Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
FANTASY FOR FANTASY’S SAKE: DEFENDING HBO’S GAME OF THRONES
Welcome to part two in a series highlighting some of the most innovative, groundbreaking TV of 2011. This installment’s focus is HBO’s wildly ambitious and equally expensive fantasy series, Game of Thrones. Booker Prize winning author Salmon Rushdie recently had some not so flattering words for Thrones. In a recent interview with Haaretz, he said: “Most novels published are bad novels, most plays put on are bad plays, most movies that come out are bad movies and that is also true of TV. Nineteen times out of 20 you fall asleep. There was a series called Game of Thrones which […]
-
KICKSTARTER: JANE WEINER’S “RICKY ON LEACOCK”
“In 1972, Ricky put a Super 8 synch-sound camera in my hand and said, ‘If you want to become a filmmaker, you have to shoot,’” writes filmmaker Jane Weiner on the Kickstarter page for her project, Ricky on Leacock. “Turning my lens on him, I was suddenly transported into another universe: What began as a filmic conversation developed into a filmic adventure that traces the roots of Leacock’s cinematic quest and his role in documentary-making over the last century.” Four decades later, and less than a year after Leacock passed away, Weiner is finishing her documentary on the legendary filmmaker […]
-
IFP LABS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO PLANNING YOUR FESTIVAL PREMIERE
There was an elephant in the room during day one of IFP’s annual Marketing and Distribution Labs, and that elephant’s name was Sundance. The majority of the Lab’s 21 attending filmmakers submitted applications earlier this year, each one hoping and secretly sort of expecting an acceptance letter. What they all received instead was a courteous but crushing rejection. Today’s afternoon session started out as something of a venting session. As the lab leaders tried to reassure these first-time filmmakers that their careers were not over, that they had many options still on the table, the mood in the room only […]
-
CAM ARCHER LAUNCHES CRIME DOC ON KICKSTARTER
Boundary-busting filmmaker Cam Archer — one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces and director of, most recently, Shit Year — is making his first doc, Criminal Thoughts. He talks about it and his career in an unguarded video for Kickstarter. In the video, Archer is up-front about the exploratory nature of his project, which appeals to me. As more and more Kickstarter campaigns seem like pre-buys for existing products/projects, Cam’s appeal to us to assist him during his creative process is striking. From the page: CRIMINAL THOUGHTS, my first feature length documentary, will be an exciting, creative departure for me. in […]
-
THE MOTHER AND CHILD REUNION: “WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN”
The title is ironic: The conversation never happens. (Kevin’s mom suggests it in a voiced-over letter to her husband, but, if it is even sent, it is — seemingly — ignored.) Eva (the chameleon-like Tilda Swinton, brilliant as ever) and Franklin (John C. Reilly) are the parents of a troubled boy who tortures his mother with line-crossing defiance. (He is played by three kids of different ages. The principal action revolves around the oldest, perfectly portrayed by Afterschool’s Ezra Miller as an intimidating glop of arrogant negativity.) Eva never wanted the unplanned child. She yells much more loudly than necessary during childbirth and appears desolate in her hospital bed. […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #52
Second #2444, 40:44 The still frame, so much like a photograph that it takes a violent deformation of reality to make it move. Jeffrey and Dorothy, frozen eternally in a film that has stuttered to a stop. In John Ashbery’s long poem Girls on the Run, there are these lines: I’ll go you one better, Fred chimed in, here’s a diver, let’s call her Josephine, who dives and dives, further and downward, all our lives’ span, to the basis of that bridge. Dorothy and Jeffrey have taken the dive that trembles us into fear, and prevents us from following. So […]
-
“IDIOT” VICTORY LAP
Congrats to Filmmaker contributor Jamie Stuart, whose short film, “Idiot with a Tripod,” appears on Time Magazine’s end-of-2011 “Best of Everything” — #3 in the list of “Top Ten Creative Videos.” Wrote Time’s Craig Duff: Many New Yorkers who were away for the holidays last year (like me) watched the weather reports the day after Christmas and wondered if the blizzard bearing down on the city would strand us in other states (it did). As the snow began to fall that day outside his Queens apartment, Jamie Stuart thought of legendary filmmaker Dziga Vertov. He grabbed a video-capable DLSR camera […]
-
Is Shallow Depth-of-Field a Fad?
Most creative arts suffer from trends. Someone does something new or unusual, and suddenly dozens of others are imitating it; just look at Hollywood. Since the arrival of the Canon 5D Mark II, shallow depth-of-field has become almost a fetish. There’s certainly valid reasons to want to have shallow depth-of-field, as filmmaker Stu Maschwitz wrote on his blog: “With a 5D Mark II, its sensor double the size of a motion picture film frame, we can achieve cinematic focus at F4. We can get fetishistically shallow depth of field at F2.8. At F1.2, we can create abstract art in a […]
-
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It is being released theatrically by Focus Features on 12.09.11.) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy plays out like a long game of chess whose pieces are constantly being moved across the board without ever reaching checkmate. Each of the many players thinks himself a king, but one by one they’re shown to be little more than glorified pawns. The narrative they collectively form is at once dense but fluttering, broken into tiny fragments whose value as clues and signifiers is constantly being called into question and, once thoroughly vetted, reassembled into something […]
-
GARY OLDMAN TALKS “TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY” AND HIS LEGENDARY CAREER
In the first of a series of videos we did at this year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards, Gary Oldman talks to Filmmaker about his new film, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (which opens Fri.) as well as what he’s gotten out of working on franchises like Batman and Harry Potter and why acting still interests him. Oldman was honored with a Tribute Award at this year’s Gothams. See more news and features from nominees and winners here. Coming later this month (and throughout awards season) we’ll have more videos of winners from the Gotham Awards. [jwplayer config=”FM Player” file=”https://filmmakermagazine.com/videos/Gary_Oldman_Final_Cut_640_338.mov” image=”https://filmmakermagazine.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Gary-Oldman-Still-640-x-338.jpg”]
