Columns
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DP Toby Oliver on Get Out, Cheating the Sunken Place and Color Grading Trailers
Sometimes you have to go where the market pushes you. And after nearly twenty years behind the camera, the market suddenly wants Toby Oliver to shoot horror films. The Australian cinematographer lensed three fright flicks last year alone, all for the low-budget genre juggernaut Blumhouse. He’s practically become Blumhouse’s version of Hammer’s in-house DP Jack Asher. The most recent of Oliver’s horror efforts to hit screens is Get Out, a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?/Stepford Wives hybrid in which black New York photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) travels upstate to meet his white girlfriend’s family (Allison Williams and parents Catherine Keener and […]
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Art and Commerce Are Stuck in An Abusive Relationship
Is there such a thing as a moral or “best” way to finance a movie in this country? Should filmmakers and artists be allowed to earn a living without having to worry about making their work commercial? What and where is the line when “art” becomes “entertainment”? And when “entertainment” becomes pure “product”? With the Trump administration’s proposed gutting of federal funding for the arts, these are some of the questions that have been rattling around my mind lately. I find them more difficult than ever to untangle. Questions about the relationship between art and commerce are exceedingly complex, not to mention […]
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“Hitler Was Treated There”: DP Bojan Bazelli on A Cure for Wellness, Alexa XT Studios and Abel Ferrara
Cinematographers right out of film school often get their feet wet by shooting short films, music videos, and commercials – brief subjects with lower budgets and ample room to experiment and make mistakes. There was no such toe dipping for Bojan Bazelli. He was dunked directly into the river of cinema and legendary New York auteur Abel Ferrara did the baptizing. The Yugoslavia-born Bazelli was just out of film school in Prague when Ferrara came across the DP’s thesis movie and tapped him to shoot his Romeo and Juliet variation China Girl (1987). Over the next decade Bazelli lensed 17 features, […]
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“The Bike is Going to Hit the Camera!” Chad Stahelski on John Wick: Chapter 2, Stair Falls and Other Stunts
“How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” moans John McClane in Die Hard 2. It’s the question at the heart of every high concept action movie sequel. Failing to adequately answer it is how McClane’s New York everyman cop ends up in Moscow, or why half of Bryan Mills’ family gets kidnapped in the Taken series. Following up John Wick poses a similar conundrum – how do you motivate a retired hitman whose bloody swath of revenge is initiated by the death of his wife and the murder of a cuddly puppy? Do you have his […]
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“Drops of Jupiter,” Cancer and Blockbuster Video: Chris Kelly on Other People
In the opening shot of Other People, a family gathers around the body of its matriarch seconds after she’s passed from cancer. This moment of grief – accompanied by no score, just sobbing — is punctured when the phone rings and a well wisher leaves a message that is interrupted when the caller pauses to place an order at Del Taco. It’s an appropriate introduction to the film – which is sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always raw, truthful, and uncannily specific. That specificity comes from writer/director Chris Kelly’s own experiences during his mother’s final months, during which Kelly — […]
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20 Honest Observations from the Sundance Film Festival
Twenty — It’s the first Friday of the Sundance Film Festival and I’m sitting in the lobby of the Park City Marriott. I’m making small talk with some friends about the festival and the election and the films we’re excited to see. There’s a TV mounted on the wall behind me live broadcasting Trump’s inaugural address. Someone makes a joke about how he’s doing everything he can to avoid looking up at the screen. I do the same, pivoting my body and adjusting my eyeline so as to avoid catching a glimpse of our new President’s grinning face. By being here, […]
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“When I Shoot Film Today The Set Seems to Move Faster”: DP Nancy Schreiber on Moving from Film to Digital Throughout Her Career
When director of photography Nancy Schreiber receives the Presidents Award at the 31st annual ASC Awards this Saturday, she’ll make history as the first woman to be honored with the award. It’s an appropriate – some might say overdue – recognition of an innovator who has consistently broken new ground in the fields of documentary, narrative features, and television. An early proponent of digital technology (she won the cinematography prize at Sundance in 2004 for her mini-DV work on November), Schreiber is also a fierce advocate for celluloid who creates stunning, expressive images regardless of the format. Her range is second to […]
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“Forget Sepia, It’s Garbage”: Maggie Greenwald on Sophie and the Rising Sun
I first became aware of director Maggie Greenwald’s work in 1993, when her extraordinary Western The Ballad of Little Jo was released. That film, the story of a woman choosing to live as a man rather than yield to patriarchal society’s demands and expectations, established a number of ongoing concerns in Greenwald’s work: a richly observed sense of anthropological detail; a dynamic sense of light, color and composition designed to portray the past with immediacy rather than distance; and a concern with the intersection between the personal and the political that makes her films both timely and timeless. All of […]
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Sundance: Are Trump Think Pieces Helpful?
I write this a few hours before I’ll be hopping on a plane and heading to quaint and quiet Park City, Utah, where I’ll be covering the 2017 Sundance Film Festival for Filmmaker Magazine and surviving on a diet of tuna sandwiches I buy from 7/11 in-between screenings while, it goes without saying, hating myself. I’m lucky to not have a specific beat or set of overt marching orders for what to cover during the festivals. Sweet freedom. I don’t plan to just review films, nor do I plan to spend too much energy covering the “business of the festival” […]
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Pink Skies and Poetic Artifacts: DP Linus Sandgren on La La Land
Early in La La Land, Emma Stone’s aspiring actress rises from a restaurant conversation about the unpleasantness of contemporary moviegoing and sprints to the Rialto Theatre to take in Rebel Without a Cause with Ryan Gosling’s intractably traditionalist jazz pianist. The burst of exuberance doesn’t last. The Rialto later closes down and as Gosling waxes poetic about jazz’s declining cultural relevance you begin to feel that for La La Land jazz is just a surrogate for the state of film itself. La La Land is an ode to the magic of movies – at a time when going to the movies has […]
