Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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NYFCC Awards and an Alternate Top 10 of 2017
Attending the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner when you’re a) not a NYFCC member b) have no interest in awards season is an interesting proposition. Theoretically awards season spans just half a year, kicking off with the Telluride Film Festival and concluding with the Academy Awards, but there’s an argument to be made that it’s now a 14-month affair. Awards season begins in January, with Sundance and attendant coverage with headlines reading “Here’s your first best picture nominee of the year,” temporarily goes into hibernation while the previous year’s awards season wraps up, resumes with fevered speculation at […]
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The 50 Most Anticipated American Films of 2018
Last year I put together a list of my 50 most anticipated American films of 2017, and this year the fine folks at Filmmaker invited me back for a new edition. Before we get started, I’ll share some quick notes about methodology. First, this list is entirely the work of one person. It’s not aggregated through dozens of industry insiders or compiled via ballots or anything fancy like that. As a result, I’m sure it’s woefully incomplete. I have no doubt that there are still a bunch of American films out there waiting to be discovered that will bowl me […]
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2017 in Ten Double Features
Why not pair, rather than pit against one another, the great films of a given year? This was the question that led me to reconsider the year-end top-10 list in terms of double features. In 2016 and 2015 I ranked my favorite double features of the year on this very site. I love the double bill for its flexibility. You can pair films based on any connective tissue: style, setting, subject matter, theme, time period, director, star. Viewing and thinking about films this way urges you to consider them anew. What do we think of the suburban woes of Lady […]
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Top Ten Films Directed/Co-Directed by Women of 2017
Many might see 2017 as a tumultuous year for women in film, but it wasn’t. I see it as the year that women in the industry began the long journey towards ending the tumult, starting with the huge artistic risks they have taken in their work. Each film I chose for this list holds a purely individual voice, each voice starting a conversation about the future of not just women in film but the future of film as a whole. 2017 was only the beginning of hearing our stories, and we have a lot more to say. 10. Kiss and […]
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Filmmaker‘s 20 Most Popular Posts of 2017
As always, we’re breaking our annual “most read Filmmaker posts” into two lists — 10 posts published in 2017 and 10 archival posts that are still registering large readerships. Throughout the 20, and particularly in the archival posts, there’s a strong current of practical advice conveyed by working filmmakers — the hallmark of this magazine. Here are our most popular posts of 2017. Published in 2017 1. The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vaccum. Our top post in 2017 was filmmaker Nina Menkes’s preview of a presentation she’ll give at Sundance next month, one in which […]
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Sex Crimes and Virtual Reality: Best VR Storytelling of 2017, Gina Kim’s Bloodless
Nabbing Best VR Story at Venice, Bloodless is veteran filmmaker Gina Kim’s (perhaps best known for 2007’s Vera Farmiga-starring Never Forever) 12-minute immersive stunner. The US-South Korea coproduction was also selected as part of this year’s IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling program, which is where I experienced it, having gone into the VR Cinema without even bothering to read the synopsis. And because of my cluelessness, the story’s climax packed a punch I never saw coming — one that shook me to the core. This is another way of saying that if you plan on experiencing the project on a future […]
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Remembering Production Designer Thérèse DePrez, 1965 – 2017
If you were a director or producer coming up in the New York independent film scene of the early 1990s, you wanted to work with Thérèse DePrez. Right out of the gate as a production designer, DePrez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away Tuesday in New York City, defined for herself an imaginative, boldly-colored and stylized approach that brought a high level of ambition and finesse to often meagerly-budgeted films. Not settling for generic indie naturalism — the gentle accenting of our everyday world that is the default approach on so many low-budget pictures — she cited […]
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“When the Design is Really Part of the Whole of a Film, the Film is Well Designed”: Production Designer Thérèse DePrez
The following profile of production designer Thérèse DePrez was written by producer Ted Hope for Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1994 issue, and is being rerun on the sad occasion of DePrez’s passing this week in New York. After the standard art school stint, and the pay-your dues PA/grip/electric rigmarole, Thérèse DePrez nabbed her first designer gig on Tony Jacobs’s low-budget consumer/horror send-up, The Refrigerator, which sent her further down the blood-spewed path to art direct three straight-to-video horror pics. The creepy crawlers allowed DePrez to hone the “specialty prop” and set design skills she would later call on for Tom Kalin’s Swoon, […]
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10 Tips on Scoring Great Locations when Producing a Microbudget Movie
Winner of the Best American Indie at the Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival, Tomorrow Ever After, a time-travel tale directed by and starring Ela Thier, is available on iTunes and Amazon beginning Friday, December 22. Thier plays Shaina, “a historian who lives 600 years in the future, and is accidentally sent back in time to current-day America. War, poverty, pollution, greed, exploitation, depression, loneliness: these are things that she’s read about in history books. And while she studied this dark period of history (in which we are currently living) when money is viewed as more important than people, she has never, […]
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Film Festival Application Process Do’s and Don’ts (Or, How Not to Shoot Yourself In the Foot When Applying to a Film Festival)
So it’s that intense festival time of year again. You’re considering festivals, applying to festivals, maybe excited about the festivals you’ve been accepted to or recalibrating your expectations after unexpected rejection letters. If so, then the following ten do’s and don’ts may be helpful to you. These suggestions are based not only on my own work with clients, but also from some amazing advice from some really knowledgeable folks who I have had the pleasure of being on panels with over this past year: Basil Tsiokis (programmer, Sundance and DOC NYC), Tom Hall (programmer, Montclair Film Festival), Dan Nuxoll (Rooftop Films), […]
