Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on How to Interview
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we are featuring a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature length documentary film Neurotypical is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of Oscar nominated documentary on deafness Sound and Fury. Here the two compare their different interview techniques. Click here to watch Larsen’s Neurotypical, an exploration into living with autism and how it reflects on what it means to be “normal”, […]
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Getty Museum’s New “Open Content” Initiative Makes 4,600 Pieces of Art Free to Use
The Getty Museum made an unusual move for the art world last week when they decided to launch their new “Open Content Program”, making over 4,600 pieces of the Museum’s private collection available to download, use, modify and publish for any purpose (all in beautiful full resolution). About this decision, the museum explains: “The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief.” Though there are no films included in the Open Content Program, there’s no doubt a vast treasure trove of […]
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Peter Mattei on How to Sell a Screenplay
Playwright, film director and now novelist Peter Mattei (The Deep Whatsis) was the guest recently on Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, where he told a surprising tale about contemporary Hollywood screenplay sales. Matthei, whose feature Love in the Time of Money was a La Ronde-inspired social X-ray of the early aughts, talks with Listi about working in the dotcom world and advertising, about the empowering nature of fiction writing and then this: I heard a story about a really well established screenwriter who had a great sci-fi script he couldn’t sell. So he finally just went into a comic book […]
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Laura Poitras on Turning on the Camera
One extraordinary passage among many in Peter Maas’s New York Times Sunday Magazine cover article on Laura Poitras and her role in the Edward Snowden story details the symbolic meanings of the documentarian’s most basic act: turning on the camera. By this point in the story, Poitras has been contacted by Snowden, has had a series of encrypted exchanges with him, but doesn’t know who he is. She, along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill of The Guardian, travel to Hong Kong to meet the source for what will be the most explosive national security tale of modern times. […]
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The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on Documenting Culture
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we are featuring a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature length documentary film Neurotypical is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of Oscar nominated documentary on deafness Sound and Fury. Here the two consider their work helps to define different cultures. Click here to watch Larsen’s Neurotypical, an exploration into living with autism and how it reflects on what it […]
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The POV Conversation: Josh Aronson and Adam Larsen on Finding the Story
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. Last month we continued this series with a discussion between filmmakers Stephen Maing and Lixin Fan. This week we are featuring a conversation between Adam Larsen, whose first feature-length documentary, Neurotypical, is currently streaming on the POV website, and Josh Aronson, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary on deafness, Sound and Fury. Here the two discuss how they went about searching for a story. Click here to watch Larsen’s Neurotypical, an exploration into living with autism and how it reflects on what it means […]
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A Five-Second Guide to This Year’s “25 New Faces”
I’m flying to Tacoma, Wa. tomorrow for the annual 25 New Faces event at the Grand Cinema, but before I depart I’m posting here a quick, video-driven guide to the talented people I’ll be hanging out with over the coming days. (Thanks to Nathan Jones and Dante Pilkington for helping to put this post together.) There’s a lot to dig into below, so enjoy. Anahita Ghazvinizadeh Below is the trailer for Ghazvinizadeh’s most recent Cannes-winning short, Needle, and you can watch her 2011 short When the Kid was a Kid here. Rodrigo Reyes Here’s the trailer for Purgatorio; you can […]
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Rodney Evans on The Happy Sad
An exploration of two couples — one black and gay, the other white and hetero — Rodney Evans’ The Happy Sad suggests with a light, deft touch the increasingly commonplace sexual fluidity that millennials are embracing as normative sexual categories fall away. Of course, there are difficulties. Partner swapping, open relationships, explorative homosexuality are nothing new, but even in the swingin’ hipster’d Brooklyn from which Evans tells his tale, complications arise, feelings are hurt, egos are shattered, these feelings only heightened by the ever present realities of race and class. A timely meditation on all of these things, the movie […]
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“In the Same Way Painters Used Their Paint…”: D.P. Bradford Young on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Mother of George
In just a few years, Bradford Young has emerged as one of the most auspicious and distinctive cinematographers in American independent film. First noticed in 2011 for his work on Andrew Dosunmu’s Restless City and Dee Rees’ Pariah, he was profiled by the New York Times the following year for his subtle, carefully framed cinematography on Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere. In just the past year, Young confirmed his early promise with two sumptuous and yet highly disparate visions: for David Lowery’s Texas-set period film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (opening this week) and Dosunmu’s Brooklyn-based contemporary drama Mother of George […]
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David Lowery on Editing Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
David Lowery made waves last year in the independent film world with the news that Ain’t Them Bodies Saints — the follow-up to his $12,000 feature film St Nick (2009) — had attracted the stellar cast of Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck and Ben Foster. It quickly became one of the year’s most anticipated independent films, premiering at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and Cannes Critic’s Week, and set to open in the US on August 16. The contemporary Western about a young couple torn asunder by a robbery gone wrong features shootouts and other elements of an action movie, but […]
