Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“It Was Subversive, a Political Act, Giving Screen Time to a Scrappy Stray Dog”: Director Elizabeth Lo on Her Mesmerizing Tribeca Documentary, Stray
About the production philosophy behind Stray, her captivating and immersive documentary about stray dogs in Istanbul, director Elizabeth Lo says that her shooting decisions were “kind of left to the whims of a dog” (specifically, a mutt named Zeytin). Lo is perhaps being a bit modest here — there’s a tremendous amount of human skill, empathy, observational power and narrative shaping in her mesmerizing canine saga. But a giant strength of the film is its sense that it is indeed in sync with the rhythms of a dog, occupying an animal world while also being both smartly aware of and […]
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Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase and The Archer: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When martial arts legend Bruce Lee died in 1973 just weeks before the release of Enter the Dragon, a bizarre subgenre of action cinema was born: “Bruceploitation.” The international success of Enter the Dragon created an appetite for new Bruce Lee movies, which intrepid producers tried to satisfy by scraping together whatever meager Lee footage they could find and building new films around it; when they couldn’t get their hands on discarded scenes from Lee’s work they tried to fool audiences with movies starring Lee imitators like “Bruce Li” and “Bruce Le.” One of the strangest Bruceploitation movies – which […]
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“It Ended Up Being Therapeutic for Everyone”: Eric Hynes, Jeff Reichert and Damon Smith on the Now-Streaming Room H.264: Quarantine
Do any of us remember a time when the film industry was not in crisis? At the time of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary, Room 666, the on-screen directors who considered his prompt (“Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?”) grappled with the kinds of issues (film vs. TV, the rise of blockbusters, the struggles of art cinema) that would go on to preoccupy filmmakers and film critics for many years — up to and through the production of Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes’s 2018 Brooklyn-set reply to Wenders, Room […]
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Reflections from Quarantine: Six Cinematographers on Their Lives During Lockdown
Over the last several weeks, since the middle of March, Daniel Eagan reached out to a number of cinematographers all over the world to check in on their personal responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic and the resulting quarantine. From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, Copenhagen to a Poland lakeside, they respond with reactions encompassing their own personal coping strategies, their current professional activities (or lack of them) and the thoughts the lockdown has stimulated about not only their profession but filmmaking in general. Find the links below, and stay tuned for future roundups of more cinematographers as well as […]
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“I’m Going For, ‘Capture It Now, Use It Later'”: DP Danna Kinsky on Shooting Drone Stock Footage in a Pandemic
Based in Los Angeles, Danna Kinsky has worked in a wide range of genres and formats, from independent features and documentaries to music videos, concerts, commercials and aerial cinematography. She is affiliated with several groups: The International Female Collective of Cinematographers (ICFC), The American Society of Cinematographers’ Motion Imagine Technology Committee, and Women in Media. Since the COVID-19 lockdown, Kinsky has been shooting drone footage of a deserted Los Angeles. Filmmaker: How have you been coping with the lockdown? Kinsky: Generally, as a filmmaker, I always strive to keep costs low. Finances are a problem, just like they are for […]
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“I Think We All Want to Know What the New Normal Looks Like…” Director and DP Rachel Morrison on Pausing Her Feature Directorial Debut
Over the past three years, cinematographer Rachel Morrison shot three features — Mudbound, Black Panther, and Seberg — along with commercials and shorts. She also directed the pilot and second episode of Hightown, a television series set in Cape Cod that premieres May 17 on Starz. This year Morrison started directing her first feature, Flint Strong, a biopic about Claressa Shields starring Ryan Destiny and Ice Cube, from a script by Barry Jenkins. On March 13, Morrison posted the following on Instagram: I started this morning scouting an amazing set by @keenkenzie that we were due to shoot next week. Then as […]
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“It’s Very Interesting to Live Without This Adrenaline…”: DP Łukasz Żal on Slowing Down While in Quarantine
Cinematographer Łukasz Żal received an Oscar nomination for his first feature, Ida, and well as for his second collaboration with director Paweł Pawlikowski, Cold War. Last year he worked on his first US production, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and based on the novel by Iain Reid. Żal spoke with Filmmaker by phone from Poland. Filmmaker: How are you? Łukasz Żal: I’m good, I’m staying in my parents’ house by a lake. I don’t feel comfortable because the whole world is suffering. Hopefully it will end well. But this time honestly is not so […]
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“There is a Lot of Necessary Nurturing to Be Found in the ‘Not Doing'”: DP Natasha Braier On Productivity Culture During Lockdown
Natasha Braier has worked on a wide variety of films, from Claudia Llosa’s intense 2009 drama The Milk of Sorrow / La Teta Asustada to Nicolas Winding Refn’s ice-cold 2016 feature The Neon Demon. In 2018 she shot Gloria Bell, Sebastián Lelio’s English-language remake of his earlier movie Gloria. Last year she was director of cinematography on Alma Har’el’s feature debut Honey Boy. Braier’s work is distinguished not only by her vivid imagery but also by her acute psychological insight into characters and narrative. Braier was in preproduction on Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to Booksmart, when the […]
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“This is the Headline: ‘You Can’t Do It Alone. So Do It With People You Love'”: DP and Director Christopher Doyle on Filmmaking Amidst the Pandemic
Scheduled for this year’s Cannes Film Festival was a 20th-anniversary screening of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Along with awards for actor Tony Leung Chui-wai and editor, costume designer, and production designer William Chang Suk-ping, the film received the Grand Prize of the Superior Technical Commission for directors of photography Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing. Doyle had hoped to present his latest films, including Love After Love, at the festival before it was postponed on April 14. Directed by Ann Hui, Love After Love is a period romance adapted from a work by writer Eileen Chang. […]
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“Using a Camera to Talk About Emotions That are Too Complex to Put into Words”: DP Jasper Spanning on Facing Sorrow During Lockdown
Cinematographer Jasper Spanning’s debut feature, Den skyldige / The Guilty, won several awards during its international run. Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller, the movie followed one character, primarily on a single set, as he deals with a mounting crisis. Spanning spoke about it in a Filmmaker interview with Chris Doyle. He followed it with the May el-Toukhy’s controversial drama Queen of Hearts, about a charged relationship between a wife and her stepson. It was a World Cinema audience award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Director of Programming Kim Yutani called it the most provocative film she had […]
