Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Black and Blue: The 35mm Colors of Uncut Gems and Star Wars
Fall 2019 provided us with a massively budgeted 35mm feature in the form of J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker (shot by Dan Mindel and colored by Stefan Sonnenfeld at finishing house Company 3) and a surprisingly visible A24 mid-budget art film in the Safdie brothers’s Uncut Gems (shot by Darius Khondji and colored by Damien van der Cruyssen at The Mill). In each case, the choice to shoot on celluloid was rooted in what could be termed (charitably) as a nod to film history or (uncharitably) a nostalgic gesture. I make no claims as to which it is, nor […]
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“Our Society is Riddled with Contradiction and False Talk”: Hal Hartley on His Career
There’s something perverse to the notion that Hal Hartley’s three decades of writing and filmmaking amount to a “career,” as Metrograph would have it in the catalogue copy for its ten-day retrospective of his medium- and feature-length films. Whatever one thinks about Hartley, to say that his work represents a “career” means viewing the films episodically, as evidence of an enterprising filmmaker’s increasing personal ambition and competence. But if I’ve suspected anything from watching and re-watching Hartley’s films—including the shorts, which unfortunately don’t appear anywhere in the Metrograph series—it’s that they can’t so easily be assimilated in this way. I […]
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Cats in Shallow Focus: A Cautionary Tale
Despite an all-star cast, an Oscar-winning director and source material from one of Broadway’s most well-known composers, Cats managed to become a widespread commercial and critical failure. Because the film should have been a recipe for success, it may seem hard to pin down exactly what went wrong during the process, but one of the primary problems is not that complicated—director Tom Hooper’s misuse of one of the most foundational, fundamental tools in a filmmaker’s toolkit: depth of field. Hooper is famously (or perhaps infamously) a fan of shallow focus. He likes having extremely blurry backgrounds, while the shot focuses […]
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The 27 Movies (More or Less) Shot on 35mm in 2019
Since I’ve already compiled a shot-on-35mm dossier for each previous year’s US theatrical releases five times, it’s not super-surprising that as soon as the internet learned Detective Pikachu was shot on 35mm, a number of people eagerly tweeted at me to let me know/make sure it wasn’t missed in this year’s edition. Irony poisoning aside, that turns out to be a surprisingly productive place to begin. The official tally of films shot, in whole or part, on 35mm for calendar year 2019 is 27, the total shot solely on 35mm is 18; Pikachu intersects with a number of common refrains. One concerns […]
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The 2019 Village Voice Film Poll, Reconstructed
When the Village Voice abruptly had its plug pulled by its final, Forbes-ranked owner two years ago, its annual film poll, which had been around since 1999, expired along with it. That needn’t necessarily have been the case—somehow, we still got a Pazz & Jop music survey last February, published on the paper’s semi-defunct website (which otherwise merely cycles through articles from the archives). The film poll was run by less obsessive and/or masochistically dedicated folks, apparently, which means that the task of insisting that it should continue, whether or not some tycoon chooses to bankroll it, has fallen to […]
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Making a Microbudget Film about the Death of David Bowie and a Wormhole to the Future: Writer/Director Liz Manashil on Speed of Life
The script for my time-travel second feature, Speed of Life, is set in 2016: a time that a lot of people point to as pivotal, when American society felt fractured. It follows a couple from the night David Bowie dies — and they are separated — until 24 years in the future, when they are reunited. Our version of 2040 follows 2016 to its logical conclusion: that David Bowie’s death may or may not have fractured the fabric of the universe. Our version of 2040 is dark and dreary all because our hero David Bowie is absent. I was actually […]
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Trading Blue Chips for Uncut Gems: The NBA Cinematic Universe
Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems could lazily be classified as a “basketball movie,” which raises the stakes in the third act via a tense and deciding Game 7 in the NBA Playoffs—numerous critics cite the nail-biting play-by-play action as the film’s tensest sequence. Yet Uncut Gems isn’t just driven by the attributes afforded a fast-paced sport: the narrative’s “house of cards” doesn’t come down to a single three-pointer or clutch free-throw that rolls around the rim before dropping in as the game clock strikes zero, Teen Wolf be damned. The Safdies pull off something trickier, interlocking their film with both on-the-record, […]
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Indie Film is Dead: Producer Ted Hope Diagnoses the Business Climate of Independent Film
This article was originally published in our Fall, 1995 issue. It may look easy but sometimes it’s pretty hard to keep coming up with the inspirational success stories we usually pack into Filmmaker. Credit card-financed movies leading to three-picture deals; Sundance hits transformed to Fox sitcoms; domestic box-office failures rescued by ticket-buying Parisian cineastes – there are only so many of these tales to go around. That’s why we welcomed this opinionated piece by producer Ted Hope lamenting the downside of today’s indie film scene. Hope is co-president of New York’s production company Good Machine and, along with his partner […]
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Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Producer James Schamus Responds to “Indie Film is Dead”
In Filmmaker‘s Fall, 1995 issue, producer Ted Hope penned a provocative essay, “Indie Film is Dead,” that critiqued multiple elements of the independent film financing, distribution and marketing system. James Schamus — producer, screenwriter and Hope’s partner at the New York production company Good Machine — responded in the same issue with this equally provocative piece, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” published online for the first time. — Editor Dear Ted, sure it’s the end of the world as we know it, but before the lights go out, I thought I’d respond to a couple of your points. “Acquisitions are driven by […]
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2010s: An Eventful Decade for American Independents
At the end of 2008, the Wall Street-generated economic collapse blew a deflating hole in the Film Indie cash cow. 2009 saw the consequent slashing of staff at the mini-majors, the closing of many companies and a pullback by the content-clueless hedge funders. The result was a low output of indies in 2009, although what films were made were made for the right reasons rather than simply a desire to make another faux-indie TV movie to satisfy desperate distributors. So the decade started there, at a solemn hushed, funeral-like Sundance 2010, one that was also a refreshing, offbeat event for […]
