Over the past 15 years, documentary writer Mark Monroe has almost silently built up one of the most prolific and successful careers in nonfiction film. His credits include Louie Psihoyos’s Oscar-Winning film, The Cove (as well as the brand-new Racing Extinction), the award-winning Sundance films Chasing Ice, Who is Dayani Cristal? and The Tillman Story, Foo Fighter Dave Grohl’s Emmy Award-Winning HBO series Sonic Highways and Ron Howard’s upcoming Beatles documentary. I recently sat in on some of Monroe’s work in New York (which included a feedback screening of Nanfu Wang’s upcoming doc on Chinese activists, The Road from Hainan) […]
If screenwriter Matthew Robbins had penned the pivotal moments of his movie life, he might not have come up with anything better than the reality. Robbins fell in love with movies in Paris while studying abroad alongside his college roommate, future editing legend Walter Murch. After writing Steven Spielberg’s debut theatrical feature (The Sugarland Express) and directing the fondly remembered 1980s fantasy films Dragonslayer and *batteries not included, Robbins found himself in Guadalajara, Mexico as part of a program to mentor aspiring filmmakers. He was assigned a 29-year-old with a fondness for insects and ghost stories named Guillermo del Toro. […]
“It is more important to observe and listen.” Despite the intense philosophical disposition many critics have discerned in the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, the 68-year-old filmmaker often seems very uninterested in the thematic choices behind his films. Instead, he often appeals to the tenet of cinematic realism. His work has been key in defining it in contemporary terms — a use of long takes and master shots with subtle changes in both camera and performances while avoiding traditional narrative exposition. More than that, Hou’s films have depended on accurate historical locations and details, all expounding on the history […]
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 — […]
In this second part of the interview with brothers Michael and Shawn, they talk about directing their microbudget movie The Inhabitants, the music and sound mixing, and distribution for the movie. Filmmaker: With one of you running the camera and the other doing sound, how did you manage to handle directing at the same time? Michael: I think we’ve learned to multi-task, but it is hard. You are trying to make sure that everything is in focus and you’re pulling focus yourself, you’re doing all that stuff. The good thing is that Shawn is standing there with the boom, he can […]
Two years ago the Rasmussen brothers, Michael and Shawn, spoke to us about the production of their low-budget horror movie Dark Feed. Now the directors and screenwriters (they scripted John Carpenter’s The Ward) are back to talk about their new New England-set horror film The Inhabitants, and the lessons learned making a movie on an even tighter budget. Filmmaker: How did this project start? Michael: The whole thing came about as we were finishing Dark Feed. One of our filmmaker friends said, “You want to keep the momentum going and get started on the next project.” A producer friend who had […]
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 […]
Filmed throughout the summer of 2014 on the warm, sweat-drenched streets of Harlem (between 125th Street and Lexington Avenue to be exact), Khalik Allah’s Field Niggas is an all-out sensory experience, gonzo journalism that’s a visceral call-to-action. Placing himself amongst the socially ignored and maligned inhabitants of Harlem’s famous cross streets, Allah takes a nonlugubrious approach to documenting the men and women who frequent the area and suffer from poverty, addiction and a hunger to have their voices heard. Both stylistically and narratively innovative — the subjects’ stories often told via non-sync sound and invasive close-ups — Field Niggas’ attention-getting title is only the tip of the […]
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 […]
Currently in post-production, Oliver Laxe’s second feature, Las Mimosas, is an ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut feature, You All Are Captains. Shot in Morocco, where the French-born Spaniard has lived for the best part of a decade, the film has been four years in the making. Produced by Zeitun Films and co-financed by Rouge International (France) and LaProd (Morocco), Laxe’s sophomore feature also received support from several funding schemes at film festivals, including Torino FilmLab and CPH:Forum. With Zeitun Films aiming to unveil the film at another major festival in 2016 (Captains debuted at Cannes in 2010), footage […]