Production
Filmmaking - Production
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Five Questions with I Used to be Darker Director Matt Porterfield
Though it only arrived three years ago, Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill, with its unique blend of fiction and documentary and its crisp, patient filmmaking, has already become quite an influential and well-loved piece of the micro-budget cannon. Now Porterfield has returned with I Used to Be Darker, a more formally scripted work that follows a troubled young woman (Deragh Campbell) who moves in with her aunt (Kim Taylor), uncle (Ned Oldham), and cousin (Hannah Gross) in Maryland. The film premieres today in US Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Tell me a bit about the development process for […]
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Dave Grohl on Directing Sound City
Dave Grohl has a history of fruitfully redefining himself. After Nirvana self-destructed, he went from being the former drummer for one the most momentous rock bands of the 20th century to being the frontman for one of the biggest acts of the 21st, Foo Fighters. So it shouldn’t seem too surprising to find him making a successful broad jump from musician to documentarian, especially with a project is as close to his heart as Sound City. Opening its doors in 1969, L.A.’s Sound City Studios was low on frills and gloss, but boasted an almost magical live-room ambience and a […]
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Shooting the Short BART: an Interview with the Director and DP
When L.A.-based director Rich Landes was offered the chance to shoot a short narrative piece for Canon he jumped at the chance. Landes has extensive experience as a commercial director, but this was a chance to direct a narrative based on his own idea, and with few restrictions from the “client.” But first he had to come up with an idea and treatment in two days. Then he had to fly to New York and cast, find locations, and hire a DP in four days, and then shoot the whole thing over the course of two days. None of this […]
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Baltasar Kormákur on The Deep
Since making his transition from actor to writer/director in 2000 with the raucous comedy 101 Reykjavik, Baltasar Kormákur has rapidly established himself as one of the most gifted and versatile European filmmakers. The Icelandic multi-hyphenate has moved with seeming ease from grand family dramas (The Sea) to gritty police procedurals (Jar City) and poignant comedies (White Night Wedding), while also turning out English-language indie thrillers such as 2005’s A Little Trip to Heaven (starring Forest Whitaker, Julia Stiles and Jeremy Renner) and the 2010’s Inhale, with Diane Kruger, Dermot Mulroney and Sam Shepard. Though Kormákur had arguably the biggest film of his career this year with Contraband – the Mark […]
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Made in Bolivia, Short-listed for the Oscars: The Story Behind Salar
We had just lost all of our locations in one fell swoop the day before, and I was walking along the train tracks that cut through the sun-baked adobe village of Chita, pretending to measure the light, but really just trying to re-convince myself that coming all the way to Bolivia to make a short film was a good idea. Since arriving, we had somehow eased our lenses through airport customs, protected our camera from torrential rain and endless sun, teamed up with a film school, and learned to love rice and potatoes with every meal. But that was before […]
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Making a Film? Read the Credits First
At a recent filmmaking panel hosted by the Massachusetts Production Coalition, filmmaker Chico Colvard offered the following advice to those getting started in moviemaking: read the credits first. The credits of other movies. “I’m fascinated by end credits,” said Colvard. “They’re so revealing. They’re fascinating in that filmmakers use them to continue the story….there’s so much more information there.” The credits can provide you with not just a list of potential cast and crew members. They can also give you the names of accountants and lawyers. More importantly, they can give you the names of possible investors. Other filmmakers might […]
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Game Changers Part 4: Planning and Shooting
In this fourth episode of a series on the making of the low-budget independent film, Game Changers, director Rob Imbs and cinematographer Benjamin Eckstien discuss audio recording, communication between director and cinematographer, and how to plan out shooting a multi-day, multi-location project. Earlier parts consisted of an overview and then discussed fundraising, casting, camera and lighting gear. Filmmaker: What is the size of your crew? Eckstein: We typically have two people in our sound department every day, though there were some scenes or times of day where we had one person. We typically had an AC and another PA. On […]
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Producer Robin Klein on Reviving The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Is My Darling
In 1965, a rough-and-tumble band of rock ‘n’ roll upstarts called The Rolling Stones were just beginning to build their legend, when wily manager Andrew Loog Oldham engaged English documentarian Peter Whitehead to follow the band around for a couple of days during a short stint in Ireland. The result was Charlie Is My Darling, a cinéma vérité snapshot of an era when the cultural revolution was only just beginning to crack the façade of the Old World. We see the young Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts (who gives the film its title) brainstorming […]
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B-Side: How a Bunch of First-Timers Made a SAG Ultra-Low Feature Without Blowing Up the Garage
Nine years ago, I walked into Sound One on my first run at my first internship. This summer, I walked out of Sound One having completed post-production on my first feature, B-Side, less than six months after we began pre-production. It wasn’t just a feature debut for me as a director, but also for our producer, DP, editor, 1st AD, and leading lady. Now rest assured, I could tell you dozens of things we would do differently. Free sample: Don’t shoot anything that will go in a movie’s first five minutes on the first day of shooting. And we have […]
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In Production: Bad Words, Dom Hemingway, Two Night Stand and Felony
“In Production” is a regular column which focuses on notable independent films that are currently shooting. If you would like your film to be included in this space, please send an email to nick@filmmakermagazine.com Coming off the production of the long-awaited new season of Arrested Development (premiering Spring 2013 on Netflix), Jason Bateman has begun shooting his directorial debut, Bad Words, in Los Angeles. From Andrew Dodge’s blacklisted screenplay, Bad Words stars Bateman as a middle-aged cynic who hustles his way into the children’s National Spelling Bee, much to the dismay of one of its directors (Allison Janney). Rounding out […]
