Columns
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“A Very Nostalgic Look at my Childhood”: DP Dean Cundey on Back to the Future
When I saw Back to the Future as a kid in the summer of 1985, the film’s 1950s setting felt as distant and exotic as another century. As the movie celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, I feel both an aching nostalgia and an existential dread at the thought that the 1980s – with its Pepsi Frees, DeLoreans, and Huey Lewises — are now an equally distant and exotic relic. There were few movies that the 10-year-old me loved as much as Back to the Future. And most of them — from The Thing to Big Trouble in Little China — […]
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Filmmaker Seeks Contributing Web Editor
Are you a good writer, knowledgeable about new developments in film and new media, and a reader of Filmmaker? Filmmaker is currently seeking a Contributing Web Editor. This is a paid, part-time position, averaging 10 hours per week, and it involves daily writing and posting to this site. In addition to possessing strong writing, reporting and editing skills, our ideal candidate will have experience with filmmaking itself, including production, post-production and business issues. Our Contributing Web Editor will report on developments of interest to our filmmaking audience, including reports on new equipment and technologies, software and events as well as […]
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Director Ron Shelton on Making Play It to the Bone, Fighting Gratuitous Insert Shots and Why White Men Can’t Jump Tested Well
How many filmmakers are capable of writing a script that not only invites comparison with Casablanca but earns it – and then surpasses its source on nearly every level? That’s what Ron Shelton did with his first produced screenplay, Under Fire (1983), which riffs on Casablanca’s combination of romance and international intrigue but strips it of all sentimentality and gives it a concrete political context (the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution) that intersects seamlessly with the film’s intimate character studies and relationships. The love triangle between the journalists played by Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, and Gene Hackman is as mature, complex, and […]
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Enter Olivia: Reed Morano’s Meadowland
The response to a student’s query about any deeper meaning behind a simple cigar — for which his professor had a signature fondness — was Freud’s possibly apocryphal, and definitely overly quoted, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Right. At times, however, it isn’t. Anything can be either real or imaginary, or perhaps occupy a middle ground. That which lies in the in-between is often the most intriguing, revealing and nuanced of all. Working from a script by Chris Rossi that she significantly revised, Meadowland’s first-time director and very experienced cinematographer Reed Morano transports us and her female protagonist, […]
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“So Much of What You Do is Intuitive”: Roger Deakins on Sicario
In an interview with Variety for his new film Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve claimed that the movie’s cinematographer Roger Deakins “could shoot with a shoe and it would look great.” Hyperbole aside, Villeneuve isn’t far off: if you can affix a lens to it, Roger Deakins can coax lyrical yet naturalistic images from it. Armed with an ARRI ALEXA Studio on Sicario – a slight step up from a shoe cam – Deakins pushed the camera to its boundaries to capture both the cruel harshness of the sunlight and the menacing unknown of the shadows for Villeneuve’s politically and morally complex tale of […]
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Rumble in the Jungle: Beasts of No Nation
While undergoing mandatory initiation — some of it colorfully ritualized, some deeply humiliating — into a unit of mostly adolescent anti-government soldiers in an unnamed, junta-led West African country, pre-teen Agu (Ghanaian first-timer Abraham Attah, a natural on camera) is deposited by these potential comrades-in-arms in a fully dug grave. “You must die before you are reborn!” booms the voice of the Commandant (Idris Elba, in a tour-de-force), a man who can be either extremely sweet or violent but not much in between. Beasts of No Nation, directed by genre-magician Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre, True Detective), has […]
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“Two Girls Coming into your House and Unleashing Havoc”: Eli Roth on Knock Knock
Eli Roth’s Knock Knock is to Fatal Attraction what that film was to Play Misty For Me: an homage that expands upon its source and intersects with the zeitgeist in immensely entertaining, provocative ways. Like both Attraction and Misty, Knock Knock is a cautionary tale and a male fantasy turned nightmare: Keanu Reeves plays a husband and father who, when left alone on Father’s Day, answers the door to find two gorgeous young women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) stranded in the rain and looking for help. He invites them in and eventually succumbs to their erotic overtures, quickly […]
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“If That Kid Hits Me in the Face, I’m Going to Hit You in the Face”: Tony McNamara on Ashby
In an early scene in Ashby, an English teacher asks the film’s young protagonist Ed (Nat Wolff) to expound on the themes of Ernest Hemingway. Wolff answers, “Proving you’re a man by trying to get killed,” tossing off the line as if it were an absurd relic of a less enlightened era. He then spends the remainder of the film embracing that antiquated view of American masculinity, whether it be in pursuing classmate Emma Roberts, taking a hit on the football field or befriending his terminally ill, ex-CIA assassin neighbor Ashby (Mickey Rourke). Ashby writer/director Tony McNamara describes the film as […]
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Pop Star: Partisan
With the dark, seriously accomplished Partisan, first-time Aussie feature director Ariel Kleiman and co-screenwriting partner Sarah Cyngler have created an eerie and disturbing but highly effective hybrid that resists pigeonholing. This is a special blend, which not only pushes the envelope but rips it open as well. They sidestepped the usual: the staple of the British boarding-school coming-of-ager; the familiar genre of films about disturbed children housed in government and private institutions; and the regularly reinvented category of urban juvenile gang thrillers. Partisan is a most welcome black sheep. The film is not only about kiddies stuck in a cult; it is […]
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“If You Read the Script You’re Not Gonna Want to Do the Movie”: Mark L. Lester on Commando
Thirty years ago this month, director Mark L. Lester changed the course of action cinema forever when he solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger’s persona in the gloriously excessive Commando. Schwarzenegger was already a star thanks to the Conans and The Terminator, but Commando is the film that established the identity he would revisit in film after film – and that introduced the “bigger is better” combination of exaggerated action and comedy that producer Joel Silver would apply to his Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Predator series, among many other pictures. Those movies would be heavily influenced by Commando’s vivid palette and precise attention […]
