Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“I’ve Never Understood a Traditional Screenplay:” Carlos Reygadas on Post Tenebras Lux
Born in Mexico City, Carlos Reygadas was a lawyer specializing in armed-conflict resolution in Brussels when he decided to try his hand at making films at the age of 30. He quickly became a unique voice in cinema with his first feature, Japón (2001), which received a special mention for the Camera d’Or at Cannes that year. In his three films since, Reygadas has developed his cinematic language and abilities, as well as his reputation for making aesthetically uncompromising and provocative films. If his second film, Battle in Heaven (2005), cemented his reputation as a provocateur, his following Silent Light […]
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Exclusive Script Extracts and Storyboards from Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux
Courtesy of writer/director Carlos Reygadas, below are the script and storyboards from two sequences from Post Tenebras Lux, which opens at Film Forum today. The first sequence is the sauna scene, in which the film’s two central characters, played by Adolfo Jiménez Castro and Nathalia Acevedo, visit a swingers sauna in France, and the second is the closing sequence of the film. 10. Cave. Camera hand held and on tripod. To be determined whether real steam or fake smoke. Juan, Esther and extras. (French). 1. Series of fixed shots of naked people in a steam bath with red light. […]
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Just How Healthy Is Independent Film Distribution?
Louise Levison, a longtime movie industry watcher, found that 2012 was a deceptively good year for indies. Writing at Baseline Intelligence, she noted “independent box office in North America in 2012 was $4.5 billion and 41.7% of the $10.8 billion total.” She warns, “the one film that I feel made the 2012 indie percentage an anomaly is The Hunger Game.” It grossed $408 million in domestic sales and, without it, the indie share would be 37 percent, in line with what she calculates as the historical annual average of indie films of 35 percent for the period of 2000 to 2011. […]
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Soderbergh x 2: Listen to His SFFS Keynote and Read His Twitter Novella
Steven Soderbergh has retired from movies — for now, at least. But while we wait for his HBO Liberace biopic to arrive, there’s a couple of recent things to remind us of his continuing greatness and furious productiveness. Firstly, his San Francisco Film Society keynote speech at the weekend drew a lot of attention for decrying the Hollywood system for destroying cinema. Via TOH, you can listen to the entire speech below. It’s a typically smart and thoughtful piece of oratory, and well worth a listen. And after that, why not start following the Bitchuation account on Twitter, where Soderbergh […]
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Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Drew Whitmire
Independent films get made, often miraculously, and we cover those films here at Filmmaker. But what about all those other projects that never, despite the best of intentions, make it through production, much less hit theaters? In this new series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” we’ll be hearing from directors who have struggled for years to realize their films only to come up short. Is the system to blame? Bad luck? Themselves? I’ll let the filmmakers answer these questions in their own words. I’m happy to be opening this series with this letter from Drew Whitmire, who has been attempting to […]
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The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
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Enter Vine: Crafting the 6-Second Film
Since Vine was launched a little less than a year ago it’s gotten a fair amount of attention from the technology press but not as much, it seems, from filmmakers. The premise, that all films must be limited to six seconds, doesn’t lend itself to narrative films; it has, rather, been a gathering place for stop-motion animators, encouraged by its use of iOS device screens as the camera shutter, and, more famously, porn. But the app has proven nearly as popular as Twitter, which bought it last October, and just this month it became the most-downloaded free app in the […]
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Submission Deadlines Approaching for IFP’s Independent Film Week Project Forum
A quick public service announcement, in case you’re not aware that the deadlines for Independent Film Week — organized by IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker magazine — are quickly approaching. Here’s all the info you should need: Independent Film Week (September 15-19, 2013) is the oldest and largest forum in the U.S. for the discovery of new projects in development and new voices on the independent film scene. The Project Forum is a meetings-driven forum connecting filmmakers with producers, funders, distributors, broadcasters, sales agents, festival programmers, and more. The three sections of the Project Forum with open applications are: Emerging […]
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Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
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Teenage Riot: A Conversation with Matt Wolf, Jon Savage and Jason Schwartzman
Youth culture didn’t start in the ’60s. In the parlance of today’s teens, the appropriate response to this might be “duh.” Teenage, director Matt Wolf’s artful new non-fiction film, uncovers the “hidden history” of youth culture and locates its origins in various youth movements in the first half of the 20th century. From German Swing kids to American Victory Girls, the film offers a veritable lexicon of lost teen vocabulary (“teen canteen,” “buzz bucket,” “boogie in the strut hut”), and reminds us that the invention of teenager culture depended on the invention of a new language — and one that […]
