Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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A New Light at the End of the Tunnel: Film Exchange’s Texas Indie Incentive Program (Sponsored Post)
For independent filmmakers seeking a location with incentives and services that can maximize their modest budgets, the Victoria, Texas-based Film Exchange has a suggestion: come to town and take advantage of $300,000 worth of equipment — for free. In Texas, productions with budgets under $250,000 don’t qualify for the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, but through Film Exchange, filmmakers can save thousands of dollars and raise their production value by implementing gear from the Film Exchange studio, including the 4K Canon C500 and Blackmagic 2.5K cameras, Zeiss cinema zooms and compact primes and a $60,000 sound package including Lectrosonics […]
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Five Questions for Learning to Drive Director Isabel Coixet
Reteaming director Isabel Coixet with her Elegy stars Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley, Learning to Drive is an adaptation of Katha Pollit’s 2002 New Yorker essay about a Manhattan writer (Clarkson), facing a sudden break-up, who gains wisdom from a driving instructor (here a Sikh played by Ben Kingsley) going through his own relationship evolution. It’s Coixet’s eight film, and below she answers questions about the process of adaptation, her interest in intimacy and the challenge of shooting in moving vehicles. A world premiere, Learning to Drive screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday, September 9. Filmmaker: Your […]
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Checkmate Director Timothy Woodward Jr. on Shooting Action and the Futility of Fixing it in Post
We recently spoke to director Timothy Woodward Jr. about the production of the movie Checkmate. Much of the discussion centered on the Blackmagic Production 4K camera, because this was one of the first feature movies shot with that camera. But in the course of the discussion, Woodward made a couple of observations about shooting that seemed worth highlighting separately. The first covered the continued importance of practical effects, and the second was about organizing your shooting schedule and why it’s worth getting it right on the day. Filmmaker: You did a lot of practical effects in the movie? Woodward: We […]
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Five Questions for Adult Beginners Director Ross Katz
Five years after transitioning from producer to director with the HBO veteran drama, Taking Chances, Ross Katz returns to the director’s chair with a comedy about going home. Nick Kroll plays a young entrepreneur whose product launch has flamed out, who has burned through his investors’ dough, and who has lost his girlfriend. He returns home to work as a nanny for his sister’s young child in what is described as a movie about beginning again. Adult Beginners world premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, September 8. Filmmaker: After having written and produced your directorial debut, you’re […]
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Five Questions for Do I Sound Gay? Director David Thorpe
In 2014 it would seem there are few societal taboos left for cinema to explore, but journalist-turned-director David Thorpe has found one with his debut documentary, Do I Sound Gay? Exploring, historically and personally, “the gay voice,” Thorpe listens to himself and others to find out why many gay men wish they sounded like someone else. Columnist Dan Savage, Star Trek’s George Takei and comedian Margaret Cho all make appearances in a film that seeks not so much to shatter stereotypes as explore the complex meanings behind them. Do I Sound Gay? premieres in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Mavericks […]
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Five Questions for The Reach Director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti
After screening his debut feature, Carre Blanc, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, French director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti returns to the festival to world premiere his latest, The Reach. Described as a cat-and-mouse thriller about a corporate shark and the young guide he hires for a hunting trip across the Mojave desert, it stars Michael Douglas, whose capacity for embodying and, through his performances, critiquing American greed is unquestioned. Below we ask Leonetti about Douglas, maintaining tension in a two-hander, and the differences between French filmmaking and American. Filmmaker: In both this film as well as Carre Blanc, class […]
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Stray Links 9/1-9/5: Tarantino’s 35mm Prints, Dead Russians and Teddy Bear Detectives
The future of 35mm rep cinema, a personal history of cinephilia as mediated by changing archival access, how the garbage heap of “hot takes” colonizes the internet and more in this week’s round-up of assorted reading: • Quentin Tarantino has owned Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema since 2007; now he plans to take over programming himself, drawing extensively upon his private collection of prints. Talking with the LA Weekly‘s Chuck Wilson, Tarantino repeatedly goes off on the crappiness of DCP, including this gem: I have all three Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood movies in I.B. Technicolor. Magnificent looking. I just […]
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Five Questions for The Yes Men Are Revolting Director Laura Nix
Five years after political superheroes the Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano) made everything all right in The Yes Men Fix the World, our planet seems pretty screwed up again. So, once more the two hit the airwaves, corporate board rooms and tabloid front pages in The Yes Men Are Revolting, directing their activist wit towards the issue of climate change. Along the way, they are joined by Laura Nix, who produced the previous film and this time directs alongside them both. Nix’s directing credits include The Politics of Fur and The Light in Her Eyes, and below she […]
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Sunshine Superman Director Marah Strauch on BASE Jumping, Interview Technique and Recreations as an Imaginative Space
Piling off cliffs and from airplanes, locking arms in the air or tumbling singly, the divers in Marah Strauch’s compelling documentary, Sunshine Superman, are simply hypnotic to watch. Seen mostly in archival footage culled from 250 hours of material, their forms take on a near-abstract quality — a quality that seduced first-time director Strauch to transition from experimental installation art work to documentary film. Her long-in-the-works Sunshine Superman, about pioneering BASE jumper Carl Boenish (he coined the acronym, which stands for building, antennae, span and earth) and his wife Jean, is a mixture of love story, human mystery and extreme […]
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Joel Bach and David Gelber on Years of Living Dangerously
The title Years of Living Dangerously could just as easily refer to the time its creators spent producing the recent series, and it has indeed been a busy few years for the journalists-turned-film producers Joel Bach and David Gelber. The pair left their posts at 60 Minutes several years ago to pursue a passion project, a long-form documentary on global warming. The result was a nine-part series that aired on Showtime this spring and, last week, took home the Emmy for the best nonfiction series, beating out Fox’s fantastic, much-lauded series Cosmos. Now the team is gearing up for phase two of the release, a DVD […]
