We were a week away from principal photography on my fourth feature film, Relaxer, and I wanted to run away. Production designer Mike Saunders and I had been building our apartment set inside his parents’ two-car garage, and things were taking too long. The entire shoot was to happen in that garage, so it had to be perfect. It didn’t look like it’d ever be ready, and I was stressing hard. My stomach burned. I couldn’t keep anything down. I’d been losing weight. I just wanted to sleep for three weeks and wake up with a finished film, but I […]

The debut feature from writer and director Hu Bo, An Elephant Sitting Still, caused a sensation when it screened at the 2018 Berlinale. Nearly four hours long, the movie unfolds over the course of a day in and around a blue-collar housing development in a third-tier Chinese town. Interlocking narratives follow a bullied high school student, an elderly parent pressured to move into a nursing home, a gangster who must avenge an attack on his brother and a girl’s illicit relationship with a married teacher. The movie’s running time, difficult subject matter and troubled production have left an air of […]

The notion of the camera-stylo, introduced by Alexandre Astruc in 1948, had a very circumscribed meaning: “the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” Quickly, though, the metaphor of camera as pen took on its own life: the French New Wave used it to propel auteur theory, while others used the metaphor in the opposite direction—filmmaking as a giant pen held by a crew, with the […]

Taylor Hess’s article “Disclosed: Producers and Therapists on Dealing with the Stress of a Demanding Profession” struck deep with me, so much so that I was compelled to write this response. I’m not a producer by choice. I’m a writer/director, and out of necessity, I produced my first feature film, The Purple Onion. I didn’t wait around for anyone or for the perfect conditions. I worked with trusted people around me and we did it, we made a movie and it got distribution. Now I’m in the process of packaging my second feature film through ICM. Again I’m my own […]

Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today Jeffrey Sharp as its new Executive Director. Sharp, as longtime Filmmaker readers will know, is a veteran producer whose credits include Boys Don’t Cry, You Can Count on Me, Evening and The Yellow Birds. He was also co-founder and President of Open Road Media, a pioneering digital publishing company that has an early innovator in the book space. Sharp’s non-profit experience comes from his role as co-founder and Chair of the Hamptons International Film Festival Advisory Board, and his most recent producing work with his Sharp Independent Productions has focused on productions […]

Since 1895 films have had at least two distinct advantages over live theater: the ability to be reproduced and watched at times and in places where the action did not actually take place, and the ability to direct the audience’s attention to precisely what the filmmakers desired. Conversely, after more than a century of cinema’s evolution, these have become precisely the reason that theater remains vibrant: it’s live and it’s present, and audiences can look wherever they want. Now virtual reality is mixing these experiences in a new way. While still prerecorded and edited (generally), it expands the audience’s range […]

The Sundance Institute announced the eleven screenwriters who will take part in their seventh annual Screenwriters Intensive. Taking place in Los Angeles tomorrow and Friday, the Intensive is “a two-day workshop for writers or writer/directors from underrepresented communities developing their first fiction feature. Fellows at the Intensive will advance the art and craft of their work under the guidance of experienced filmmakers and in collaboration with Institute’s Feature Film Program.” Advisors are Andrew Ahn, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Patricia Cardoso, Deena Goldstone, Tanya Hamilton, Elgin James, So Yong Kim, Sarah Koskoff, Tracy Oliver, Joan Tewkesbury, and Andy Wolk. The program is […]

Water Makes Us Wet – An Ecosexual Adventure is Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s ecstatic exploration of the pleasure and politics of water. Premiering tonight at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the doc is part road movie, part experimental film, part activist project. Water Makes Us Wet combines the allure of sex and environmental justice as it takes viewers on a trip through California, a state recently ravaged by drought and wildfires linked to climate change. Moving from San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plants to Sprinkle’s childhood house to the shrinking, toxic Salton Sea, the queer couple and artistic duo create a vivid […]

Since the late 1990s, Gas Food Lodging filmmaker Allison Anders frequently lamented the pitiful media attention around women directors. “There are no girl-wonders, especially in this business,” she told BOMB Magazine in 1994. “But men all think they’re the next boy-wonder.” In the wake of bombshell reports on gender pay inequity and the #TimesUp movement, the media and entertainment industries are now certainly well aware of the “boy wonder syndrome,” as it’s been called. But bias is still glaringly with us, sometimes in subtle ways. Not only were no women directors nominated for Oscars this year, as has been widely […]

The following guest essay on the making of Ham on Rye is from cinematographer Carson Lund. The film premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this week, and the official site is here. For independent filmmakers, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions: it’s both an ideal place to congregate with likeminded artists and craftspeople, and a truly daunting place to actualize on-location productions if you’re low on cash. Between inflated permitting fees, hefty fines for unlawful shooting, and a police force with plenty of experience enforcing these standards, there’s no shortage of ways in which the city formally discourages guerrilla […]