Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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23 Paces to Baker Street, Mildred Pierce, Linklater and Almodovar, and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In a career-spanning interview with Polly Platt for the DGA oral history series, director Henry Hathaway dismissed his 1956 thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street as a throwaway, one of those studio assignments he took without much relish. It’s yet another example of why filmmakers cannot be trusted when it comes to their own films, for while the material is slightly shopworn (and owes an enormous and obvious debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window), Hathaway frames it with meticulous care and artistry. The movie follows Van Johnson as a blind playwright who thinks he overhears a crime being plotted; after the […]
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~29 Movies Shot on 35mm Released In 2016
This is my third time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot in 35mm, and this year’s number is substantively lower than 2014 (39) and 2015 (~64). This seems like an anomaly, not a permanent trend: following the high-profile push by J.J. Abrams et al. to force studios to pony up for a certain amount of Kodak celluloid for the forseeable future, the company seems solvent enough (and they’re bringing back Ektachrome!). Some celluloid regulars (Spielberg, Nolan, Abrams, Tarantino) sat the year out, while Woody Allen jumped to digital, and there are fewer straggler releases that were completed three […]
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Catching Bullets in the Rye
Hitler believed that movies were much better for propaganda than books or newspapers. He thought a pictorial presentation of an idea could reach more people, faster, with no effort needed on the viewer’s part. His minister of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, emphasized the escapism aspect of film. Goebbels wanted movies that were big and loud and glamorous, and that would be distracting to the population, with dark subliminal messages wrapped inside the pizzazz. Researchers recently reported that the rate of gun violence in American PG-13 motion pictures is now higher than that of R-rated films. When we see these gun […]
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Kubrick Connections in One Million Years B.C. and Two for the Road; Plus Edge of Seventeen and the Pure Cinema Podcast: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations
Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966) is probably best remembered for its iconic poster image of scantily clad cavewoman Raquel Welch, but revisiting it via Kino Lorber’s excellent new Blu-ray release reveals it to be a far more — and in some ways less — interesting film than that. Less in the sense that it doesn’t really deliver the sexy goods promised by the famous marketing, but more for film buffs who will delight in the movie’s multitude of connections to other, often wildly disparate, classics of the era. It’s a surprisingly experimental movie in some ways, telling its […]
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Witness Project: DP Ben Gaskell on Shooting with Lomo Anamorphic Lenses
Ben Gaskell is a freelance cinematographer and DP for Witness Project, a series of short documentaries about oppression. For a recent episode on Anastasia Lin, Miss World Canada 2015, Gaskell shot on the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K using old Lomo anamorphic lenses. Filmmaker: How did you get involved with this project? Gaskell: The director was an editor on a documentary that I worked on and he knew that I had a knack for bringing an artistic flare to the documentary genre. We chatted about the series and ended up finding a common language, and he was really interested in the […]
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When It Comes to Raw, Focus World Sees Red: On Red Band vs. Green Band Trailers
“Aberrant behavior, bloody and grisly images, strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug use/partying.” So reads the information box on the R rating for Raw, Julia Ducournau’s tasty little horror film about a vegan who becomes a cannibal. Explicit films (gross-out horror flicks, bawdy comedies, sexy dramas) always face the same marketing challenge: how do you show the best parts of a movie when those moments might be too graphic? In the case of Raw, Focus World gave the movie two trailers: a mainstream gothic green-band trailer and a frenetically disturbing red-band trailer. Ironically, the two share a lot of the […]
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Using Interviews and Animation to Bring the Sniper Documentary Tower to Life
The documentary Tower recounts the day in 1966 that a sniper on the University of Texas Tower killed 14 people and wounded dozens more. The film includes archival footage, interviews with those who were present and animated recreations of the event. In this interview, director/producer Keith Maitland and DP Sarah Wilson talk about the making of the film which receives its broadcast premiere on PBS on Tuesday, February 14th. Filmmaker: How did you become filmmakers? Maitland: I started off in narrative filmmaking, working on other people’s movies, and right around the time I met Sarah — we’ve been together 13 years […]
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“What’s Your Secret?”: Eight Sundance Directors on Short Filmmaking and the Festival Circuit
“Do you have a film in the festival?” The first thing people say to you when they meet you at a festival is usually this question. And for many of us, the answer is a negative. We’ve emptied our bank accounts, called out of our day jobs, skipped out on weekends upstate or by the beach to work on beckoning projects. And when we get rejected by a film festival, it can feel like those sacrifices and hard work were for naught. For new filmmakers like us, festivals, along with a good online distribution plan, are a coveted way to […]
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Tech Talks: The FilmGate Interactive Media Festival
The 2017 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival, which took place February 3-5, was a bit different from prior editions I’ve attended. For one thing, the fest was now headquartered in the heart of Hurricanes-land — over Super Bowl weekend no less — at the University of Miami School of Communication (rather than in trendy South Beach). For another, accommodations this time included a lovely historic house rented in Coconut Grove, where I found myself one of four born-and-bred Americans, along with three other artists originally hailing from India, Serbia and Turkey. Very Real World meets virtual reality. But perhaps the biggest […]
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Why Make a Microbudget Film? Five Questions for Director Paul Harrill on the Virtues of Ultra-Low Budgets
Is there a business in microbudget filmmaking? The question is begged by the title of an upcoming class at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center titled, yes, “The Business of Microbudget Filmmaking.” The program copy reads: In this class, you will learn proven, cost-effective filmmaking and business techniques for producing a $50,000 (or less!) film project. We’ll go step-by-step through the filmmaking process to discover tips and tricks for developing, planning, producing, and distributing a microbudget film. The class — a two-parter taking place February 13 and 20 — is taught by filmmaker Paul Harrill, which is itself […]
