Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“I Made an Audio Drama Under Quarantine and So Can You!”: Frank Hudec on His Pandemic-Produced Audio Drama, Craiglockhart
There was a meme floating around the interwebs in early April. It consisted of two photos of Donald Glover. On one from, I think, Community, where he is clean cut, smiling and drinking coffee, the caption reads: “New Year’s Day, Looking Forward to 2020!” Next to it was the “Three Months Later” photo; it’s a shot from a Childish Gambino video where he’s shirtless and holding a shotgun. My January 2020 pretty much mirrored Donald Glover’s sunny optimism. I had just received a contract to direct a long-gestating film of mine, which had been optioned by a French company […]
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Wroclaw’s American Film Festival Announces Winners of the 10th U.S. in Progress
The 10th edition of U.S. in Progress, the American Film Festival in Wroclaw’s post-production forum that brings together American independent projects with the Polish and international film industries, concluded on Friday with the announcement of the winning films. Among the awardees are Homebody, by Joseph Sackett, who was selected for this year’s Filmmaker 25 New Faces list, as well as a prior 25 selection, Geoff Marslett, who brought his The Boardinghouse Reach to the event. As the American Film Festival’s Artistic Director explained earlier to Filmmaker, this year’s event was held online, with projects being presented to European sales agents, […]
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Tennessee Johnson, I Spit on Your Grave and Adaptation: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
These days, director William Dieterle is best remembered for his dreamy, stylized melodramas of the mid-to-late 1940s (I’ll Be Seeing You, Portrait of Jennie), but in his own time his greatest successes were mostly sturdy prestige biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. A key transitional film was 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced a supernatural element to Dieterle’s work and paved the way for a return to the German expressionist style in which he had worked as an actor. Before the delirious flights of fancy to come, however, Dieterle made one last return […]
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Breaking Bad Habits, Making Better Calls: Director Ronni Thomas on the Pandemic Final Production of AMC’s The Broken and the Bad
What do you do when you’re a week away from finishing a documentary project about the world’s biggest and most renowned TV series and the world decides to end? It all began very normally about a year ago. AMC approached the company I work for, IKA Collective, with the concept of creating a docu-series focusing on real-world stories that mirror the fictional worlds of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The show’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were enthusiastic about the idea, and before long I was on my way to Green Bank, West Virginia to document electromagnetic sensitivity; […]
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Grace of My Heart, Hard Eight and Mallrats: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’m a big fan of anything and everything written and directed by Allison Anders, but I’ve always been particularly fond of her 1996 musical Grace of My Heart. A magical blend of the kind of intimate behavior-driven filmmaking Anders is known for with the scale and resources of a big studio movie, it’s one of the most generous films I’ve ever seen in terms of how much it gives its characters (all of whom are presented with deep empathy and respect) and the audience. The heart of the picture is the richly detailed story of a singer-songwriter (a fantastic Illeana […]
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Three Insights into America’s Predicament at the recent New York Film Festival: MLK/FBI, City Hall, Nomadland
The New York Film Festival concluded several weeks ago; the much-anticipated Presidential debates came and went. Today we face the outcome of an existential election, and I find myself still thinking about three exceptional films at NYFF 58, two documentaries and one drama, that throw certain features of our national political crisis into sharp relief, intentionally or not, as only great films can do. The documentary MLK/FBI, from accomplished director/producer/editor Sam Pollard, revisits the final decade in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., ending with his assassination in 1968, a period during which our tax dollars underwrote […]
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Sundance Announces 23 New Documentary Fund Grantees
Twenty-three projects hailing from 21 countries will receive support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. Announced today, the projects will receive $540,000 in unrestricted grant support with funds made possible by The Open Society Foundations and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “During a time of shared crisis, it is essential that Sundance continue its steadfast support of artists across the globe,” said Documentary Film Program Director Carrie Lozano in a press release. “These films creatively assert our common quests, conditions and resilience as they interrogate notions of individual and collective power.” “Creative support for nonfiction storytellers feels […]
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Rambo: Last Blood and Play Misty for Me: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series is one of the more durable franchises in American cinema, which is somewhat surprising given that it didn’t really find its voice until its fourth installment and began with a film that didn’t lend itself to sequels at all. First Blood, which Ted Kotcheff directed from a script by Stallone, Michael Kozoll and William Sackheim in 1982, is a stand-alone action classic, an elegant and austere survival film in which Vietnam vet John Rambo takes on the town that wronged him without killing a single person. Stallone made up for First Blood’s low body count with […]
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Get Ready to Stream: Delivering a Film in 2020 to a Virtual Festival
Six months ago, I was considering an update to my now biennial guide on how to prepare your film for festival exhibition. The 2018 version of that guide is available on the Filmmaker website and is a good reference if you are showing your film at a drive-in or outdoor screening that has a DCP server or some other file-based playback system. However, the majority of festival screenings happening this fall and into next year will be on virtual festival platforms. Pre-pandemic, I would’ve told you that the widespread adoption of a streaming component to festivals was as likely as […]
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The Noise Inside: Writer/Director Darius Marder on Sound of Metal
The following interview with Darius Marder about Sound of Metal, currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal stars Riz Ahmed as Ruben, the drummer for a two-person heavy metal band who loses his hearing and, for much of the film, his perspective and sense of self as a result. His hearing falters and almost entirely disappears early in the film during the middle of a tour with his girlfriend/bandmate Lou (Olivia Cooke). Both are recovering addicts, and as their world is turned upside down, Lou fears Ruben […]
