“The Odds Were in Our Favor to Fail”: Krisha at the BFI London Film Festival
Krisha Fairchild is a 64-year-old actress who lives in Mexico and has four dogs. She’s named after a young Polish girl who saved her father’s life during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. With an older sister named Vikki and a younger one called Robyn, Fairchild grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, the three sisters take turns visiting their 91-year-old mother — who suffers from cognitive brain damage as a result of her late onset closet alcoholism — in an assisted living facility in Texas. Fairchild’s mother is remorseful about the addiction, and like her own alcoholic father, is charming […]
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“To Make an Independent Movie is Delusional in a Way”: Alaska is a Drag‘s Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller at US in Progress
US in Progress is a biannual event held in June during the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in Paris and in October during the American Film Festival in Wroclaw. It’s a five-year-old industry event that aims to strengthen transatlantic film collaborations and partnerships between European industry and emerging American filmmakers. The fifth US in Progress recently held in Wroclaw featured six films in various editing and post-production stages. The participants included: Mike Ott and Nathan Silver, Actor Martinez Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller, Alaska is a Drag Zachary Shedd and Daniel Patrick Carbone, Americana Benjamin Kruger, It Had to Be You Joel […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Wes Anderson
The Rome Film Festival had a striking fresh look this year under the direction of its new artistic director Antonio Monda. The redesigned fest had a slew of hot films and top-tier tributes. But at the core of the new “festa,” or celebration of cinema, was a series of high-profile conversations with leaders in the arts. One of the main highlights of the fest was a conversation with Wes Anderson and novelist Donna Tartt in which they discussed their love of Italian films. While Tartt went in depth on her love of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Max Ophuls’ Everybody’s Woman, and Paolo Sorrentino’s […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting Their Microbudget Horror Film, The Inhabitants, Part Two
In this second part of the interview with brothers Michael and Shawn, they talk about directing their microbudget movie The Inhabitants, the music and sound mixing, and distribution for the movie. Filmmaker: With one of you running the camera and the other doing sound, how did you manage to handle directing at the same time? Michael: I think we’ve learned to multi-task, but it is hard. You are trying to make sure that everything is in focus and you’re pulling focus yourself, you’re doing all that stuff. The good thing is that Shawn is standing there with the boom, he can […]
