Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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The Blackmagic Production Camera and Pocket Camera: A Review
I’ve been shooting exclusively with Blackmagic cameras for the past year. Their three primary offerings, the 1080p Pocket Cinema Camera, the 2.5K Cinema Camera, and the 4K Production Camera, to my mind, are the most practical low-cost/high-quality cameras currently available for DIY filmmakers. Are they perfect? No. In fact, many people prefer going with the Panasonic GH4, the new low-light sensation Sony a7S, or even the Canon 5D Mark III. The truth is, there is no perfect camera, just personal preference. There’s always been a specific camera at a specific time that works best for me. In the prehistoric age […]
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12 Picks for the SXSW PanelPicker
Not five months after the mammoth festival wraps, SXSW opens up their PanelPicker site, an online forum which aggregates all industry and filmmaker programming pitches for their next conference. Last year, I went through the offerings and highlighted 15 that piqued my interest; this year, the stakes are higher, and I’m down to 12 from the 183 listed. You have till September 5 to vote on your favorites. How “High Maintenance” Is Redefining Storytelling I fondly recall the day former Managing Editor Nick Dawson sent me a link to an episode of High Maintenance some 18 months back. Since then, Ben Sinclair and […]
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“Dying of the Light” at MASS MoCA
Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas If you’re anywhere near North Adams in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, close by the New York and Vermont borders, anytime between now and February 1, 2015, do yourself a favor and drop by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to contemplate their exhibition marking the last days of photochemical motion pictures: The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor. With the contraction of film manufacturing and virtual demise of laboratory services in the face of near-universal digital imaging, the medium of […]
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Stray Links 8/25-8/28: David Fincher’s Gap Ads and Kazakhstani Cowboys
Behind the scenes of David Fincher’s new Gap ad campaign, the logistics of growing the beef industry in Kazakhstan, a look at illegal logging in Indonesia and more in this week’s links round-up: • Yesterday the Gap released four new ads directed by David Fincher. Mashable’s Todd Wasserman has the videos and quotes from Gap Global CMO Seth Farbman on Fincher’s typically exacting work process. One spot had the actors running 50 to 60 times up a set of stairs (the audition included ten minutes of running). Fincher lived up to his end of the bargain by creating “a new […]
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Somebody: Miranda July’s Messaging Service
Remember We Think Alone? Miranda July’s investigatory aggregate into the emails of famous people? July is again re-examining how people communicate in the age of information with a new app/messaging service entitled Somebody. Some sort of sick combination of texting and Tinder, Somebody ensures human contact upon receiving a message because that message is not your own — it belongs to someone nearby, and you are tasked with delivering it. To promote the project, Miu Miu commissioned a short from July that premiered today at the Venice Film Festival. In the supplement, a varied cast of characters (including July herself) […]
