Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions for Twenty Feet from Stardom Cinematographer Nicola Marsh
Nicola Marsh was one of two cinematographers for Twenty Feet from Stardom, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Documentary. She’s worked with director Morgan Neville on a number of projects, including Troubadours and The Night James Brown Saved Boston as well as other directors including Cameron Crowe on Pearl Jam Twenty and The Union. Marsh, who has just finished shooting a reality show in the Caribbean, spoke to us about shooting Twenty Feet from Stardom, the different cameras used on the project and the hidden strengths of older lenses. Filmmaker: For Twenty Feet from Stardom you were shooting with […]
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“This Is The Guy”: Steve James, Roger Ebert and Life Itself
“Who the fuck are you?” Fueled on booze, Flamo was raging. Someone had told the cops he had stashed guns in his house, and so his mum and brother were handcuffed and led away. Craving revenge but thinking better, Flamo phoned Cobe (pronounced KOH-bay), someone he met years earlier in the county jail who was now a violence interruptor, counseling young gangbangers like Flamo to chill out and stop drawing blood in Chicago’s crime-ravaged South Side. When Cobe arrived, Flamo was stunned to find some white man filming him. Luckily, Cobe knew how to vouch for the white man to the youth he […]
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Azazel Jacobs on His New HBO Series with Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, Doll and Em
Type the words “never hire” into Google and it autocompletes an admonition anyone entering business has certainly heard. Indeed, working with your friends — not in the collaborative way we as filmmakers work together but rather with friends as your employees, having them roll your calls, drive you on errands and maybe even pick up your dry cleaning — is usually a recipe for professional and personal disaster. But while the combination of friendship and the employer/employee relationship can produce profoundly icky moments, that ickiness can also be the stuff of great humor and nuanced drama, as is the case […]
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Jersey Boys: Daniel Patrick Carbone on Hide Your Smiling Faces
Promising newcomerDaniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces, well received at festivals such as Berlin, Tribeca and Abu Dhabi, is a sumptuously shot meditation on the difficulties faced by a couple of rural New Jersey teenage brothers following the untimely death of a friend. The film’s delicately designed frames, as well as its super spare screenplay, studiously withhold information — artfully, but perhaps somewhat tediously, denying the audience pleasure. (That pleasure is subsequently generated, however, by the beauty of Hide Your Smiling Face‘s overall visual aesthetic.) The picture’s rather chilly style is somewhat reminiscent of Alastair Banks Griffin’s Two Gates of Sleep, with […]
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Reimagining an ID: Sound & Vision
Television stations – like distribution and production companies – can have a lot invested in their IDs. They represent the brand in the mind of the consumer. In 1972, WGBH created a station ID with a logo sting by Gershon Kingsley. That sound has become closely associated with WGBH, and they’ve made several updated IDs using that original Moog synthesizer sound through the years. Paul Sanni, an editor for the Creative Services department and the Masterpiece series at WGBH has twice worked on revisions of the ID. Sanni has a background in audio and video and for the latest version […]
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Leah Warshawski on Connecting the Rwandan Film Industry
Last Friday the African news site AllAfrica.com published a lengthy story on the growth and maturation of the Rwandan film industry since the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Coming from a place of inter-tribal distrust and decimated infrastructure, filmmakers, like others in the country, got to work rebuilding their country, their pride, and their national image. In the immediate aftermath of the genocide many films understandably dealt with it as subject matter (think Italian neorealism springing up in the wake of the Allied tanks), but in the ensuing 20 years filmmakers have created a space to tell other stories and redefine […]
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Errol Morris on Stephen Hawking and A Brief History of Time (and Yo Yo Ma and Cello Playing)
The pairing of the finest scientific mind of his generation with one of America’s best documentarians and the preeminent composer of his time should, one would think, have made more of a lasting impression on the cinematic landscape. However, 20-odd years after its release, Errol Morris’ 1992 A Brief History of Time – a (liberal) adaptation of Stephen Hawking’s all-time bestseller, with a score by Philip Glass – is a title receiving a much-needed revival thanks to its release on DVD and Blu ray through Criterion. Morris’ movie, which cannily interweaves Hawking’s own compelling history with the astrophysicist’s theories of the […]
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Zachary Wigon, John Gallagher, Jr. and Kate Lyn Sheil on Intimacy, the Internet and The Heart Machine
Premiering at SXSW in its Narrative Feature Competition, The Heart Machine, the first feature from film journalist Zachary Wigon, is an astute romantic drama tackling the interpersonal confusion of our internet age. (Full disclosure: Zach Wigon has written for Filmmaker, and I contributed to the film’s Kickstarter campaign.) With technology altering and intermediating the ways we discover each other, meet, communicate and even break up, our romantic rulebooks are being surreptitiously rewritten, and right under our noses. Yes, a kiss is still a kiss, but is a text just a text? Or, in the case of Wigon’s film, a Skype […]
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WorkingIndie.com: A New Way to Network
When I was in film school in 2004, we spent a lot of time flipping through binders of head shots and reading resumes on sheets of paper. As the Internet revolutionized social networking and sites like Shooting People and Mandy.com got filmmakers’ and actors’ information online, the casting and crewing process was turned upside-down, and definitely for the better. But there are still limitations to what the Internet can do. The main problem is penetration, getting everyone on the same network; second to that is searchability, being able to find the right people who are on the network you’re already […]
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The Kids Are All Right: Matt Wolf on Teenage
Based on Jon Savage’s 2007 book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Matt Wolf’s elliptical and handsome documentary Teenage delves into the history of teen-hood, revealing how those formative years between 12 and 20 produced generations that were cultural forces to be reckoned with in the West during the 20th century’s earliest decades. Using a collage style that includes archival footage, newsreels, dramatic reenactments (anchored by recognizable young actors such as Jenna Malone and total newcomers found by street-casting impresario Eleonore Hendricks), the movie takes us to pre-war Germany, through the pages of diaries of midwestern 15-year-olds, and to dance […]
