For the past six years I’ve been curating content about filmmaking and the creative process at large. I’ve found a lot, and there’s a lot more to uncover, but the one thing that I have always found frustrating was how fragmented all the information remains. It takes an average of five to seven years to make an indie feature. What happens during that time? How do people make a living, juggle other aspects of their lives, and overcome doubt, blocks, debts during those five to seven years? We know so little about the current indie film industry landscape that UCLA is […]

Ben Stillerman — director of Taking Stock, a new film about his father’s South African family business — talks with two other documentary filmmakers about the particular joys and challenges of making films about family. Leah Warshawski is the director of Big Sonia, about her inspiring Holocaust survivor grandmother; Kate Dandel’s Gold Balls is about professional senior tennis and features her father-in-law. Stillerman: I came up with the idea for doing a film about my father and our family business partly because I knew I would have unfettered access to a very interesting person and story. I also knew that […]

Mark Pellington, along with David Fincher and Mark Romanek, began his filmmaking career in what might be called MTV’s heroic age. After a series of music videos, which include Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” U2’s “One” and R.E.M.’s “Drive,” he made two skillful, flashy, mid-sized star-driven studio thrillers — Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies. Over the last ten years, a succession of his indie films have all dealt in sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic terms with people trying to manage death. Alex Ross Perry, perhaps at one point associated with the mumblecore movement, whatever that exactly was, has for the last eight years, […]

What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]

I’m fortunate to work in action and with stunts, behind the camera. The stunt community is comprised of all kinds of talent — drivers, motorcycle riders, gymnasts, fighters, parkour, Cirque du Soleil acrobats and much more. They are the best of the best! I’ve been even more fortunate to train and work with the best stunt coordinators, innovators, riggers and performers in Hollywood. Most audiences, and even film critics, aren’t aware that action sequences are created by a separate team of technicians and performers. On Hollywood films, action is shot by a second-unit crew, with its own director and sometimes […]

The lobby is packed. Within minutes of opening, a line has formed for Frankenstein AI: a monster made by many, and we’re completely booked for the day. Festival-goers curious about emergent forms of storytelling weave their way through the New Frontier section of the festival, a labyrinth of VR, AR and AI. Now in its 11th year, Sundance’s New Frontier is hosted in two venues and has expanded to over 30 exhibitions ranging from individual experiences to a social VR theater for close to 100 participants. The last few months have been a whirlwind. On November 13th I received an […]

Michael Taylor has been editing the work of America’s independent filmmakers since 2004. Taylor has cut films for Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange), Rick Alverson (Entertainment) and Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet), to name a few. In 2017, he edited two films to appear at the Sundance Film Festival: Elvis & Nixon and Deidra & Laney Rob a Train. He returns to the festival this year having edited A Kid Like Jake, a New York-set drama starring Claire Danes, Jim Parsons and Octavia Spencer. In the interview below, Taylor goes in depth on how he broke into editing, his love of New […]

Danish cinematographer Nadim Carlsen has shot more than 20 music videos, commercials, shorts and features since 2009. In recent years he served as DP on the horror film Shelley, which screened at Berlin and CPH:PIX, and What Will People Say, which played at TIFF and IFFR. Carlsen went to film school with Isabella Eklöf, the director and cowriter of the provocative Holiday. Ahead of the film’s five screenings at Sundance, Carlsen spoke with Filmmaker about his use of static long takes and why he and Eklöf sought to create glossy images that “contradict the dark and dramatic content” of the […]

As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Red. Blue. Green. Swim. Bathroom. Crying. Lifting. Exalted dance. Small inside. Melting personality. Melting fatigue. All night cigarette dance party. Fall asleep on the floor of the set. Messy reality. Inner turmoil. Beasts but good ones. Mask. Another mask. Masking tape on the mask. Tragedy but holding tragedy. A big hand holding it all together. Fond […]

Documentary filmmaker Jarred Alterman began his career on an unlikely note: as the director of more than a dozen episodes of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s animated show Tom Goes to the Mayor. Alterman would later serve as the DP on Contemporary Color, a 2016 concert film starring David Byrne. He collaborated on that film with Robert Greene, the esteemed documentary filmmaker and indie film editor. Alterman shot Greene’s latest non-fiction creation, Bisbee ’17, which screens in competition at Sundance. Alterman spoke with Filmmaker about the film’s western aesthetic, singular setting and unique blend of scripted and documentary scenes. Filmmaker: How and why […]