Joshua Leonard first came onto the scene with the lo-fi sensation The Blair Witch Project, then went on to receive rave reviews for his performance in Lynn Shelton’s Independent Spirit Award-winning Humpday. His narrative feature debut as director, The Lie, premiered at Sundance in 2011 and he just wrapped production on his sophomore feature Behold My Heart which stars Marisa Tomei. Currently he co-stars in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Unsane, which was famously shot on an iPhone. Leonard talks about how freeing that was and how he’s dismayed, now that he’s a dad, at all the bad guy parts he’s being […]

Emily Mortimer is perhaps best known for her role as MacKenzie McHale in Aaron Sorkin’s beloved HBO series The Newsroom. Some of her other memorable performances are in Woody Allen’s Match Point, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Hugo and, as Phoebe, Jack Donaghy’s love interest, on the NBC series 30 Rock. In this hour she talks extensively about one particular, powerful scene in her breakout film, Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing (which earned her an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress), and about what it was like to play a character named “Emily Mortimer” in her HBO series Doll […]

One of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s – a period in which great directors like Jonathan Demme, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante were making their first movies for the company – was Michael Pressman, whose 1976 action-comedy The Great Texas Dynamite Chase remains one of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic exploitation pictures of its era. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pressman directed one distinctive film after another, exhibiting astonishing range – the only thing his movies of the era have in common is that they have nothing […]

A few months after my son was born, I took my wife to see the Tommy Lee Jones western The Homesman. If you know that movie, then you know why it was a bad idea: minutes into the film, a woman driven mad by the harshness of pioneer life kills her infant child. My wife nearly walked out. I didn’t understand that impulse at the time, but as my kid has gotten older I’ve become equally squeamish toward onscreen violence directed at children. It’s not an uncommon sentiment for parents, which is why it’s a perilous choice to open the new horror […]

Welcome to the debut episode of Filmmaker‘s new podcast about acting, Back To One. In each episode, host Peter Rinaldi invites one working actor to do a deep dive into their unique process, psychology, and approach to the craft. No small talk, no celebrity stories, no inane banter — just the work. Episode One: Kevin Corrigan We could not have a more perfect guest for the first episode of a podcast about “the work” of acting if we had somehow constructed one. The TV guest star extraordinaire, the go-to indie comedy player of our time, the actor’s actor, Kevin Corrigan […]

In Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson’s Japan-set return to the world of stop motion animation, there is a character with a face full of freckles. This seemingly incidental attribute required the film’s lead puppet painter Angela Kiely to place 297 freckles on each of the puppet’s many interchangeable faces. All told, she painted over 22,000 freckles for the film. That is the painstaking diligence required for the art of stop motion animation, a form demanding an obsessive attention to minutia perfectly suited to Anderson’s fastidiousness. In a Wes Anderson film, no detail – not even a single freckle – is […]