Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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David Lynch and Patti Smith Talk Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and More on the BBC
David Lynch can be a tough interview — check out my attempt back in 2001. Patti Smith does a bit better in this joint interview on the BBC2 Newnight’s Encounters series. They both discuss their memories first hearing the song “Blue Velvet,” and Smith’s reflexive lyricism brings out something allied in Lynch. Check it out.
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No One Knows About Persian Cats
The oft-heard label “Iranian vampire western,” which highlights the pop, postmodern, and cross-generic character of Ana Lily Amirpour’s fresh and potent A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, inflates its self-proclaimed hype and to-date majority critical evaluation. By these measures, its salient quality is hipness. A minority of writers have taken a more sociological tack. From a PC vantage point, the director is the first-generation daughter of Iranian immigrants. In addition, vampire films scream tooth-and-nail for ideological deconstruction. You need only scrape the veneer of a film that is largely surface to uncover its denunciations of generalized misogyny, social stratification, […]
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Watch: Josephine Decker’s Flashes of Brilliance
A considerable crowd of critical praise has coalesced around the work of Josephine Decker, most notably this “A Star is Born” piece from her longtime champion Richard Brody. Kevin B. Lee at Fandor put forth a more tempered assessment of Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (ending their week run at the IFP Media Center today), but he also compiled this beautiful, elliptical montage of the imagery in the two films. Narrative and/or stylistic misgivings aside, it is undoubtedly clear that Decker buttresses her films with a visceral atmosphere, achieved through fine details, ethereal lighting and playful camerawork, […]
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Five Questions for Ann Marie Fleming and Sandra Oh About Their Indiegogo Project, Window Horses
Currently raising funds on Indiegogo is an ambitious animated feature by filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, Window Horses. With a lead character voiced by Sandra Oh, the film uses the medium of poetry to explore ideas of cross cultural exchange. From their Indiegogo page: In this coming-of-age story, Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all […]
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“Stanley Begged Us Never to Talk About Him”: On Making Barry Lyndon
15 years after his death at the age of 70, director Stanley Kubrick remains more than ever a figure of admiration, fascination, and curiosity – and the pleasure his work provides seems, at this point, to be as infinite as the universe depicted in the final act of his 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. A secretive and private director during his lifetime (though nowhere near the recluse he was largely reputed to be by the international film press), in death Kubrick’s process has steadily become more and more transparent, with a growing number of books, articles, and documentaries devoted […]
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Dan Schoenbrun on Kickstarting collective:unconscious
Some Kickstarter campaigns sell themselves. collective:unconscious had me at, “Five of NYC’s most adventurous filmmakers are working together to adapt each other’s dreams.” The five filmmakers in question are Frances Bodomo, Lauren Wolkstein, Josephine Decker, Daniel Carbone and Lily Baldwin, and the project’s curator cum ringleader is Dan Schoenbrun, Film Partnerships Lead at Kickstarter, who previously supported several of the filmmakers’ other projects as Associate Director of Programming at IFP. Filmmaker spoke with Schoenbrun about the conception of the project, the series timeline and the protocol for working as a collective. Donate to the campaign here. Filmmaker: What was the genesis of […]
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Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s Very Own 2010
In Interstellar‘s future, a life-ending new Dust Bowl requires astronaut Matthew McConaughey to go into space, shoot through a wormhole, scope out three planets for habitation and make it back home to assure his daughter he loves her. The film is bookended and periodically interrupted by real Dust Bowl veterans’ talking heads, their hard times testimonies taken from a Ken Burns doc on the topic. It speaks to Christopher Nolan’s admirably idiosyncratic instincts that he’d ground visualizations of near-mystical journeys through quantum physics with seemingly incompatible Burns talking heads; it speaks simultaneously to his imaginative limitations that he can think of […]
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ITVFest: Is Independent TV More Than a Bridge to Mainstream TV?
In a small Vermont town on the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest, an hour and a half from Albany NY, the Independent Television and Film Festival (ITVFest) holds its annual get together. Taking place in the fall, ITVFest is very similar to a film festival, with screenings, panels and talks given by content producers. But rather than films, it focuses on TV and web entertainment. ITVFest started in L.A. in 2006, then moved to Vermont in 2013. I attended some of the screenings of web productions in a large tent set up for the event, as well as […]
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Save the Baby! On the Benefits of the Three-Act Screenplay Structure
Poor old three-act structure. It gets hammered away at, like an old punching bag, every time someone wants to challenge the primacy of the formulaic Hollywood screenwriting methods. “Take that! You follow-the-dots, color-within-the-lines, stodgy old armature!” Poor, poor three-act structure. So much to offer. So misunderstood. What if I were to tell you that in the 2,500-year history of Western dramatic literature, three-act structure is actually a radical new innovation? What would you think if I also said that its radical impact, towards the end of the 19th century, was to finally free dramatists from a highly proscriptive, closely dictated […]
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Factory 25 Acquires Little Feet and Boneshaker
Factory 25 will distribute Alexandre Rockwell’s Little Feet on a double bill with 25 New Face Frances Bodomo’s Boneshaker. The films will open at the IFC Center on December 12 and will be available for streaming on Fandor and Vimeo the same day. Little Feet was previously part of a Vimeo on Demand TIFF deal in which Vimeo gave the filmmakers $10,000 in exchange for 30-day exclusive distribution rights. Rockwell won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1992 with In The Soup, and Little Feet harkens back to the film’s 16mm black and white camerawork. Said Factory 25’s Matt Grady of the paired acquisition, “Both films are very […]
