Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Making a Pandemic Horror/Thriller During a Pandemic: The Quarantine-and-Bubble Strategy of Banishment
As studio and television filmmaking creaks back into production, a first wave of microbudget films made amidst the coronavirus-related shutdowns enters post. One such film is the horror-thriller drama Banishment, which launches today an Indiegogo campaign for its post-production costs. Shot in and around a secluded cabin in Lake Placid, New York for just $5,000, the film fashioned its own safe production protocols before official industry guidances, like the recent “Safe Way Forward” plan, were issued. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of today’s safe production — quarantining, social distancing, mask-wearing on set — were all adhered to. But one other element […]
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How to Shoot a Film in a Global Pandemic
If you’re going to get stuck shooting a film in a global pandemic, it helps if you’re already pretty much self-quarantined in a beach resort and living off product-placement steak, wine and coffee. That’s the situation I found myself in on my film, 18½, which we started shooting in early March, 2020. What could possibly go wrong? Foot Bumps and Elbow Knocks 18½ is a 70s-era Watergate conspiracy thriller/dark comedy we were filming in Greenport, New York, which is on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island (“Nawth Fawk,” as it’s known locally), about three hours from Manhattan, […]
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The Sin of Nora Moran, True Colors, The Carole Lombard Collection: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Shifting points of view, complicated flashbacks, elaborate optical effects and a fluid approach to objective reality are not typically characteristic of American movies released in the early sound era, which makes Phil Goldstone’s 1933 picture The Sin of Nora Moran a real discovery. Goldstone was a producer and director who worked on Hollywood’s “poverty row,” the section of studios located around Sunset and Gower that cranked out extremely low budget features designed to fill out the bottom halves of double bills; like Frank Capra, Edgar G. Ulmer, and several other filmmakers who spent all or part of their careers on […]
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Why We Made A Show With An All Black Women Cast And Crew
In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-present, centuries-long war on Black bodies, I’m writing to you about a niche, indie webseries called The Retreat. Why? Because it’s our show, and it matters. When the protests simmer, you may ask yourself, how can I help NOW? What can I do in the in-between? In those days, weeks, months when racial tensions aren’t dominating the headlines, in the the moments when the revolution isn’t televised for the mainstream…How can I become a proactive force in amplifying Black voices? Naturally, dismantling systems of oppression is monstrously daunting in scope, […]
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Live Streaming with the ATEM Mini Pro
In the early days of the global shutdown, even before the canceled NAB would’ve taken place, Blackmagic Design had some product announcements that ended up being very appropriately timed: Updates to their Pocket Cinema cameras and the ATEM Mini, and the release of the brand new ATEM Mini Pro. I had a chance to chat with Bob Caniglia, Director of Sales Operations in North America for Blackmagic Design, about the new updates, as well as some thoughts on the new ATEM Mini Pro after using it for a few weeks. Turning Cinema Cameras Into Broadcast Cameras Working our way down […]
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Pamela Cohn’s Lucid Dreaming Podcast Debuts with Documentary Filmmaker Penny Lane
Critic and programmer Pamela Cohn recently published her first book, Lucid Dreaming, a collection of extremely thoughtful and probing interviews with boundary-pushing non-fiction filmmakers. (Read an excerpt of the book’s conversation with Donal Foreman here.) And now an extension of the book, the Lucid Dreaming podcast, has just launched. The first guest is Penny Lane, well-known to Filmmaker readers for films like Our Nixon and Hail, Satan?, as well as for her occasional Notes on Real Life column. You can listen to Lane’s interview and subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes here.
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“I’m Not Even Sure Satire Exists Anymore”: Writer/Director Tom Gilroy Talks with Jim McKay About His Dystopic — and Timely — Short, #WaynesvilleStrong
With the rallying cry of its hashtagged title, Tom Gilroy’s #WaynesvilleStrong is a darkly comic and scarily plausible vision of a very near future in which low-wage work, enforced patriotism and the panoptic powers of the internet combine to create a pandemic hellscape that one laid-off meatpacking worker must delicately navigate, one videocall prompt at a time. The short was made quickly, in May and during quarantine, with everyone appropriately socially distanced, and to its great credit that what was political satire just two months ago is now turning into, with the current battles over “reopening,” political reality. The short […]
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“Reopen, Rejoice, Rebuild!”: Watch Tom Gilroy’s Quarantine-Themed Short, #WaynesvilleStrong
Premiering today here at Filmmaker is #WaynesvilleStrong, a short film by Tom Gilroy (The Cold Lands, Spring Forward) starring Nick Sandow (Orange is the New Black) that, with dystopic wit, speaks directly to today’s arguments around workplace reopening during the pandemic. Set in a distressingly-possible near future, Sandow is a quarantined worker who has fallen afoul of the government’s official “reopen, rejoice and rebuild” policy. Stuck in a videochat hellhole of automated prompts, Sandow’s worker becomes increasingly agitated as the contours of a new, neoliberal form of pandemic-fueled social control becomes apparent. Gilroy describes the film as “a kind of […]
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The Whistlers, The Room, Marriage Story and Cannery Row: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first two recommendations this week are two excellent thrillers from last year that are newly available on DVD, The Whistlers and The Room. The Whistlers, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, is a gleefully twisty, darkly hilarious Romanian crime film that recalls movies like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in its jigsaw structure and fluid loyalties but finds a unique tone all its own thanks to director Corneliu Porumboiu’s approach. He adopts a whimsical attitude toward his eccentric group of cops playing both sides of the law and the criminals they’re […]
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Searching for an Independent Distribution Strategy Amidst Pandemics and Streaming Wars
I made a microbudget movie called #LIKE. Amazingly it is wrapped, posted and on the festival circuit, and it has been receiving glowing reviews like this: “Writer/director Sarah Pirozek’s teenage noir #Like pulses with the energy of a ’70s thriller.” Discouraged by stats on Hollywood hiring and women directors — a 2015 DGA report reported that 84% of first-time scripted TV directors were white men — and inspired by the work of independent female filmmakers like Marielle Heller, Laurie Weltz and Anja Marquardt, I decided to stop waiting for permission to make my first feature. Instead of making a short-film calling […]
