While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
After working as a producer for British stand ups Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr and as a script editor for the envelope-pushing Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, Iain Morris teamed up with fellow Carr collaborator Damon Beesley to create The Inbetweeners, a small-screen comedy series about a quartet of high-school boys who occupy the awkward middle territory between in-crowders and nerds. Starting in 2008, the show ran three seasons and gained not only a fanatical following but also a string of awards, including the Audience Award at the BAFTAs and Best Sitcom at the British Comedy Awards, both in 2010. […]
After the excitement of the last two weeks of camera announcements, here are some software announcements and updates that you might have missed. Prelude is unbundled One of the new apps to appear in Adobe Creative Suite 6 is Prelude, an ingestion and logging tool that is a separate application but works closely with Premiere. Prelude lets a user scan through the clips on a camera or memory card and select the ones they want to transfer or transcode. Metadata can be added, and it’s also possible to create very simple rough cuts within Prelude. The rough cuts and the […]
Four years after their disappointing big-screen take on the anime series Speed Racer, the Wachowski siblings return this fall—alongside Run Lola Run filmmaker Tom Tykwer—with their adaptation of Cloud Atlas. The film, based upon David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, has been dubbed by the media as Germany’s first attempt at a studio blockbuster, and it certainly has the look for it. Starring America’s favorite would-be uncle Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving and Doona Bae (among many others), Cloud Atlas examines the course of lives across decades and dimensions, through various incarnations, which […]
Wayne White is a fascinating figure whose work has permeated popular culture in multiple meaningful ways, without his name ever becoming well-known. Starting out as an underground comic book artist, White progressed to being a designer, puppeteer and performer on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, then to directing music videos for such acts as Peter Gabriel and the Smashing Pumpkins, while he’s also a talented an prolific painter, sculptor and musician. Graphic designer and commercial director Neil Berkeley, who first met White in the early 2000s, determined to make a film about this underappreciated figure and has created Beauty is Embarrassing, a unique and […]
“In Production” is a regular column which focuses on notable independent films that are currently shooting. If you would like your film to be included in this space, please send an email to nick@filmmakermagazine.com Late last week, Drive writer Hossein Amini’s directorial debut, The Two Faces of January, which stars Viggo Mortensen, commenced principal photography in Greece. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith (best known for the oft-adapted Ripley novels), it is described as a “stylish international thriller” about a Greek-speaking American (Oscar Isaac) who becomes infatuated with a beautiful, wealthy couple (Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst) only to be introduced to […]
Tomorrow Tribeca Film releases So Yong Kim’s latest feature, For Ellen. The following interview was originally published on the eve of the film’s Sundance Film Festival premiere. After winning over half a dozen festival prizes for her first two feature films, So Yong Kim has spent the last few years producing for her husband, Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl), and developing and writing her newest movie, For Ellen. Similar to her previous films, For Ellen’s narrative derives from Kim’s own experiences growing up. Brought together through the character of a young man traveling to see his daughter for the […]
After debuting at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2011, Damon Russell’s Snow on Tha Bluff had a small theatrical release earlier this year. Writing about it then, Filmmaker’s own Brandon Harris described the film as “An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, [which] discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about.” Since becoming available through such platforms as iTunes and Netflix Watch Instantly, Snow on Tha Bluff has found a new and highly engaged audience which has discovered and been electrified […]
In Detropia, the new documentary from directing partners Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a gleaming sun rises over a handsome stretch of metal and glass, yet much of the landscape it kisses is neglected, overgrown, and decaying. This is the dichotomous portrait of Detroit delivered by the filmmakers, whose breakthrough film, Jesus Camp, likely rattled your core. With similar attention paid to stirring emotional heft, Grady and Ewing’s latest uncovers the splendor and squalor of a very American metropolis, whose all-time-low state of disrepair is punctuated by glimmers of its former — and, perhaps, future — glory. Painstakingly researching their […]
The funny thing about film festivals is that there never seems to be enough time to talk about the films you’ve just seen. Distribution strategies, yes, industry gossip, most definitely, but the actual creative decisions and approaches involved in making the films themselves – barely! So the Grand Cinema’s mini-festival celebrating Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Tacoma, WA, last month felt like a truly rare treat. Bringing together 14 of the actors and filmmakers or filmmaking teams on the list, including myself and Katherine Fairfax Wright, my directing partner on Call Me Kuchu, The Grand Cinema scheduled […]