Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“He Could Almost Do It All Alone”: Producer Paula Vaccaro on Working with Emir Kusturica
I guess people expect to see a big bearded man as Emir Kusturica’s producer. Of course the question I get the most is, how did it start? I was a journalist more than 20 years ago in my hometown, Buenos Aires. In the late 1990s I moved into production: management, line producing, etc. In the early 2000s I moved to the UK and Spain and started to produce for others. My encounter with Emir’s work was thanks to Jose Ibañez, Pentagrama Films producer, who was producing Oliver Stone’s The Immortals, a series on world leaders seen from Oliver’s prism. I […]
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The Narrative Agent: Camera or Actor?
In conjunction with his workshop tour, commercial director-d.p. Vincent Laforet has been making the publicity rounds, conducting interviews with several outlets, including our own Michael Murie. In the majority of these discussions, Laforet emphasizes the importance and motivation of camera movement. “Generally speaking, in modern cinema,” he told Murie, “you rarely see stationary cameras. Audiences want to see movement, and it’s really important to have dynamic movement to retain people’s attention.” Such a sentiment is more or less ripped straight from the Hollywood rulebook: the more visually dazzling (booming, parallax, etc.) a story can be, the better it is. In the majority of […]
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Out of My Hand: Production Notes from a Micro-Budget Liberian Film Set
When my creative partner Takeshi Fukunaga summarily told me he wanted to shoot his first feature film, Out of My Hand, in the country of Liberia, I was skeptical. He and I run a Brooklyn-based production company, TELEVISION, and neither of us was particularly well-versed in Africa, let alone in the mysterious and contradistinct country of Liberia, whose two successive civil wars (the last of which ended only ten years ago) were preposterously vicious in size and scope. At the time, Takeshi had been inspired by a yet-to-completed documentary film by the late Ryo Murakami, his brother-in-law, who’d visited the […]
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Trailer Watch: Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner
One of several high profile titles premiering this week at Cannes, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner explores the late career of the eccentric 19th century British painter. Foremost regarded for his alternately bleak and hilarious portraits of middle class London, it will be interesting to see Leigh tackle a (period steeped) biopic. Of course, character driven narratives are Leigh’s bread and butter, given his now widely imitated scripting process in which the fruits of rehearsals are folded into the pages. Starring frequent collaborator Timothy Spall, the film premieres tomorrow in Competition and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on December 10. Watch the trailer […]
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Futurestates Launches Final Season with Seven Films and One Immersive Storyworld
Launching today is the fifth and final season of ITVS’s online series, Futurestates — short films by independent filmmakers “exploring the visions and various challenges of what life might look like in an America of the not so distant future, where automation and artificial intelligence is becoming an even more dominant force in people’s day to day lives.” The series has a different form this year, with the seven shorts all part of one immersive storyworld that is expressed not just through the films but through social media and a striking website by New York interactive specialists Murmur. Comments series […]
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Here Comes the ARRI AMIRA
ARRI has met with some success in digital filmmaking with their ALEXA camera. As just one indication of their dominance, the ALEXA was used on three-quarters of this year’s Best Picture nominees. It’s been praised for its image quality, ease of use and ruggedness. But it’s not cheap, and it’s not light. ARRI last year announced the AMIRA, and described it as a documentary camera. It’s smaller and lighter than the ALEXA, but if you were hoping for a significantly cheaper camera, you’ll be disappointed; the base AMIRA is $39,999. For those on a budget, renting the camera remains the […]
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Watch David Lynch’s Animated 2002 Series Dumbland
Shortly after the release of his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, David Lynch took a little downtime to create an early incarnation of the webseries: the aptly titled Dumbland. A profane series of vignettes centered around an irascible man, the bizarrely hilarious episodes feature Lynch’s own chicken scratch and characteristically strong sound design. You can watch all eight of them above, and be sure to stick around for the dancing ants featured in the final episode.
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“Constraint as Liberation”: Nicholas Rombes Publishes 10/40/70
Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70” series is one of the freshest, most boundary-pushing bouts of film criticism in years, a collection of essays on films analyzing only the content of single frames occurring at the ten, 40 and 70-minute marks. Originally published, at The Rumpus, they are now published in 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, an essential collection from Zero Books. The book is prefaced with an apt quote from Jean Baudrillard: “As for ideas, everyone has them. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis.” That singularity is here in ample supply, as Rombes’s […]
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How To Sell Your Movie at AFM: Unconventional Tips From the Moonshine Kingdom Team
If making a movie seems like a Herculean task, selling it can be even harder. You have to work festivals, industry contacts and many other avenues in the hope of finding a buyer. When Mooshine Kingdom‘s director Milton Horowitz and cinematographer Ryan Forte went to American Film Market (AFM), they decided to take a slightly different approach by going as exhibitors rather than as filmmakers. “I noticed that it said if you go as an exhibitor, you get access to the buyers list,” Horowitz says. “We thought, ‘That’s what we need, we need the buyers list.’” Though it was more […]
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Finding Teaching Jobs: A Few Thoughts about Teaching Work for Independent Filmmakers
I’ve been teaching film at different southern California colleges for the past nine years, and it has occurred to me recently that the landscape has changed. It has always been competitive, but it has become even more so. When I first started, finding work as an adjunct was difficult but possible, especially if you had relationships at film schools that needed part-time help. One of the dirty little secrets of higher education is that colleges are often DESPERATE for adjunct faculty, and will madly scramble for any warm body at the beginning of a semester. However, like everything else, when […]
