Interviews
Interviews
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Gordon Willis: “I Never Got Fired”
Gordon Willis, the legendary cinematographer who shot The Godfather and Annie Hall, reveals in this clip from Craft Truck‘s cinematographer series how to be a valuable crew member and the norm of the relationship between the director and d.p. Watch the full interview here.
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Cinematographer Zach Zamboni on Creativity and Shooting with Just Two Primes
Zach Zamboni, a cinematographer on Anthony Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown, recently spoke about his philosophy of shooting and being creative at an event in Boston. Particularly intriguing was his description of shooting an episode using just two prime lenses and his interest in shooting with Super 16 lenses on the Sony F55. About cameras, Zamboni said that he doesn’t believe one camera is “right or wrong” for a job. “The choice of camera will inform the lenses I’m going to put on that camera,” he remarked. “Those lenses will inform my behavior with that camera, and that will start to […]
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Spook Country: Spencer McCall on The Institute
Just what the hell was the Jejune Institute? After watching Spencer McCall’s fascinating and intentionally puzzling documentary The Institute, I’m still not quite sure. An interactive, multimedia, experiential game, based in a nondescript building in San Francisco’s central business district that thrives of]n the memory of a woman who disappeared into the Bay Area night a quarter century ago and never returned? Perhaps, I guess. A scripted experience surely, an alternate-reality game involving participants in events both spooky and merely bizarre, including scavenger hunts to fairly ominous locales, mock public protests and sundry hijinks that would feel right at home […]
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Adapt or Die: 13 Steps to Adapting a Film from Something Else
“We’re not special. We’re not brilliant. We never were.” So says David Harbour’s character in my film Between Us. And he’s right. Most of us probably started as writer-directors by necessity, but at a certain point in a filmmaker’s career (and of course, if you have an actual “career,” you will eventually cease to be a filmmaker, and become instead a “filmSmaker”), you will realize you’re probably not as brilliant or talented as you once thought you were. If you were indeed a genius screenwriter, you’re probably better off writing scripts for Hollywood and actually getting paid to write anyway. […]
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DIY Multiplatform Storytelling: Kal on the Tokyo Sally Film and App
Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]
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The Interactive Mic: Etienne Paquette & Alexandre Lupien on Mégaphone
Mégaphone, an interactive project currently running in Montreal, is designed for a world that’s forgetting that the word social doesn’t necessarily have to precede media. The project seeks to remove the fiber optic interface that currently connects so many of us and move public discourse back into a public space–that is, somewhere outdoors with plenty of foot traffic. Thus it’s built around a pre-Industrial Era public speaking model like Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner in London: anyone can take to the mic to discuss any topic they like (though there is an MC and suggested time slots for certain subjects to […]
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Philadelphia Fire: Jason Osder on Let the Fire Burn
Jason Osder’s searing Let the Fire Burn is a look back at a damning chapter in American history, a moment so outrageous and shameful and multifaceted that all our culture could do was turn around and walk the other direction. A found-footage marvel with no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia police’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was fired upon 10,000 times, doused with enormous amounts of water and then finally firebombed, an event […]
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“I Don’t Have to Pick Up a Gun, I Can Just Pick Up a Camera:” Jia Zhangke on A Touch Of Sin
“I really want to say that we are all connected,” Jia Zhangke said Monday night. “This is our issue.” If that makes his latest film, A Touch Of Sin, sound like some sort of Chinese Crash redux, it’s just a quirk of phrasing: the connection Zhangke’s thinking of is an epidemic of violence in China, which he describes as a response of the economically dispossessed trying to reclaim some form of dignity. Viewed as isolated actions, the four violent incidents dramatized in A Touch Of Sin might seem like singular occurrences; stitched together, they’re obviously connected symptoms of Chinese society […]
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Andrea Arnold on Honing Her Next Project as Film Society of Lincoln Center’s First Filmmaker in Residence
Andrea Arnold is still a little jet-lagged. Meeting me at Indie Food & Wine, the restaurant inside Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center, the Oscar-winning director of the short film Wasp, and the acclaimed features Red Road, Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, has barely settled after flying into New York a day earlier. It’s four days before the start of the 51st New York Film Festival, and Arnold hasn’t even gotten a chance to look over the main slate. “All I’ve done is put a lot of food in my freezer,” the English filmmaker says. Arnold has good […]
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Strange Fruit: Jim Mickle on We Are What We Are
Jim Mickle, whose 2010 post-apocalyptic monster picture Stake Land launched him into the top tier of filmmakers making artfully rendered low-budget horror pictures, is back with a lyrically photographed, deeply felt family drama that also happens to be about people that eat other people. In his remake of Jorge Grau’s fabulous 2011 Mexican shocker/political satire/cannibalism-themed exercise in existential miserablism We Are What We Are, Mickle moves the action from a hideously corrupt Mexico City to the rainy forests of the rural Catskills. It opens with the sudden and distressing death of a mysteriously stricken woman, Emma Parker (Kassie DePaiva). Her family, […]
