Interviews
Interviews
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Michael Kleiman on Web, Connectivity, and Social Documentary
Only 32% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That figure, coming from the organization A Human Right, means that 4.6 billion people are effectively left out of the Information Age that most of us take for granted. Individuals and organizations across the world are working to ameliorate that and spread online connectivity into underdeveloped and rural areas from the U.S. to Kazakhstan. And films like Tiffany Shlain’s Connected (2011) are starting to probe what can happen to global consciousness when the collective wisdom of the world, not just our meager social networks, are finally truly linked together. […]
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Five Questions for I Learn America‘s Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
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Fifth Column Features Launch Pay-As-You-Wish Model
Filmmaker contributor John Yost recently joined forces with Alexander Berberich to launch Fifth Column Features (FCF), a boutique independent film studio and online distribution company. Though the concept may sound familiar, FCF boasts the industry’s first pay-as-you-wish content model, which Yost likens to a barometer for audience commitment. Filmmaker spoke with Yost about what FCF is doing differently, and how, as filmmakers themselves, they are able to prioritize their colleagues’ best interests. Filmmaker: Why do you feel the industry was lacking a pay-as-you-wish platform? Are you operating from a standpoint that audiences are the most valuable entity to an independent filmmaker? John Yost: Pay […]
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Co-Directing and the Exhaustion of the Indie Filmmaker: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 3)
In parts I & II of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we covered finding the story, script development, and the difficulties of finding locations and cast. In this final part of the interview, Medinger talks about co-directing a feature, offers some advice for first time filmmakers, and attempts to explain what it’s really like to make your first movie. The film is currently in post-production, and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker: You and Robin Schmidt are co-directors on the movie. How does that work? Medinger: Robin and I have both directed […]
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Political Zoo: AJ Schnack on Caucus
The 2012 candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination — in other words the people who vied to be the standard bearer for those responsible for the government shutdown spurred by opposition to the Affordable Care Act — were photogenic, prone to gaffes: a documentarian’s wet dream of a cast. The GOP primaries offered us ambitious charlatans and lunatics eager to put themselves of display, finding room after room of deluded or poorly informed or simply mean-spirited white people to entertain and cajole. The entire primary season, while not as entertaining as it could have been (how can people with such depressing […]
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In Conversation: David Cronenberg’s D.P. Peter Suschitzky
Peter Suschitzky has photographed films for John Boorman, Ken Russell and most notably David Cronenberg, but the 72-year-old d.p. still prepares each film with the written word. “It begins with a careful reading of the screenplay,” he says in a polite English accent over the phone from London, “trying to get a feel for, subconsciously, what’s in that script.” Suschitzky is giving interviews to promote, Evolution, TIFF’s celebration of hometown boy and horror master, Cronenberg. Evolution launches Hallowe’en week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto with a multimedia exhibition of celebrating Cronenberg’s five-decade career that began long before […]
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Script Development, Casting and Locations: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 2)
In this second part of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we cover script development, locations and the difficulty of casting a small ensemble feature. AfterDeath is a psychological thriller/horror movie currently in post-production and was co-directed by Medinger and Robin Schmidt. While Medinger and Schmidt have both been working in video and film for the past decade, this is their first feature film. The first part of the interview, which covers the journey to find the story for the movie, can be read here: Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1) AfterDeath […]
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Deb Shoval Interviews Stacie Passon About Concussion and the IFP Narrative Labs
The following is a guest post by writer/director Deb Shoval, whose debut feature AWOL participated in the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs. Nine months ago, I sat down with the endlessly generous Stacie Passon, the writer/director of Concussion, for some words of wisdom on making the low budget, indie first feature. Her biggest piece of advice? Get AWOL into the IFP Narrative Labs. Fast forward to Part 2 of 3 of the yearlong lab fellowship: IFP Week. Stacie, now an IFP Narrative Lab mentor, gets into more detail. Passon: Now if my son comes in during this interview and starts whining, […]
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Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1)
The psychological thriller/horror movie AfterDeath is the first feature film of directors Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt. Shot on a tight budget and a tight schedule, the development and shooting of AfterDeath offers a lesson to anyone looking to make their first feature. AfterDeath is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker spoke to Medinger about the project shortly after shooting wrapped. Medinger and Schmidt met at Oxford University in the late ’90s. Schmidt was studying English and Medinger was studying engineering. After leaving university, Schmidt became interested in film and video and learned […]
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Taking Horror Interactive: Neal Edelstein on Haunting Melissa
As the producer of films like The Ring and Mulholland Drive, Neal Edelstein is no stranger to horror films and thrillers. And with his new project, Haunting Melissa, he’s moved beyond traditional pictures with his first immersive production for iPad and iPhone. Available for free in the App Store, Haunting Melissa centers around the search for a girl who vanished from the farmhouse where her mother had earlier gone insane, but this story is told in a succession of videos released to the viewer in seemingly random bursts. The temporal extension – and unexpected timing – of the narrative through these push notifications […]
