Columns
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Screenwriter Eric Heisserer on Lights Out, The Rules of Horror and Collaborating with James Wan
Eric Heisserer bristles at the label of horror movie screenwriter. It’s understandable. While his produced credits include a Final Destination sequel and the remakes of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Heisserer points out that he has authored 56 feature film scripts and only eight of them have been in the horror genre. That connotation may change later this year when Heisserer’s screenplay for the sci-fi film Arrival hits screens from Prisoners and Sicario director Denis Villeneuve. But for now Heisserer and I are talking about Lights Out, a new horror offering based on director David F. Sandberg’s […]
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Danny DeVito on The Ratings Game, Storyboarding and Test Screenings
In 1984, Danny DeVito made one of the most assured and entertaining directorial debuts in comedy history when he helmed The Ratings Game, a hilarious satire that premiered on Showtime only to disappear from circulation in the decades that followed. The movie tells the story of a New Jersey trucking mogul (DeVito) who moves to Los Angeles with dreams of making it in the TV business. When he falls in love with a woman (Rhea Perlman) who works for a ratings service, he figures out a way to rig the system in his favor, rising to the top with a […]
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Fabled: The Childhood of a Leader
Youthful innocents relish playing the part of amateur cartographer for school assignments, drawing prats, or, even more fun, molding contours from papier-mache. Seven-year-old Prescott (Tom Sweet), the subject of Brady Corbet’s astonishing debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, is no innocent. The film, adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same title and co-scripted by Norwegian Mona Fastvold, charts his rocky path from angel in his church’s Nativity play to one of the signature faces of the diabolical: totalitarianism. The scene in which the boy slides his fingers across a wall map of Europe just as it was […]
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“We Laid Out the Chessboard of the Movie”: Fede Alvarez on Don’t Breathe
Filmmaker Fede Alvarez made an impressive feature debut in 2013 with his uncompromisingly savage, Sam Raimi-approved remake of The Evil Dead, but it didn’t come close to preparing me for his extraordinary follow-up, Don’t Breathe. That film, which reunites Alvarez with his Evil Dead producers Raimi and Rob Tapert as well as co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues, is a clinic in how to construct a perfect thriller – a Swiss watch of a movie that takes the audience in the palm of its hand in the opening scene and then squeezes hard for an hour and a half. The premise is elegantly […]
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Alan Vega, 1938 – 2016
Alan Vega, half of the epochal punk electronic music duo Suicide, died yesterday. He was one of the greats. With Suicide partner Martin Rev, Vega laid the groundwork for industrial electronic music, and much more, as he mixed noise with melody, free-form floating song structures with the terse songwriting economies of doo-wop. The band — starting with its title — was a provocation, but also a salve (or, as Bryan McPeck and Matt McAuley from ARE Weapons wrote in their interview with Vega, “optimistic, life-affirming shit”). Songs dealt with psychotic killers and social unrest and love and optimism. “Dream, baby, […]
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“A Fart to the Heart”: DP Larkin Seiple on Swiss Army Man
A few years ago I worked on a promo for a Jerry Springer-hosted dating show set in a soundstage-built TSA screening line. The concept involved potential dates in the queue afflicted with, shall we say politely, peculiarities – including a gentleman with a flatulence problem. For the sake of authenticity, the shoot’s assistant director emulated gaseous emissions during the takes – sometimes using the double palms of the hands method, other times opting for the tried and true armpit technique. The giggles spread like a contagion – to grips, to camera assistants, to set dressers. So as much as I […]
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Separation Anxiety: Men Go to Battle
The lives of the young, illiterate Mellon brothers, Henry (Tim Morton) and Francis (David Maloney), whose world barely extends beyond their small, unproductive farm in Small’s Corner, Kentucky, might seem historically insignificant compared to the monumental events transpiring in their own backyard in 1861. The magic — I use the word loosely because the film is cloaked in such an original isomorph of naturalism — of director Zachary Treitz’s Men Go to Battle lies in its equal treatment of the two strands. The filmmaker tailors the aesthetic to his purposes, noting with a hint of sarcasm to The L Magazine, […]
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One Perfect Place to Put the Camera: DP Adam Stone on Midnight Special
In the summer of 2005, with roughly $50,000 scraped together from friends and family, Jeff Nichols made his directorial debut Shotgun Stories not far from where he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Two things haven’t changed since – Michael Shannon has been in front of the camera for every Nichols movie and cinematographer Adam Stone has been behind it. That includes Take Shelter, Mud, and now Midnight Special, which elevates Nichols to the studio realm with a tale of a father (Shannon) and his “special” son (Jaeden Lieberher) on the run from the government and a religious cult with […]
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Doctor’s Order: The Innocents
Determinism or free will? I’m flummoxed. This is my second successive review of a film about nuns. The first was Zach Clark’s Little Sister, in which meek ex-goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin) is a novice in a New York City convent whose mother superior, like the newcomer herself, doubts the young woman’s faith and commitment to the order of the Sisters of Mercy. During a trip to the family home in North Carolina — half therapy, half reunion with a brother mutilated from combat — she appropriates the flamboyance and kitsch that had been a substantial part of their youth. […]
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DP Paul Yee on The Fits, Achieving Close Eyelines and Getting an Unexpected Steadicam Bump
In the opening shot of The Fits, the slender frame of 11-year-old tomboy Toni glides in and out of a static medium shot as she counts off sit-ups while peering down the center of the camera’s lens. The image embodies the distinctive dichotomy of the film’s style – a mixture of neorealism and abstract lyricism that taps into the simultaneous horror and yearning of adolescence. The influence of neorealism is found in the cast of non-actors (led by Royalty Hightower as Toni) and the setting, a community center in Cincinnati where a mysterious wave of seizure-like fits strikes the dance […]
