Following her “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of pieces highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this email interview, she talks with Jessica Miller, the editor and producer of Butterfly Girl, playing in Documentary Spotlight.   Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it?  Miller: Cary [Bell], the director, and I have been working on little projects together over the years, but it was at SXSW 2012 where we were both inspired to really try something new. We decided that we wanted to make […]

Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.

Music in cinema continually captivates audiences. Scores and soundtracks can become as renowned as a film itself and play a large part in an audience’s emotional engagement with a movie. Awards are distributed honoring Best Original Song, Best Original Music Score, Best Film Music, and Best Music Direction at multiple film festivals and award ceremonies. But music has also always been a fascinating subject for movies as well. Struggling musicians to sensational bands, and everyone in between, have been captured in film. The Sundance Film Festival is often the first venue at which these movies premiere, and this year is […]

Filmmaker: Why this movie?  Why did you decide to do it? Deguchi: I worked with Jeremiah Zagar, the director of this film before – on his first feature length documentary film called “In A Dream”. Even before I worked with him, by looking at a few scenes he put together, I could tell he was an extremely talented filmmaker. Not only that he is a delight to work with! We became good friends since and when he asked me to edit this film, I was thrilled. I would’ve dropped everything to work with him. Filmmaker: Do you think a male director might have […]

The day before its release, Alan Edward Bell A.C.E., the editor of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, as well as The Amazing Spider-Man and 500 Days of Summer talked about his career and his editing philosophy at a meeting of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bell’s father worked in the film industry, and Bell was sure he didn’t want to do that; he wanted to be a rock climber. He became, he said, pretty good at it. But to pay rent he took people out rock climbing, and most of them were from the […]

Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011.   Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]

At the start of my interview with Tim Squyres, the editor of most of Ang Lee’s films, including his latest, Life of Pi, I tell him how much I like the movie. I say that I know I like it because its images, its ingeniously affecting conclusion, and, most of all, the headspace it created for me have lingered for days. Upon waking each morning, scenes have come flooding back. And the subtleties of the film’s ending, which contains a rich meditation on the role stories play in our lives, have resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. “I get […]