Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Creative Fraternity: Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio on their SXSW Doc, May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers
Two decades of writing, producing, and finally directing some of the most commercially and critically successful films in the world have given Judd Apatow enough cachet to make nearly anything. After his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), took in more than $175 million in domestic gross revenue, his Apatow Productions produced an ongoing string of gargantuan hits, including Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), Bridesmaids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015). But it is only within the last three years that Apatow has moved into a seemingly unlikely genre: documentary film. Last year saw his first nonfiction work as co-director with Michael […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
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Following The Money Shot: Ovidie on Her SXSW Investigative Doc Pornocracy
Originally trained in philosophy, and known as the “porn star intellectual” since the publication of her book Porno Manifesto in the early aughts, feminist pornographer Ovidie can now add hard-hitting investigative journalist to her CV. The French icon’s latest documentary Pornocracy, debuting at SXSW (and later in the month at CPH:DOX), is a stunning exploration of the dark underbelly of online porn — a shadowy world in which a single faceless multinational corporation, with numerous offshore accounts, controls what we see while exploiting the performers whose very livelihood it shamelessly steals. Filmmaker spoke with Ovidie prior to the doc’s March […]
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Cinema, Chimera: Maya Dardel Director Zachary Cotler on the Present Value of Difficulty
Set in the literary world and dealing with a dying poet and novelist with an unusual end-of-life proposal, the Lena Olin-starring Maya Dardel is directed by two filmmakers who know something about the world of their film. Magdalena Zyzak wrote the recent novel The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkel as well as co-wrote and produced the feature film, Redland. Zachary Cotler is the author of five books of poetry, fiction and literary criticism, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In advance of their film’s premiere at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, they’ve each penned an essay inspired by […]
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Unaffordable Objects: Maya Dardel Director Magdalena Zyzak on Description in Film and Literature
Set in the literary world and dealing with a dying poet and novelist with an unusual end-of-life proposal, the Lena Olin-starring Maya Dardel is directed by two filmmakers who know something about the world of their film. Magdalena Zyzak wrote the recent novel The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkel as well as co-wrote and produced the feature film, Redland. Zachary Cotler is the author of five books of poetry, fiction and literary criticism, and he’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In advance of their film’s premiere at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival, they’ve each penned an essay inspired by […]
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An Experiment in Biohacking: Director Kate McLean on the SXSW Short, Gut Hack
Last year, a friend asked me to come to an event about synthetic biology. I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I suspected the evening was going to be a bit over my head, but she was speaking and I wanted to show support. When I arrived, the speakers were a mix of academics, industry types, enthusiasts and scientists. I began to prepare myself in for a night of polite nodding and drinking as a man from a biotech company took the microphone to present some kind of recruitment talk about his company. Then, back near the bar, someone started to boo […]
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Do Brands’ Lives Matter? Whiskey Fist Director Gillian Wallace Horvat on When Story and Advertising Collapse
In my new short, Whiskey Fist — premiering Friday, September 10 at SXSW — the characters work in front of a sign that reads “Brands’ Lives Matter.” The font is ripped off from Ed Ruscha and the fluorescent ombre background is purloined from posters of the kind stapled to telephone poles advertising local reggae or salsa concerts. Such an insidious combination of high and low appropriation characterizes the vanguard of marketing today, that joking/not joking tone that one would find flourishing in the branding firm where Whiskey Fist takes place. Branding’s sophistication is more seductive than ever, and even more […]
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Stitchers, Hooperman and Dennis Hopper’s Colors: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’d like to kick this week’s column off with a pair of television recommendations: one a smart and stylish contemporary series that’s currently streaming, the other a retrospective pick on DVD that deserves to be better known. Stitchers puts an ingenious spin on one of the most shopworn of all television genres, the procedural, breathing new life into the form via an elegant visual style and audacious premise. The show follows Kirsten Clark (Emma Ishta), a Caltech student with a medical condition that wreaks havoc on her sense of time. It also makes her a desirable candidate for a covert […]
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“Porn is Everywhere, Almost Like a Collective Unconscious”: Bruce LaBruce on his XConfessions Short Refugee’s Welcome
Bruce LaBruce is one busy renaissance man. The queercore icon — director of 11 features (not to mention numerous short films and music videos, and several theater works), visual artist and author — has now teamed up with Erika Lust’s XConfessions to release Refugee’s Welcome. The story of a Syrian refugee in Berlin who both suffers a hate crime and finds a poetic (and explicitly sexual) connection with a Czech punk, the short will be available on Eroticfilms.com (NSWF link, obviously!) on March 9th. (And today only for free — use the code BRUCE). Filmmaker spoke with LaBruce — who […]
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Blackmagic Announces Color Control Panels and URSA Mini Pro
Blackmagic announced some exciting new products last week; two control panels specifically designed for color correction work, a Linux version of DaVinci Resolve, and a new version of their Mini URSA camera, the Mini URSA Pro. Color Control Panels When Blackmagic acquired DaVinci Resolve, they took it in a new direction; they separated it from the expensive external control panel it had previously required, created Macintosh and Windows versions, released free versions, and greatly expanded the editing functionality of the application. In short, they seemed to be turning it away from a color editing powerhouse into an all-in-one production tool. […]
