Columns
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“You Really Have To Let Go and Trust That Something Funny Will Happen”: Michael Urie, Back To One, Episode 312
Michael Urie is one of those mega-talented actors who seems to jump effortlessly from theater (like Torch Song, Spamalot, and, currently, the revival of Once Upon A Mattress) to television (like Ugly Betty, Younger, and, currently, Shrinking), with a genuine love for both. On this episode, he talks in-depth about his acting process with a humility and a humor that is infectious. He explains why he decided to always be off-book on day one, how he came to believe in himself as an actor after starting out wanting to be a director, tells an interesting story about the temptation to […]
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“Day Car Work on Stage is Really Tough”: DP Larkin Seiple on Wolfs
It seems strange to call a $100-plus million dollar Brad Pitt and George Clooney movie a return to a director’s roots, but in a way that’s exactly what Wolfs is for Jon Watts. Like his breakthrough feature Cop Car—a spartan and sinewy 2015 neo-noir made for $800,000 that impressed Marvel enough to land Watts a trio of entertaining Spider-Man movies—Wolfs is a lean, propulsive story that unfolds in a single day with no use for superfluous exposition. Clooney and Pitt star as lone wolf fixers who reluctantly team up when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) ends up with a […]
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“There’s a Lot about ‘The Watcher’ and This Third Party in What We Do”: Will Janowitz, Back To One, Episode 311
Straddling the line between outsider artist and full-fledged Hollywood sellout, Will Janowitz has always found solace working both sides of the industry. With work ranging from Troma films to Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock to The Sopranos, he’s made a career of always doing the unpredictable. This year two films he produced, and one he wrote, will make their festival run; Bang Bang starring Tim Blake Nelson and the later, Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones directed by Clint Bently. On this episode he talks about his improvisational sweet spot and how it rests in the heart of danger […]
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“You Just Have to Learn to Adapt”: Chase Stokes, Back To One, Episode 310
His breakout role in Netflix’s Outer Banks catapulted Chase Stokes to fame. In the series, he portrays the charismatic and determined John B, the leader of a group of young outcasts on a treasure hunt in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The show’s blend of adventure, mystery, and coming-of-age drama quickly gained a massive fanbase, establishing Stokes as a rising star. Since then he’s been in Tell Me Your Secrets, this year’s The Uglies, opposite Joey King, and next year’s Valiant One, not to mention Season 4 of Outer Banks, which is dropping in October. On this episode, he […]
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The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk
This year is the 40th anniversary of William Gibson’s classic novel Neuromancer. It’s a work of singular brilliance that arrived as part of a new vanguard. Back in 1984, in the Washington Post, author and editor Gardner Dozois identified Gibson as part of an emerging trend: new science fiction authors who had eschewed formulaic space operas for “bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff.” Dozois called these authors the “cyberpunks,” and the label caught on. Key works of cyberpunk like Neuromancer were produced in the ’80s alongside the boom in personal computers, and again in the ’90s as subscriptions to online services and […]
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Streaming 3D on the Apple Vision Pro
In the first week of January, I received an email from a programming manager at MUBI—arguably, the leading global streaming platform for arthouse and independent cinema—telling me that the company was working on a new project that would allow it to present stereoscopic (3D) films on its service in the immediate future and asking about the availability of my films’ materials and SVOD rights. Intrigued and perplexed, I verified that I had the rights to all of my solo projects and told MUBI it could include whatever it wanted. A week later, MUBI licensed non-exclusive U.S. and Canadian streaming rights […]
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Waste Not: The Green School Alliance
Like many film school instructors, Kent Hayward, an associate professor of narrative production at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), has also freelanced in the industry. While working on a variety of productions over the years, from Lifetime shows to The Dark Knight, he’s noticed an unfortunate fact. “At the end of the production, when wrap time comes, there is always a mad dash to the dumpster to get rid of everything,” he says, speaking from this year’s University Film and Video Association annual conference, which met at Cleveland State University in early August. “It’s tremendously wasteful to see all […]
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Review This: Letterboxd and Independent Film Marketing
There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity. Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, […]
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Subtle Inconsistencies: Filmmakers and Generative AI in 2024
In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book, there’s a story about a mannequin maker and his underground workshop. The craftsman believes that after the introduction of cinema, people began to lose their natural gestures and now simply imitate the movements and behaviors of actors they see on the big screen. To preserve natural and native mannerisms, he undertakes an immense archival project: He makes mannequins of people performing small gestures in great detail. I’m curious what the craftsman would do faced with generative AI. AI film festivals and competitions are growing in popularity. Last May, the second annual Runway AI […]
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“The Presence of the Moments While Performing Was, I Think, Something I Was Just Starved for as a Person”: Booger Star Grace Glowicki, Back To One, Episode 309
The mega-talented Canadian multi-hyphenate Grace Glowicki gives an incredible performance in Mary Dauterman’s debut feature Booger. On this episode, she reveals why she was interested in the project before even opening the script, and how she could just tell Dauterman was going to be the kind of director that would give her the support she needs. She talks about her current focus on examining issues dealing with authority, her love of bodily fluids in film, her struggle with emotional scenes, how directing herself as an actor actually helped her acting career, differences between the Canadian and American indie film scene, […]
