Interviews
Interviews
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Back to One, Episode Two: Emily Mortimer talks Her Breakout Film, Being Right and Wrong for the Part, and Aaron Sorkin
Emily Mortimer is perhaps best known for her role as MacKenzie McHale in Aaron Sorkin’s beloved HBO series The Newsroom. Some of her other memorable performances are in Woody Allen’s Match Point, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Hugo and, as Phoebe, Jack Donaghy’s love interest, on the NBC series 30 Rock. In this hour she talks extensively about one particular, powerful scene in her breakout film, Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing (which earned her an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress), and about what it was like to play a character named “Emily Mortimer” in her HBO series Doll […]
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Tribeca 2018: Michael Muller on Sharks, Fear, and Into the Now
If you don’t know Michael Muller‘s name, you do know his work. His posters for Deadpool 2 are the most creative bit of film advertising in the current market, and he’s also shot artwork for Marvel films like Captain America: Civil War, Dr. Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 as well as dozens of other films, innumerable portraits, album covers and ad campaigns for brands like Nike and Sony. But in 2006 he began training his camera on a very different subject, wild sharks, and since then shark photography and marine environmental activism has become his primary cause. His still photos of great whites, hammerheads, and […]
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Tribeca 2018: Composer Ariel Marx on Scoring To Dust
Ariel Marx is a film composer to watch. It’s early in her career, but her credits already include an impressive variety of dramas and comedies on both film and television. She’s assisted on projects like Wonder and Amazon’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, and her own scores have been in the films West of Her, By Jingo, and The Tale, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and runs on HBO next month. She’s even worked in augmented reality with Armen Perian’s The Angry River, a piece about human traffickers that changes with the direction of the viewer’s gaze — an impressive challenge for a traditionally linear form […]
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“We Don’t Have a Script, But We’re Working on It”: Michael Pressman on Doctor Detroit and Transitioning from Film to TV
One of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s – a period in which great directors like Jonathan Demme, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante were making their first movies for the company – was Michael Pressman, whose 1976 action-comedy The Great Texas Dynamite Chase remains one of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic exploitation pictures of its era. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pressman directed one distinctive film after another, exhibiting astonishing range – the only thing his movies of the era have in common is that they have nothing […]
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“A Very Old Fashioned Kind of Filmmaking”: DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen on Shooting A Quiet Place on 35mm
A few months after my son was born, I took my wife to see the Tommy Lee Jones western The Homesman. If you know that movie, then you know why it was a bad idea: minutes into the film, a woman driven mad by the harshness of pioneer life kills her infant child. My wife nearly walked out. I didn’t understand that impulse at the time, but as my kid has gotten older I’ve become equally squeamish toward onscreen violence directed at children. It’s not an uncommon sentiment for parents, which is why it’s a perilous choice to open the new horror […]
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Filmmaker‘s New Podcast, Episode One: Kevin Corrigan
Welcome to the debut episode of Filmmaker‘s new podcast about acting, Back To One. In each episode, host Peter Rinaldi invites one working actor to do a deep dive into their unique process, psychology, and approach to the craft. No small talk, no celebrity stories, no inane banter — just the work. Episode One: Kevin Corrigan We could not have a more perfect guest for the first episode of a podcast about “the work” of acting if we had somehow constructed one. The TV guest star extraordinaire, the go-to indie comedy player of our time, the actor’s actor, Kevin Corrigan […]
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Cotton Balls, Cling Film and Unashamed Composites: DP Tristan Oliver on Isle of Dogs
In Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson’s Japan-set return to the world of stop motion animation, there is a character with a face full of freckles. This seemingly incidental attribute required the film’s lead puppet painter Angela Kiely to place 297 freckles on each of the puppet’s many interchangeable faces. All told, she painted over 22,000 freckles for the film. That is the painstaking diligence required for the art of stop motion animation, a form demanding an obsessive attention to minutia perfectly suited to Anderson’s fastidiousness. In a Wes Anderson film, no detail – not even a single freckle – is […]
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“I Think Hope is When We Step out of the Cinema and Begin to Question Ourselves”: Director Andrew Dosunmu on his Michelle Pfeiffer-Starring Where is Kyra?
In his previous two features, Restless City and Mother of George, Nigeria-born photographer-turned-filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu has placed vivid human dramas within ultra-specific pockets of New York City. His films have examined how immigrant characters find their lives shaped by the often very subtle clashes that come from their retaining their own identities within the larger melting pot of the city. Working continually with the great cinematographer Bradford Young, Dosunmu also makes extraordinarily beautiful films, full of arresting images that convey the rhythms, exuberances but also pathos of these city streets. With his new picture, Where is Kyra?, opening today from […]
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“We Made a Cult that People Might Have Wanted to Join”: Five Questions for The Endless Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Offering a blend of psychological seduction and physical threat, cults have provided charged settings for a number of recent movies, both fiction and doc. But The Endless, the latest feature from innovative independent genre filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, puts a new spin on the cult-film genre; they writers, directors and stars make their “UFO death cult” one in which the very ambiguity of its danger is just one of their film’s existential menaces. Benson and Moorhead play Justin and Aaron Smith, brothers who escaped the California cult years ago. Aaron has fond memories of growing up in the […]
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“It Was Important to Me Not to Fetishize a Classic Vision But to Look to the Present for Inspiration”: Director Aaron Katz on his L.A. Neo-Noir, Gemini
His fifth feature, and the first following his co-directed (with Martha Stephens) breakthough comedy Land Ho!, Gemini returns writer/director Aaron Katz to the character-based neo-noir of his earlier Cold Weather but with the cloudy Portland grays of that film replaced here with a sunlit sensuality befitting the picture’s L.A. setting. Indeed, shooting in his new hometown for the first time, Katz looks for inspiration to the kind of ’80s thrillers — American Gigolo and Bad Influence in particular — that found their treacheries and ambiguities within the city’s sunlit highways, dark nightclubs and oversized mansions. And while city geography is […]
