Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Co-Directing and the Exhaustion of the Indie Filmmaker: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 3)
In parts I & II of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we covered finding the story, script development, and the difficulties of finding locations and cast. In this final part of the interview, Medinger talks about co-directing a feature, offers some advice for first time filmmakers, and attempts to explain what it’s really like to make your first movie. The film is currently in post-production, and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker: You and Robin Schmidt are co-directors on the movie. How does that work? Medinger: Robin and I have both directed […]
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ScreenCraft’s Digital Discourse: Build Your Audience Now
“Distributing is easy, marketing is hard.” With that statement, moderator Ryan Koo kicked off the discussion at ScreenCraft’s recent Digital Discourse panel on the future of content creation and releasing. Nestled in the WGAE suite of a Tribeca high rise, the participating panelists included YouTube’s Amy Singer; Erica Anderson, Chief Marketing Director at Seed&Spark; Erick Opeka, SVP of Digital Distribution at Cinedigm; @radical.media’s Adam Neuhaus; and BOND 360 Founder and CEO, Marc Schiller. Chances are, you’ve heard it before: with so much of the independent film world unspooling in a viral sphere at a hair-raising pace, filmmakers must be prepared […]
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Five Questions with Go For Sisters Director John Sayles
Childhood friends Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton) and Fontayne (Yolanda Ross) have been out of touch for a few years. When they reconnect, during an early sequence in John Sayles’ 18th feature film Go For Sisters, it is over a desk. Bernice, a parole officer, sits before folders of rap sheets to one side; Fontayne, a former junkie and criminal, fidgets on the other. It doesn’t take long, however, for the circumstance to turn from professional to personal. When Bernice’s drug running son vanishes near the Mexican border, she calls on Fontayne to help track him down. The two women head South, […]
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A Rising Tide: On the Benefits of the CAAM Fellowship
My journey as a filmmaker has had its share of ups and downs. I am both Asian American and queer, and both identities are often contained in niche boxes in the film world. Right after receiving my graduate degree in screenwriting, I co-wrote and produced an indie film that premiered at Sundance, was acquired and theatrically released — a groundbreaking event at the time for an Asian American-themed film. The following years were a blur of studio rewrites, a spec sale, and many near misses. The successes were few and far between but it was enough to keep me afloat […]
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Indie Distributors Respond to Netflix on Issue of Day-and-Date
At the Film Independent Forum a couple weeks back, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos gave something of a provocative keynote in which he declared that theaters would “kill movies” if they continued to resist multi-platform, day-and-date distribution. Though Sarandos later backtracked, Indiewire picked up the ball and ran with it, soliciting responses from several independent distributors on the matter. Among the executives weighing in were Kino Lorber’s Richard Lorber, Emily Russo of Zeitgeist Films, and Matt Grady of Factory 25. Dylan Marchetti, President of Variance Films, raised an interesting point, noting that “[Sarandos] knows that any resistance here isn’t to […]
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OK, Enough, Goodbye To Be Released Via Vyer Films
Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, two of Filmmaker‘s 2011 “25 New Faces,” have found a home for their debut feature, OK, Enough, Goodbye, at Vyer Films. An unusual coming of age tale, Ok, Enough, Goodbye centers on a protagonist who is effectively old enough for a mid-life crisis. The aforementioned, nameless 40-year old man lives in Tripoli, Lebanon, with his mother, having long relinquished any prospects for independence. But when his mother abruptly leaves, the man is left with nothing but his surroundings. As he struggles to find his bearings adrift in the small city, he must keep his mother’s absence a […]
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“I Am the Master of My Destiny”: Jeremy Irons Talks at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox
In 1979, Jeremy Irons was in the middle of shooting the British TV drama, Brideshead Revisited when the show’s technicians went on strike. No one knew if or when the show would continue, so Irons talked to director Karol Reisz about filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman the following March. “[Reisz] was going out on a big limb to allow the studio to use me,” Irons recalls, “because I was a nobody.” Irons would become a household name for playing a stiff upper lipped Englishman because of Brideshead , but this past weekend in Toronto he showed a funny, candid and insightful side […]
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Joshua Oppenheimer on How Limitations Shaped The Act of Killing
In light of The Act of Killing‘s upcoming screening in MoMA’s The Contenders series, I thought to share an interview in which Joshua Oppenheimer discusses how repression and restrictions shaped the evolution of the film’s groundbreaking narrative. Originally setting out to capture the Indonesian genocide from the survivors’ perspective, Oppenheimer quickly realized that constant military interference was throwing a wrench in his work. Drifting in and out of jail with his crew, Oppenheimer began to follow the victims’ suggestion that he film purported perpetrators, in the interest of obtaining information that may bring them closure. Within minutes of meeting the men in […]
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The State of 4K
Technology tipping points – when something goes from the unusual to the commonplace – can happen with unexpected rapidity. Has 4K reached a tipping point, and if so what aspect of 4K? Acquisition, production, distribution, or all three? If you’re shooting a film today, should you be shooting in 4K? The answer to these questions is complicated by cost, complexity and the long-term shelf-life of your project. Today, a convincing argument can be made for shooting in either 4K (future proof) or HD (cost effective and most people won’t see the difference). One thing seems for certain; we will be […]
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Netflix Originals “Exclusively” Acquires The Square
When Netflix announced this past July that they wanted to expand their original programming beyond wildly successful TV serials to documentaries, I figured an Alex Gibney commission wasn’t far off. Instead, the Internet was met with the puzzling news earlier today that the streaming giant acquired the very much completed, newly edited, festival-circuit debutant The Square. “Original,” it seems, lends itself to a different definition when Netflix is doing the talking. Though The Square is currently making a self-financed, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles, Netflix said in a statement that they will exclusively “premiere” the documentary […]
