Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Our Indie Problem: Financiers and Sexual Harassment
I have felt disgusted these last ten days reading the news about Harvey Weinstein as well as the angry and heartfelt outpouring from so many on social media. But like most of my colleagues in independent film, I’ve considered myself a step removed from the A-list parties and Hollywood glitterati that comprised so much of Weinstein’s world. My colleagues and I are making films, I have thought, as a high-minded alterative to the vapidness of Hollywood. But the last ten days has caused me to realize that we are not immune from the same problems that Hollywood is suffering. The […]
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Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]
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“As Humans, We Will Never Settle”: Five Questions for Human Flow Director Ai Weiwei
World-renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei makes his feature-length filmmaking debut with Human Flow, an expansive documentary that shines a light on the global refugee crisis. Ai circles the globe to showcase the personal stories behind the sweeping headlines of fallout from war, famine and climate change in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Serbia, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand and Turkey. Today 65 million people have been forcibly displaced, more people than in the time period following World War II. Ai manages to show both the massive scale of the […]
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Interactive Storytelling in Eko Studio’s The Garage Sale
From the folks at Eko Studio, director J.M. Logan (The Disunited States of America) and writer Molly Hagan comes a new interactive film for the web, The Garage Sale. It’s about three couples who descend on a suburban garage sale with different aspirations and behaviorsl the film, viewable through a web browser, allows viewers to live-switch through their different stories. “The viewer is able to navigate between stories to get a different perspective, learn new information, and follow which of the couples they are most curious about,” says the press release. “While their choices will not impact the final outcome […]
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Waking Up After a Wild Ride: Z Behl Reflects on the Foggy Haze of IFP Week
Awakening from a foggy haze, a wet dream of sorts, filled with opportunities more immense than I could daydream, I find myself writing follow-up emails that can only signify Film Week is over. Over 160 filmmakers, curated into a database cross-referenced by production companies, sales companies and distributors, as well as every other industry intersection imaginable, the Project Forum is a four-day event where filmmakers meet interested parties (kind of like a dating service) and parlay over films in every stage of production. A word of advice: bring your producer! Without Carlos Zozaya I would have been lost! What was […]
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NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying
Until relatively recently, Richard Linklater’s hopscotching across genres and budgetary tiers had him generally pegged as an unpredictable magpie whose next move would never be clear; now, certain circles of online discourse have him basically pegged as the alpha male celebrator of white patriarchy (I did my song and dance on this a while ago, no reprise necessary). Setting aside those pejoratively-described constants, I think it’s true that starting with Before Midnight (the exact pivot point is arguable) the mandatory elements of A Film By Richard Linklater have become pretty fixed (put another way, I certainly don’t expect faithful filmings of mediocre plays […]
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Greenslate’s John Finn Talks Rebranding and How Technology Can Revolutionize the Payroll Industry
John Finn, founder and CEO of Greenslate, remembers the good old days — and they weren’t that good. In 1995, when he first got into the independent film industry, he was a freelance production accountant, loaning himself out to productions where every penny counted. The standard practices of production accounting were daunting back then: there were seas of paperwork, year-end production company tax filings were strenuous efforts and, on set, accountants would spend entire days running around just trying to get signatures on start paperwork from producers and crew members. “I realized there was a need for financial acumen,” Finn recalls. […]
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“Women Don’t Always Get to Play the Funny Parts”: Julie Klausner Talks Making Difficult People Herself at IFP Week
If there’s a common thread that runs through any truly original work, it’s this: The creators saw something that wasn’t in the world, so they created it themselves. You hear that a lot in independent films. You also hear it, increasingly, in TV now too. The lines separating cinema and television are getting blurrier. For further proof, witness Julie Klausner’s appearance at IFP Week 2017. Klausner is the creator of Difficult People, which is not a movie but a hit TV show on Hulu. But the way she approached her TV show sounds a lot the way indie filmmakers talk […]
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“Find a Small, Possibly Unsexy Job You Can Do Well”: At IFP Week, Directors and Producers on Getting Started in Indie Film
So you’ve made a film. Congrats, but you’re not out of the woodwork yet. You may never be. The four filmmakers and one producer who appeared on the IFP Week panel called “On Working (and Staying) in Indie Film Today” had vastly different stories to tell about how they turned movie-making into an actual job. The biggest name on the panel was Gillian Robespierre. Having directed and co-written the indie hits Obvious Child and this summer’s Landline, she has more stability than most in her field, having parlayed those successes into TV work on top of a future making her […]
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Who Gets to Tell Whose Story?: IFP Week Filmmakers and Funders Talk the Politics of Representation in 2017
When Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit came out this summer, some charged that it shouldn’t have been made by Kathryn Bigelow. Critics, including rogerebert.com’s Angelica Jade Bastien, felt that the story — about ten Black civilians (and two Caucasians) tortured and, in some cases, killed by racist white cops during the 1967 Detroit riots — should have been told by Black filmmakers. These commentators argued that Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal, both white, not only lacked the perspective to get the events right; they also ran the risk of aestheticizing suffering and the destruction of Black bodies. This is not a new […]
