Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Kim Ki-Duk on Pieta
Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the […]
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Turning the Internet Green: The FX Protest
Over the past few months it’s been hard to miss the green icons showing up on Twitter and other social media in support of the FX Protest, an event that happened at this year’s Oscar ceremony to protest ongoing problems in the VFX industry. While movies continue to make great use of visual effects, the companies that create these effects are being financially stressed and are going out of business. To find out more about what’s been going on in the VFX industry, we spoke to Michael Scott, a VFX compositor who has been working in the industry for the […]
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Crowdfunding a Transmedia Phenomenon: Director Nicolás Alcalá on The Cosmonaut
With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation of Lánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent. The Cosmonaut will be available to watch for free on Saturday on the film’s website; the DVD, theatrical […]
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Will Tom Wheeler Kill Net Neutrality?
“I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over.” Guess who said these memorable words? In November 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama uttered this now all-but-forgotten campaign promise. The president recently announced his plan to appoint Tom Wheeler (above), a true industry insider, to head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Wheeler is a career water carrier for corporate interests. He served as head of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 and 1984, and ran the Cellular Telecom and Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 through 2004. […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: D. Fox Harrell
In the penultimate part of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s interview project with prominent transmedia figures, D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, answers our questions. Harrell’s research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He develops new forms of social media, gaming, computational narrative, and related computational media systems based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. The National Science Foundation has recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He has worked […]
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Shooting Richard Linklater and James Benning
Gabe Klinger is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for his documentary on directing legends James Benning and Richard Linklater. Below he talks about the experience of working on the project. My first encounter with Richard Linklater was through his Dazed and Confused. The film was of meteoric importance to me and my junior high peers. The soundtrack, which revived forgotten tunes by War and Foghat, got more play on our boomboxes than the Dr. Dre, Nirvana and Mariah Carey hits of the day. When a friend’s mom busted me for stealing her pack of smokes, I told her Dazed and […]
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When Life Gives You Lemons: An Unexpected Crowdfunding Success
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that I am sitting on a niche documentary goldmine. It’s titled Nuts: The Best Damn Fans In The Land. It will be about Buckeye Nation, which is the cultish fandom of The Ohio State University. I’ve never been more certain of a project’s potential success than this one. However, my past attempts at trying to get it funded tell a much different story. For almost a decade I failed to obtain funding for this golden project. Then a miracle happened, which I will get to in a moment. Buckeye Nation is the […]
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Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Michael Lew
Get together for drinks with a group of people who work in film, and soon the memories will flow. And they are usually linked to films these people have worked on. Film titles become markers of memory. It was on that film that this electrician met his future wife. On this one a P.A. adopted her dog. The sound guy was going through a divorce on this other one. The films may have faded from our collective memory, but the days on those sets are still ripe for the people who were involved. In reading this letter from Michael Lew, […]
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Richard Dutcher on Project 23 and The Boys at the Bar
Richard Dutcher is one of the most important and accomplished directors that nobody’s heard of. Like many independent filmmakers, Dutcher is a multihyphenate: writer, director, actor, producer, editor. In the process he’s created eight feature films that span genres and styles, including romantic comedy (Girl Crazy), intense emotional drama (States of Grace), gritty gut-wrenching naturalism (Falling), supernatural horror (Evil Angel), elegant formalism (Tryptich), and even a passionate period piece with only one actress (Eliza and I). And since his 2000 film God’s Army he’s become something like the Robert Rodriguez of Utah: the most important filmmaker in a region with […]
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The Opportunist on the Road to Cannes
My name is David Lassiter, I’m the writer and director of a short film called The Opportunist, and over the next few weeks, my team and I will be documenting our adventures on the road to Critics Week at Cannes where our film will have its world premiere. We are big fans of Filmmaker so we’re super excited to share our experiences. To begin! It’s only been two weeks since the Critics’ Week line-up was announced and already it feels like we’ve lived a lifetime. First things first: the film’s not even finished! We submitted a work in progress to Critics’ […]
