Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Five Questions with 28 Hotel Rooms Director Matt Ross
Matt Ross’s directorial debut is an inventive look at an affair between a married account (Marin Ireland) and a novelist (Chris Messina) that unfurls within the walls of 28 hotel rooms across the country. Dictated by checkout times and the call of the “real world,” their truncated encounters are marked by a growing sense of urgency, as their physical connection turns emotional. Ireland and Messina shoulder the challenge of being the sole recipients of Doug Emmett’s lens with magnetic grace, crafting their characters’ dimensions in varying increments of restraint and ebullition. 28 Hotel Rooms, currently streaming on iTunes and VOD, […]
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A Kickstarter Launch for Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby
Author Stephen Elliott (The Adderall Diaries) founded the culture website The Rumpus and recently directed his first feature, About Cherry. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign for his second, Happy Baby, an adaptation of his 2004 autobiographical novel. The below is excerpted from Elliott’s Daily Rumpus newsletter, which, as a newsletter writer myself, I highly recommend. — SM Someone asked yesterday why I was doing a Kickstarter for my movie. He said he would donate $5, he doesn’t have very much money (which is fine), but he wanted to know why I needed you (he said, “Why do you need us?”). […]
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Phillip Van’s Amazing Post-Sandy Blackout Photos
Filmmaker and former 25 New Face Phillip Van took his camera out during the New York blackout and came away with a beautiful series of long-exposure shots capturing the city’s architecture and workers without their customary nocturnal illumination. Here’s what he had to say via email: I shot the photos on a regular old Canon 5D. One night I had a tripod. Another I went handheld so I could travel more. The city was pitch black and ominous. Buildings felt like mausoleums. But if you stayed out long enough, your eyes adjusted to candles and shadows behind curtains and you […]
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RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
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Factory 25 Acquires Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I
Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, the filmmaker’s uber-controversial follow-up to his Gotham Award-winning I Am a Sex Addict, was today picked up by Factory 25. Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique distribution company will give the film a simultaneous digital and theatrical release in December, which will qualify the doc for awards consideration. The film, in which Zahedi gleefully pokes fun at the Middle Eastern benefactor who is bankrolling his movie, had its world premiere at SXSW earlier this year — and has been banned in the United Arab Emirates for blasphemy. From today’s press release: Brooklyn, NY (November 6, 2012) […]
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VOD for Indies
As indie makers know all too well, movie distribution is undergoing a major restructuring. The shift from analog media to digital production, post-production and distribution technologies not only changes how movies are made and distributed, but how people view them. Theatrical moviegoing is declining; since 2002, ticket sales have declined by nearly 20 percent. Making matters worse, DVD sales are shrinking. And video streaming revenues, while growing, are doing so at a rate insufficient to make up the difference. Readers of Filmmaker are urged to check out a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, “Now playing at a living […]
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The Week in Cameras: The Empire and the Rebellion
This week saw Sony announce two new cameras, the PMW-F5 and PMW-F55, as well as some details about 4K recording for the NEX-FS700. Unfortunately, they didn’t announce many pricing details, other than the $2,000 price for the interface unit for the NEX-FS700. The cameras are expected in January, and pricing information will probably come sometime in December, but we have been left to depend on whispers from those who say they have been told numbers, even though Sony continues to say that they haven’t told anyone the prices. That said, it appears that the PMW-F5 will be under $20,000 and […]
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Checking Out Sony’s New NEX-EA50H at Abel Cine Tech: Ergonomics and Low Cost Too
October 30 has come and gone, and with it Sony’s splashy announcement of two 4K additions to their CineAlta “F” series of Super35 cameras — F3, F35, F65 — namely, the F5 and F55. At a moment when Sony’s FS700 uses a Super35 4K sensor to capture low-cost AVCHD, it should have startled no one that Sony’s October surprise would be all about expanding their 4K line-up. But lost in the social media buildup to the F5/F55 announcement has been the recent introduction of another large-sensor Sony HD camcorder, the NEX-EA50H, a design that tackles, at last, the issue of […]
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Five Questions with North Sea Texas Director Bavo Defurne
The most striking thing about North Sea Texas is the handsome precision of its aesthetic, which, from the windswept beaches of its coastal setting to the ’70s duds that match home décor, comes close to endowing the film with a magical-realist vibe. A native Belgian and graduate of a Brussels art school, writer/director Bavo Defurne isn’t interested in being a fly on the wall. From a portfolio of ethereal photography to a handful of short films (including Campfire, which gobbled up praise as it cruised the international festival circuit), Defurne has an affinity not for the affected, but for the […]
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Why 3D?
John has graciously given me a chance to tell people why I do 3D, why I ACTUALLY do 3D, to write something beyond the technical babble that typically highlights any in-depth discussion of 3D or the snark that informs any “3D, ugh” diatribe or the relative silence from my peers in the indie community. I’ll do my best to talk about 3D in a way that I haven’t heard often… less a technical piece (or 3D ugh-fest), more an honest ramble on independent artistic creation. An ode, if you will. It’s a shame to start like this, but to get […]
