Interviews
Interviews
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Stop-Motion DP Tristan Oliver on Creating a Behind-the-Scenes VR Short for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
UK-based cinematographer Tristan Oliver has worked on stop-motion features, shorts, music videos and commercials for more than 20 years. Oliver served as DP on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run and Wes Anderson’s forthcoming Isle of Dogs. For that last feature, Anderson also tapped Oliver to shoot a VR short on the making of the film, which enters theaters on March 23. Oliver spoke with Filmmaker about the cameras used on the film, translating Anderson’s aesthetic to stop-motion and the film as “an homage to Japanese cinema.” The short will screen as part of Sundance’s New Frontier program. Filmmaker: How and why […]
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“The Art of Silently Weeping While Pulling Focus at the Same Time”: DP Nick Higgins on Shooting Robin Williams: Come Inside My Head?
Following Water & Power: A California Heist in 2017 and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired in 2008, Marina Zenovich returns to Sundance for a third time with Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, her documentary on the late comedic maestro. Documentary DP Nick Higgins served as one of four cinematographers on the project. Higgins was the sole DP on O.J.: Made in America and has more than 50 cinematography credits to his name. Below, he shares his thoughts on lighting documentary subjects and why he prefers to shoot interviews with a single camera. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind screens four times at Sundance 2018. Filmmaker: […]
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“I Was Watching Russian TV More than My Entire Family in Russia”: Maxim Pozdorovkin and Matvey Kulakov on Editing Our New President
Maxim Pozdorovkin entered the documentary film world in 2013 with Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a film that earned him top prizes at Sundance, Cinema Eye Honors and the British Independent Film Awards. He returned to Sundance in 2014 with The Notorious Mr. Bout. Now, he returns to the World Cinema Documentary Competition once again with Our New President, a doc on Russia’s propagandistic state-run news networks. Below, Pozdorovkin and co-editor Matvey Kulakov discuss how they crafted a feature film from such surreal archival footage. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes […]
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“Documentaries Are Less an Act of Creation and More an Act of Discovery”: DP Bob Richman on The Price of Everything
Brooklyn-born DP Bob Richman began his career as a production assistant for Albert and David Maysles. He’s since gone on to shoot some of the most widely seen documentaries of the past 20 years: An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for ‘Superman’, the Paradise Lost trilogy and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, to name a few. His latest feature, The Price of Everything, is a vérité doc on the puzzlingly astronomical price of fine art. Richman spoke with Filmmaker ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere about his preferred camera for vérité filmmaking, reuniting with director Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect) and the essential importance of a good […]
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“If You Want That Melodramatic Shaft of Light, You’d Better Mean It”: DP Sam Levy on Shooting Lady Bird
There’s a tradition of young directors looking for inspiration in the bygone eras of their adolescence. For George Lucas in American Graffiti, it was the California car culture of the early ’60s. For Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused, it was the Texas high school rituals of the ’70s. And for Greta Gerwig in Lady Bird, it’s Catholic school and the suburban doldrums of early-aughts Sacramento. Written and directed by Gerwig, Lady Bird follows the titular character (Saoirse Ronan) through her senior year of high school as she fights with her mom (Laurie Metcalf), pines for a philosophical dilettante from the […]
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“Things Happen that are Too Big for You…”: Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan on the Director’s Cut of his Masterpiece, Margaret
Margaret may be one of the best movies you’ve never seen. It’s the second film from writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose first, You Can Count On Me, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000, and third, Manchester by the Sea garnered two Academy Awards for Lead Actor and Original Screenplay. But Margaret suffered a different journey, shooting in 2005 and being released much later in 2011 for a very limited run — and a cut 36 minutes shorter than the one Lonergan preferred. As part of its series, “The Way I See It: Directors’ Cuts,” the Quad in New […]
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DP Rachel Morrison on Mudbound, Her Ideal Extinct Film Stock and Using Waveform Monitors
In Mudbound, a friendship between two returning soldiers – one white (Garrett Hedlund) and one black (Jason Mitchell) – sets a pair of neighboring farming families on a path to tragedy in post-World War II Mississippi. For cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Fruitvale Station, the upcoming Black Panther), filmic references for the harshness of agrarian life in the Jim Crow South were few and far between considering the Hollywood studio offerings of the era were preoccupied with propagandistic war movies and opulent musicals. Instead, Morrison looked to the Depression-era photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration – specifically the work of Gordon […]
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“ARRI is a Woman…”: Christopher Doyle on Finding a Film and the Gender of Cameras
Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s interview with Kaleem Aftab was one of our most highly-read pieces of last year, and in this concise interview posted at the ARRI channel, he discusses specific aspects of his methodology, including adapting his approach to his physical surroundings and the importance of camera ergonomics.
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“… A Running Dialogue Between Past and Present Notions of Screen Culture”: Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes on Room H.264
In 1982, in the Hotel Martinez at the Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Spielberg’s E.T. was the closing night film, German auteur Wim Wenders set up a stationary 16mm camera in a room on the sixth floor and asked a succession of directors to film themselves answering a single question: “Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?” Respondents ranged from yes, Spielberg, to Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni, and topics covered included film vs. television, the rise of blockbuster “sensation-oriented” cinema, and the evolving theatrical experience. […]
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DP Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water, Judging Exposure without a Meter and Capturing Rich Blacks
There’s a line in Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl” that goes, “(It’s) strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” Suffering together connected director Guillermo del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen on the set of 1997’s Mimic. The Miramax-produced giant insect creature feature marked the first American effort for del Toro and just the second studio gig for the Danish Laustsen. The experience was not a pleasant one. As del Toro put it during an on-stage interview at the BFI London Film Festival last October: “Two horrible things happened in the late ’90s: my father […]
