Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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NICOLAS WINDING REFN DOC HITS YOUTUBE
Last week on the blog, I linked to a great piece by Nicolas Winding Refn on the obscure exploitation director Andy Milligan. Now, though, it’s the Drive helmer himself who’s in the spotlight, as he’s the subject of an hour-long portrait by French documentarian Laurent Duroche, NWR, which is available to watch on YouTube. As you’ll discover from the very first minute — when we first see and then hear Alejandro Jodorowsky talking French in his distinctive Chilean tones — this is a film without subtitles. But the good news is that Refn is fluent in English and the majority of […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Doc Filmmaking as an Act of Faith
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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Andrew Neel and Louisa Krause Talk King Kelly
While there have been many films riffing on reality tropes in the last several years, few have been as cleverly conceived and entertainingly executed as Andrew Neel’s debut fiction film, King Kelly. Set in the world of amateur webcam porn, the film depicts a monstrously fascinating Tracy Flick for our oversexualized social media age. Played ferociously by Louisa Krause, Kelly is a high-school student who runs a profitable one-woman porn empire from her suburban bedroom, with her parents none the wiser. Stripping on cam, uploading details of her everyday life and ruling over her chat room with a gonzo glee, […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Doc Filmmaking as Vocation
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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MORE OF “THE MASTER”
Here’s the second bit of footage released from Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming The Master, this time featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman (who plays the title character), as well as Joaquin Phoenix. As with the previous one, this is really a teaser/clip rather than an actual trailer, giving us a sense of only a small aspect of the film — rather than taking the usual trailer tactic of telling us 90% of the plot and compacting every notable or high-energy moment from the film into 90 seconds. As someone who likes to be surprised by movies, I hope that this refreshingly different […]
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LAFF 2012: FAMILY MATTERS
The North American premiere of Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love was the big to-do Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles, and not just because it opened the L.A. Film Festival: Allen doesn’t often visit the city (not even when nominated for an Oscar), making his personal introduction of this latest work something of a coup for the fest. And while it would be wrong to call a new film by the endlessly prolific director a cinematic “event” in the same vein as, say, the arrival a new Terence Davies project, so too would it be wrong to think it […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox & Cristina Ibarra on Choosing Documentary Filmmaking
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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A Call to Producers: Innovate or Die!
The following blog post originally appeared at the IFP’s site and is cross-posted with permission. — Editor. I’m very fortunate to be friends with many accomplished independent film producers–people whose films have screened at the best festivals, won significant awards, gotten picked up by major distributors, earned healthy gross receipts, and received accolades in the mainstream press. We hang out sometimes, one-on-one or in groups, to catch each other up on our projects, share recent experiences, exchange opinions on companies and people we’ve worked with, etc. But essentially, we get together for emotional support against an industry and an economy […]
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EXCLUSIVE: “PAVILION” TRAILER FEATURING NEW SAM PREKOP TRACK
Prior to its BAMcinemaFest screening on June 28, Tim Sutton’s festival favorite Pavilion has a haunting new trailer — featuring a new song from The Sea and Cake’s Sam Prekop — which we are delighted to be exclusively premiering on the Filmmaker website. In the current issue of the magazine, Scott wrote the following on the film: Tim Sutton’s Pavilion, premiering in the Emerging Visions section, is a beautifully shot and tantalizingly subtle tale of the fragility of adolescent friendships. A teenage boy (Max Schaffner) spends summers with his mother in upstate New York before traveling to stay with his […]
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“PARAíSO”: AN INTERVIEW WITH NADAV KURTZ
On still mornings in the “Windy City,” a select few people can be seen careening down the high rises that mark Chicago’s skyline. While the buildings they descend contain people waking up for their daily routines—or the destinations of such routines—these men are living out their routines. In the short documentary Paraíso (Paradise), newcomer Nadav Kurtz delves into the lives of three Mexican immigrants working as window washers in Chicago. The film, which won Best Documentary Short awards at this year’s Tribeca International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival, portrays a segment of the workforce for Chicago’s largest […]
