Interviews
Interviews
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“Find Your Tribe”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins and Producer Adele Romanski Give Advice at IFP Week
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
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“How Are You Going to Make a Video that’s 9,000 Pixels Long?”: The Mixed Media Art of Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter’s work not only reflects the world around her but also the world of the future she hopes to see. Wonder Why — the digital mixed media project currently taking over the Made in NY Media Center by IFP in Brooklyn, NY — is her most narrative work to date, mashing up everything from Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane and Google Earth to campy star graphics and well-lit tunnels that she equates with hope. The result of putting these kaleidoscopic and powerful images into her unique visual blender creates an effect for the viewer akin to finding hidden letters of […]
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“I Think There’s a Parallel Between Gender Politics and Politics of the Land”: Clio Barnard on Her TIFF Premiere, Dark River
UK-based Clio Barnard has impressively transitioned from video artist to acclaimed feature filmmaker in the span of just seven years. After making several short films, her feature debut The Arbor, a hybrid documentary about the late playwright Andrea Dunbar, went on to win a bevy of awards, including London Film Festival’s Best British Newcomer award, Tribeca Film Festival’s Jury Award, British Independent Film Awards’ Douglas Hickox Award, and subsequently a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer. Her second feature The Selfish Giant, loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s children’s story of the same name, also […]
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“…Much More Truthful and Much More Alienated than Anything I Would Produce Myself”: Jonathan Lethem on Fred Barney Taylor’s Lethem
Last week I was very much looking forward to talking with friend Jonathan Lethem about the new film Lethem, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, which screens at the Metrograph on Sunday, September 17, with the author in attendance. Before that happened though, we both received the news that Michael Friedman had died. A beloved friend and collaborator, Friedman co-founded The Civilians, a theater company where I’m an associate artist. He also wrote the score and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s 2003 novel. Fortress of Solitude tells the story of Lethem’s childhood on Dean Street in […]
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It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
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Letter From Rome
For Abel Ferrara, now living and working in Rome, there’s no love lost between the renegade director and the New York of yesteryear, the New York of Bad Lieutenant. “Being in Europe, it’s very different,” Ferrara explains. “We thought we were free then, but it’s nothing compared to where we’re at now. We’re outside the system, working within the European financial community, which includes the socialist brand of government financing and various cultural ministries.” Continues Ferrara, “On Bad Lieutenant” — the cover of Filmmaker’s second issue — “we were totally free. The director has to have absolute freedom. Now, you […]
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Forced Perspective: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]
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Indie Film is Alive
“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]
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The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
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Rise of the Machines: Cathy O’Neil and James Schamus on How Algorithms are Changing Society — and Filmmaking
Amazon and Netflix are having a huge impact on the independent film business, and there are more players entering the subscription VOD space every day, both here in the United States and worldwide. I myself just had a great experience working with Netflix on Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which Green, Filmmaker’s own editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay and I produced. Opening day on Netflix was, though, a bit unsettling. The data driving the film’s marketing, and the measures for its success or failure, are closely held corporate secrets — even the sources and kinds of data the company uses to determine how […]
