Interviews
Interviews
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Listen: Walter Murch in Conversation (Part Two)
Yesterday we shared part one of a podcast conducted with Walter Murch conducted by Glenn Kiser for the Dolby Institute Conversations with Sound Artists series. In this second part, Murch discusses how Apocalypse Now changed the state of film sound, why going to film school could be a good idea, and using sound effects to express a character’s emotional state.
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Listen: Walter Murch in Conversation (Part One)
We’re pleased to be sharing this podcast conversation with legendary editor Walter Murch, conducted by Glenn Kiser and including questions from other leading sound designers including Randy Thom, Gary Rydstrom, and Ren Klyce, for the Dolby Institute Conversations with Sound Artists series. In this first part, he discusses documentaries’ effects on contemporary films, as well as aspects of his work on four of his most famous films: Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The Godfather and The English Patient. We’ll post part two of the podcast tomorrow.
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Jon Vogl on Budgeting for Post Production Sound, Transitioning From Film to Digital Dubbers, and Con Air‘s Place in Sound History
On a shady street in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District you’ll find Second Line Stages’ annex building, where Apex Post Production is located. Depending on the day you arrive, you might witness an ADR session for Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven or Ava DuVernay’s new TV show Queen Sugar. The man running the ADR session is Jon Vogl, a Los Angeles transplant and studio veteran who moved to New Orleans to take advantage of increased film and TV production in the state. In this sit-down we discuss the technological changes that he’s witnessed in his twenty-plus years working in post-sound […]
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Activist Resistance and Organization in Portland and Elsewhere: Penny Allen on Her Career
This weekend, Metrograph hosts a bona fide repertory first for New York City: a retrospective of four films by activist-director Penny Allen, who grew up in Portland and is currently based in Paris. I was one of a relative handful lucky enough to see Allen’s 1978 gentrification satire-docudrama Property at a packed Light Industry screening in 2014: the film was an anthropological curio concerning a handful of Portland hipsters — a clique a far more “Dogpatch,” to use Allen’s term, than the upscale suburbanites currently associated with that particular epithet — who band together to save their neighborhood from gentrification by buying […]
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Choosing the Alexa 65 over Film and Finding the Right Format: DP Greig Fraser on Lion and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
It’s fair to say that 2015 was a pretty good year for Greig Fraser. The cinematographer globetrotted to London, Jordan, Iceland, the Maldives, India, and his native Australia while lensing two movies. One of them (Lion) has Fraser in the Oscar conversation and the other (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) is a blockbuster prequel to his favorite childhood films. The two movies seemingly couldn’t be any more different. Rogue One is a space adventure with a $200 million budget and a small country’s GDP worth of merchandising revenue in which the final half is basically one intense battle sequence. […]
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Do You Need to Premiere at a Major Festival to Qualify your Doc for an Oscar? Roger Ross Williams on the Shortlist Process
One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it. However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued […]
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Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe on The Bad Kids, Achieving Documentary Shot/Reverse Shot with One Camera and Balancing Advocacy and Aesthetics
Placed deep in the secluded landscape of the Mojave Desert, Black Rock High School isn’t your typical institution for American teenagers. A continuation school designed specifically for trouble students for whom Black Rock is their last chance at academic redemption, the men and women frequenting these halls face a daily struggle of balancing their studies with often toxic home lives (and fearing that the destructive family cycle could repeat itself over the next generation). As society appears ready to deem them unworthy of fitting in, the title characters in the documentary The Bad Kids work increasingly hard to fight against their stereotypical image. As the […]
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Omnipresent Poet: How Pablo Larraín Captured the Essence of Neruda Without Simplifying His Humanity
Reconciling the flawed humanity of a person with their extraordinary deeds means accepting that both vice and virtue can coexist. Ditching the narrative shackles of biographical films that aims to encompass the entirety of a person’s life, even if that means just piecing together a sequence of significant events, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín inventively designed an iridescent impression of his homeland’s most notable artist, Pablo Neruda, which captures his essence without simplifying his humanity. No stranger to revisiting Chile’s most scabrous historical passages through a fictional lens that neither condemns nor absolves, in Neruda Larraín presents the man as a masterful poet, lazy communist, seductive […]
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The Best VR of 2016: Arnaud Colinart and Amaury La Burthe on Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
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“If You Put Up a Video Village You’re Going to Get 10% Less Material Every Day”: DP Giles Nuttgens on Hell or High Water
In Hell or High Water two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) embark on a spree of heists intended to fleece predatory Texas banks, with an about-to-retire Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) hot on their heels. The film is an elegy to a dying way of life – not only for family ranchers Pine and Foster, but also for lawman Bridges. Making the movie was an elegy of sorts as well for cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, a vocal celluloid proponent who ultimately opted to shoot with an Alexa Studio on the project. In the words of another great western requiem The Wild […]
