Directing
Filmmaking - Directing
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DIY Previs: Developer Dan Fearing on ShotPro
Just as pencil-and-paper storyboarding has by and large given way to computer-based previsualization software, high-end previs suites are now confronting much more budget-friendly software and apps. The newest of these is ShotPro, an iOS app from WebGames3D.com that premiered on the App Store late last year. Developed by Dan Fearing and a small team of Sacramento-based designers and coders, ShotPro already looks like a game changer in the world of DIY previsualization. It launched loaded with characters, props, settings, lights and even lenses, and two updates have already followed, adding scalability for onscreen items, animatable cameras, new camera models, moveable keyframes and other features. Version 1.5 […]
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Five Questions with Bloomin Mud Shuffle Director Frank V. Ross
For my money, Frank V. Ross is one of the most inventive, witty and honest low-budget filmmakers that major festival land has neglected to embrace. With the exception of the SXSW-premiering Audrey the Trainwreck, Ross’s films have toured the regional circuit like best kept secrets, with their structurally complex, yet casually rendered studies of modern relationships serving as any program’s unmitigated highpoint. His latest, Bloomin Mud Shuffle, which premieres tonight at the Wisconsin Film Festival, concerns Lonnie (James Ransone), a vaguely alcoholic house painter, and the object of his unsteady affection, Monica (Alexia Rasmussen). Such a distilled synopsis scarcely does justice to Ross’s execution, with its […]
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“An Auteur Film with Pseudo-Anonymous Dialogue”: Benjamin Crotty on Fort Buchanan
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
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Doron Max Hagay on His No-Budget Monica Lewinsky Web Series, Monica
You would think that the filmmaker behind such razor-sharp, atmospheric satires as Erica Wexler is Online and Perfect Thoughts would go for broke with an unsuspecting subject like Monica Lewinsky, but Doron Max Hagay had other plans when it came to designing his amusing new web series, Monica. “From the outset, I was dogged about not representing Monica’s story merely as satire,” says Hagay, who joined forces with actor Lily Marotta to loosely adapt “Monica Takes Manhattan,” the 2001 New York Magazine profile that detailed Lewinsky’s post-Clinton life in the big city. The first two episodes of the six part series are now available online, with subsequent episodes […]
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Reconfiguring on the Fly: David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon Production Diary
David Lowery doesn’t necessarily dole out directing tips in his production diary for the upcoming Disney remake of Pete’s Dragon, but they do seep through in the details. Currently on day 11 of 70 of the New Zealand-based production, many of Lowery’s entries touch upon the fluidity of the filmmaking process. Most recently, he recounts nailing a precisely planned sequence, only to forfeit his original design for another: Today we were back in the woods at Battle Hill, shooting a sequence that I’d planned out very carefully last summer and had no interest in altering. It was two shots, with a very precise cut point, and […]
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Five Questions with Pervert Park Directors Frida and Lasse Barkfors
First-ime feature filmmaking couple Frida and Lasse Barkfors set their sights on unraveling the taboo yet widespread condition of the sex offender in Pervert Park. At the Florida Justice Transitions trailer park in St. Petersburg, the film’s ostracized subjects work towards societal reintegration through group therapy and unflinching self-reflection. Filmmaker spoke to the Barkfors about building relationships with guarded subjects, objectivity, and how they first came across FJT. Pervert Park has its North American premiere in the World Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival tonight. Filmmaker: As Scandinavians, how did you come across Florida Justice Transitions, and what led […]
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“Someone Always Has to Compromise”: Peter Strickland on The Duke of Burgundy
With The Duke of Burgundy, the cinephilic English director Peter Strickland has made his third — and perhaps best — film to playfully riff on genre conventions. What begins as a bloodless tale of mistress and maid blossoms into a poignant, cyclical exploration of a couple’s inability to compromise on sexual predilections. Best experienced with an uninitiated pair of eyes, The Duke of Burgundy is an increasingly rare film that, for all its reflexive homages and aural intricacies, never forgoes substance for style. Filmmaker spoke to Strickland about scripting tone, genre aesthetics, and the ways in which his film aims to […]
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Five Questions with Mulignans Director Shaka King
Certain to be one of the most intelligent films at Sundance, Shaka King’s Mulignans is four minutes of biting, vicious satire that ably turns the tables on its viewer. A response to the casual and not-so-casual racism of your average gangster film, King and his cohorts commiserate from the stoop of their Bed-Stuy brownstone about the influx of white people in the neighborhood, in thick Italian accents, wild gesticulations and track suits. Even before King’s character is throwing his cigarette butt at a passing white boy or casually calling a white woman the n-word, you sense just how deeply absurd it is that […]
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“I Don’t Know If Camus Would Have Approved”: Five Questions for Far From Men Director David Oelhoffen
David Oelhoffen’s latest film, Far From Men, is based on Albert Camus’ short story “The Guest.” Set during the Algerian War and shot in the manner of a Western, the film features a French and Arabic-speaking Viggo Mortensen as Daru, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria required, against his will, to transport murderous prisoner Mohamed (Reda Kateb) to meet his justice. The two men must confront their own morality and each other against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. The powerful film recently played at the Marrakech International Film Festival, near where the film was shot. Mortensen received a career tribute award for the […]
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“This is The Kind of Thing I Want in a Restaurant:” Vanessa McDonnell on John’s of 12th Street
If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you may have a sense of the sort of family dynamics the harried environment can rapidly inspire. John’s of 12th Street, a dyed-in-the-wool Italian establishment in the East Village, takes this close-knit enclave to its apotheosis. As rendered in Vanessa McDonnell’s observational documentary of the same name, the restaurant is purely populated by the sort of old school New York characters that can only be regarded as a dying breed. From opening till close, McDonnell captures as many yarns spun over the tables as chicken parms are laid into the oven. In advance of John’s of 12th Street‘s world […]
