Interviews
Interviews
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Director/Cinematographer Matthew Heineman on Shooting Sundance Award-Winning Doc Cartel Land
A tense, cinematically-styled verite documentary about the Mexican drug wars, Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land was one of the big winners at Sundance this year, nabbing both the Directing and Cinematography Awards. Strikingly, both positions were filled by the same person: Matthew Heineman, who also produced and edited. (For Cartel Land, Heineman shares the d.p. credit with Matt Porwoll.) Below, the multi-hyphenate talks about why, for him, shooting isn’t entirely about the image; why being his own d.p. calmed him down during the tenser moments of production; and the benefits of capturing a flat image through Canon Log. Filmmaker: How and […]
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Cinematographer Ben Lichty on Shooting the Greenpeace Doc, How to Change the World
A “hippie heist movie-turned-high sea adventure” is how Sundance describes Jerry Rothwell’s Sundance award-winning documentary How to Change the World, about the early days of the Greenpeace movement. Below, cinematographer Ben Lichty describes mixing interview with archival footage, creating “visual variety” and shooting with the RED Epic. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Lichty: When I first heard about How to Change the World and the story the film would explore, I really wanted to be a […]
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Cinematographer Catherine Lutes on Shooting the Pop-Up Porno Series
An unlikely combination of elements — the children’s pop-up book and X-rated adult relationship stories — collide in one of the more unusual series of shorts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: Pop-Up Porno. Toronto-based director Stephen Dunn was inspired by friends’ tales of online dating, and he worked with various graphic designers to come up with actual book illustrations. The resulting three films premiered in Park City, where the books were also exhibited. Bringing the turning pages to life is cinematographer Catherine Lutes, who below talks about the Canon C300, realizing the film on a tiny budget and accenting […]
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“It’s Too Important to be Tucked Away for Another 30 Years”: Don Argott on Kickstarting Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
Don Argott’s interests are eclectic, to say the least. Just in the past five years the Philly-based documentarian has followed the downward spiraling of rock stars, explored a nuclear-reactor community and, most recently, launched a Kickstarter campaign for his latest project Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The in-production doc is co-directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm co-creator Bob Weide and is about his decades-long attempt to make his own film about the iconic author, who in the process became a close friend. Argott spoke with Filmmaker about meeting Weide at an overseas film festival, going the indie financing route, and how […]
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Five Questions for Boy Meets Girl Director Eric Schaeffer
When Filmmaker last checked in on Eric Schaeffer in 2013, he was busy making his web series, Eric Schaeffer: Life Coach. The article focused on Schaeffer’s determination to create the piece in any format necessary, as he transformed what was originally planned as a feature film into a self-produced web series that he produced himself. Schaeffer’s next project is a feature film that took much of the same DIY determination. Boy Meets Girl is a romantic coming-of-age comedy, a staple of indie fare, but here featuring a transgender protagonist. The film investigates sexual identity and gender in very relevant ways in […]
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“I Have One Camera Position Each Day”: Force Majeure Director Ruben Östlund
Structurally, tonally and formally indebted to Roy Andersson — not least in opening and closing to the sardonically mournful strains of Benny Andersson’s “Briggens blåögda blonda kapten,” along the lines of the other Andersson’s ever-present ambient musical commentary — Ruben Östlund’s second feature Involuntary lays out five situations in which people behave contrary to how they should. The entire thrust of Östlund’s multi-film project is summed up early, with an elementary school classroom recreation of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment. A subject is asked to identify which line of several on a cardboard display is the longest. Everyone in the room says the shortest line is the longest, […]
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Dealing with Archival Footage: Making The Prime Ministers
Documentary films often rely extensively on archival film, and dealing with different archive sources and the variety of formats involved can become a significant headache. For The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, co-producer and editor Nimrod Erez had to deal with hundreds of sources and dozens of video formats. As editor and co-producer, Erez ran the post-production department, overseeing the additional editors brought in to work on the picture and seeing the movie through grading and final picture. The film will be released this year and is the second and final part to follow The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, which was released in 2013. The […]
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Cinematographer Martijn van Broekhuizen on Shooting Sundance Horror Drama, The Hallow
Among the positive qualities cited by Variety in their review of the Sundance-premiering horror film The Hallow was the cinematography of Marijn van Broekhuizen, with Geoff Berkshire writing that it “plays with shadow and light in eerie, evocative ways and beautifully embellishes the script’s fairy-tale quality.” Below, van Broekhuizen answers questions about being hired by director Corin Hardy, basing his lighting schemes around backlight and the challenges of night shooting. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Van […]
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Director Maro Chermayeff on the Independent Lens Doc A Path Appears
Two years ago a team surrounding journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof and producer Maro Chermayeff released a four-hour documentary and multimedia project called Half the Sky, a companion to WuDunn’s and Kristof’s book of the same name. It dealt with basic human rights issues for women, focusing on topics like women’s healthcare, domestic violence and rape, and girls’ education in countries like Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Somaliland, and Cambodia, and I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about its transmedia components and outreach efforts. Late last year WuDunn and Kristof released their follow-up book, A Path Appears, shifting their focus from women in extreme […]
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Cinematographer Adam Hobbs on Shooting Sundance Competition Doc, Finders Keepers
Premiering this past week at the Sundance Film Festival was Finders Keepers, the tale of an eccentric Southern feud pitting two social outsiders against each other for the possession of a severed foot. Here, cinematographer Adam Hobbs discusses the challenges of mixed camera formats, long days and natural lighting, and choosing to shoot with prime lenses. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hobbs: In 2010 I was working in commercial production, A close friend told me about […]
