Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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David Lynch and the Nightmarish Meanings of his Hollywood Star Casting
In episode four of Twin Peaks: The Return, an older gentleman has an obscure conversation with Gordon Cole (David Lynch) as he escorts him to the office of FBI Chief of Staff, Denise Bryson (David Duchovny). Their scene together is short but just by his brief appearance Richard Chamberlain evokes a mass of associations in the viewers who recognizes him, maybe as Cannon Films’ Allen Quartermain, maybe as the ambitious priest with impure thoughts of Rachel Ward in The Thornbirds, or maybe as Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia. An icon of classic television thanks to his performance in the prime-time […]
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First Reformed: Paul Schrader vs. Slow Cinema
In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema. “It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time,” he said. “It’s a dead end. […] There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in […]
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SFFILM Announces Major New Suite of Artist Development Programs
SFFILM, the presenter of the San Francisco International Film Festival, has announced two new artist development programs as well other grants and partnerships. Supporting producers will be the New American Producer Fellowship, a program for a producer who has recently immigrated to the United States. Supported by the Flora Family Foundation and intended to “provide a stage for the perspectives of underrepresented filmmakers and to enrich the understanding, empathy, and curiosity of the general public,” the Fellowship will provide a $25,000 cash grant as well as an artist residency at SFFILM’s FilmHouse. The new Women, Peace and Security Fellowship, supported […]
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Trailer Watch: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]
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Bull, Season One, Duel in the Sun and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
The best new television series of the 2016-2017 season arrived on DVD last week in the form of CBS/Paramount’s Bull: Season One package. A smart, stylish and very funny drama with a killer pedigree – Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists in the history of television. The show focuses on Jason Bull (Michael […]
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So You Can’t Afford a Wardrobe Designer: Costume Design for Independent Film on a $500 Budget
“Microbudget filmmaking” is a bit of a misnomer considering the broad spectrum “microbudget” entails — one producer’s $5,000 line item is another’s entire operating budget. In a perfect world, we’d all have sufficient funds to hire the best and brightest among us and no project would be too scrappy. Unfortunately, when it comes to independent productions, sometimes that old chestnut still applies: if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I learned this lesson the (somewhat hard) way when I directed my first feature, A Feast of Man. With an operating budget of $15,000 – a combination of […]
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Twin Peaks: The Return: Last Looks Before the End
I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]
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Reed Morano on Successfully Pitching for and Directing the Intense Dystopian Drama, The Handmaid’s Tale
Reed Morano was told she wouldn’t get to pitch on The Handmaid’s Tale: “Don’t get too excited about it.” Someone showed her the pilot just so she had an idea of what Hulu was up to, but there was already a “very big male director” they were out to, as Morano discussed at an IFP Q&A earlier this year. When Morano heard that her long time collaborator and friend Elisabeth Moss was attached as the lead of the show, she reached out — not taking no for an answer. “A week and a half later, I got a call: ‘The producers […]
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Through You: Stopping and Feeling Through Dance and VR
Although dance and virtual reality seemingly lay at polar ends of the creative spectrum, they can come together to make incredibly moving artistic experiences. That, at least, holds true for co-directors Lily Baldwin and Saschka Unseld in their new piece Through You, a VR film heavy on physical choreography that premiered at Sundance earlier this year and on August 1 was released on Samsung Gear VR via the Oculus Video app. The piece features a couple as their relationship evolves over the course of decades through discovery, fulfillment, loss and rejuvenation. It uses handheld camera movement to create a very visceral […]
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Shooting From Dock to Dish with the New Canon C200
For the launch of the C200, Canon hired producer Andrew Fried of Boardwalk Pictures to create a short introduction video, From Dock to Dish. Boardwalk Pictures specializes in nonfiction programming, most notably producing the Chef’s Table series for Netflix. The team, including DP Bryant Fisher, shot From Dock To Dish over the course of two days using pre-production units loaned from Canon. In this interview producer Fried and DP Fisher talk about the camera and their experience shooting the video. Filmmaker: How did you become involved in this project? Fried: Canon approached me to see if I had any ideas for a short […]
