Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Projecting Outside the Echo Chamber
In the past decade, I have screened thousands of documentary festival submissions. That amounts to countless hours of observing — or, more often than not, being told about — the horrifying effects of war, discrimination, depression, censorship, animal slaughter, plastic bottles, shoddy reporting, asbestos and mountaintop removal. Befitting this past decade of “hope,” I have also been given the tools to fix those problems: a program I can donate to, a message to spread to my community, a website I can visit to learn more. Nearly every one of these films has failed to leave an impression. They don’t make […]
-
Helicopter Parent: Cristian Mungiu on Graduation
Cristian Mungiu’s feature debut, 2002’s Occident, was an accomplished exercise in the then-fashionable mode of multiple narratives, which slowly overlap and converge, but it wasn’t until 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days that he received significant international attention. Building on the style established by his contemporary, Cristi Puiu, in 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (as well as using Puiu’s DP Oleg Mutu), Mungiu crafted an intense portrait of a woman trying to get a proscribed abortion in the waning days of Ceaușescu’s Romania. The film won the Palme d’Or, solidifying the rise of the Romanian New Wave. […]
-
DIT Gear
While gear doth not a DIT make, DITs definitely need gear. Here’s a general overview. MEDIA MANAGEMENT A modern computer system with at least Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connectivity. Lighter media loads can be managed with a laptop and external shuttle drives; heavier duty may require workstations with SAS or fibre channel PCI cards for high throughput to a large-capacity RAID. Software such as ShotPut Pro (entry level) or Pomfort Silverstack (professional) for safe, checksummed, multi-destination downloading. SIGNAL MONITORING High-quality, professionally calibrated HD (occasionally UHD) monitors are probably the most important tools a DIT can have. Flanders Scientific and Sony […]
-
Trailer Watch: Laura Poitras’s Risk
“This is not the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions…. I was wrong. They are becoming the story,” That’s Oscar-winning documentary director Laura Poitras at the head of this new trailer for her latest feature, Risk, with a voiceover that functions as a new statement of artistic intent. Poitras has been working on this film about Wikileaks and Julian Assange since before CITZENFOUR, but as those words testify, there was more to document since the film’s screening last May at the Cannes Film Festival. That earlier version necessarily ended before the ’16 election, […]
-
“I Relate to Gambling — Not as a Card Player but as an Independent Filmmaker”: Joe Swanberg and Jake Johnson on their Netflix Original, Win it All
With his new, SXSW-premiering Netflix Original, Win it All, the famously improvisatory writer/director Joe Swanberg has dealt his fans a real surprise: a picture with a much clearer plot, rhythm and character journey than his previous films. Indeed, with this movie about risk-taking, Swanberg has taken on a risk many successful filmmakers have avoided — the risk of artistic evolution. Pairing up again with collaborator Jake Johnson (Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, TV’s New Girl), Swanberg puts his focus on gambling and the addiction to both winning — and perhaps losing too. Johnson, who co-wrote the script, plays Eddie Garrett, a down-and-out […]
-
Radley Metzger, 1929 – 2017
Radley Metzger died on March 31st at the age of 88, something that has not been widely reported in the mainstream and film press. This omission doesn’t necessarily surprise — though it does disturb — me. Like his work, Radley was largely marginalized because his films often included naked people having sex. Yes, the films were about sex but they were also about a lot more. Films like Score, Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet were more than just softcore films. As the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2014 sold-out retrospective demonstrated to new audiences, Metzer’s films had strong visuals […]
-
Personal Shopper: Assayas, Garrel, Truffaut, Godard, Lagerfeld and the Anxiety of Economic Influence
It only dawned on me last week — midway through four consecutive days spent at Lincoln Center’s Jean-Pierre Léaud retrospective — that Olivier Assayas and Philippe Garrel are essentially contemporaries. This isn’t obvious if you look at their filmographies: Garrel made his first short in 1964 (when he was all of 16!) and his first feature three years later. Assayas didn’t make his first short until 1979 and his first feature until 1986; looking at those dates, they’d appear to be filmmakers from different generations, even if at least somewhat temperamentally aligned in their backgrounds (both began as painters). Garrel was born in 1948, Assayas in 1955, and […]
-
The Delinquents, Peyton Place and The Wanderers: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Robert Altman was making a living as an industrial filmmaker in Kansas City, Missouri when an opportunity arose that would change his life — and the history of American movies — forever. It was the mid-1950s and juvenile delinquent movies like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause were burning up the box office, so the son of a movie theater chain owner approached Altman with idea of producing his own teen film. Altman banged out a script in three or four days, and on a budget of $60,000 shot his first feature, The Delinquents, in two weeks with […]
-
“Don’t Ever Ask Me For A Shot List”: Walter Hill on The Assignment
America’s greatest living action filmmaker returns in top form in The Assignment, the deliriously entertaining new film from director Walter Hill. The premise, from a screenplay co-written by Hill and Denis Hamill, is pure lurid pulp: male assassin Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) runs afoul of a brilliant but deranged surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who has him abducted and knocked unconscious. When Frank comes to, he discovers that he’s been surgically altered and now has the body of a woman – a revelation that only briefly slows down his obsessive quest for revenge. It’s a provocative conceit that might be offensive in […]
-
Lensing the Real Unreal: DP Adam J. Minnick on Shooting Actor Martinez
“It’s a job.” –Arthur Martinez I had two features as a cinematographer under my belt by late June of 2015, both close and comfortable collaborations with a single director: Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook). It seems fitting that he made the phone call I received only a week and a half before Actor Martinez began principal photography. Joel eagerly informed me that two directors, Nathan Silver (Stinking Heaven, Uncertain Terms) and Mike Ott (Lake Los Angeles, Littlerock), had contacted him asking about my nearly immediate availability. I didn’t know them personally, but I certainly had been aware of their […]
