While many important films premiered in front of attractively dressed people at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the big story on the beach was the regal blessing accorded the American indie scene. Four films appeared in Competition plus a handful in the Director’s Fortnight, all produced in the United States outside of studio-based development and production systems. Further risking immodesty – after all, Filmmaker is a cheerleader for just this kind of work – the Festival was even more specifically laudatory: it celebrated the filmmakers who emerged from New York in the early ’90s and their powerful aesthetic influence on […]

This article originally appeared in our Fall, 1995 print edition. Development is a dirty word in the film business. To screenwriters in Hollywood, it means toiling under the tutelage of a team of business people, endeavoring to give them what they want, all the while realizing that there is little chance that their script will ever get made. To development executives, it means finding an idea, novel, or original screenplay and then having to work with a writer who can be alternately moody, recalcitrant, or even lazy – and then being disappointed with the results. For the studio executive, development […]

This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. GRACELAND. Anocha Suwichakornpong, known by her friends as Mai, is at home on a film set. Case in point: while most filmmakers would kill to watch their film screen in front of a Sundance audience, Mai is on the other side of the world, shooting her next short film, Days and Days and Days and Days. But then, can you blame her? Graceland, Suwichakornpong’s film about an Elvis impersonator who travels from Bangkok into the countryside with a mysterious stranger, boasts much of the top talent in Thailand, including editor […]