Interviews
Interviews
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Working with Hair and Makeup – Interview with Maya Landi
Maya Landi is Boston-based hairstylist and makeup artist who works on everything from weddings and music videos to horror films. I talked to her recently about her work, how to age characters and how to create a head-shot effect, during the shooting of a music video for the band Run 8 Rider. Filmmaker: What have you been doing for this project? Landi: One of the characters plays a grandfather and a father in different eras in time. I had to do some aging makeup for him, as well as make everybody look appropriate for the era that they are supposed to […]
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Five Questions with The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek Director Wendy Jo Cohen
When it comes to The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek, everything is in the title: a heady brew of history, sexuality and satire; it’s tongue-in-cheek to the extreme. The fake documentary relates the histori-fictional “tale” of four misfit Civil War heroes: a one-armed prostitute, an engineering prodigy slave, a wizened Chinese general, and a gay opium fiend colonel, who manage to save the Union from a foreign horde intent on conquering Washington. Their contribution to history sadly goes unnoticed, precisely because of the group’s oddball features that prove unacceptable to the powers that be. Fake archival footage, war audio effects […]
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Tim Sutton’s Pavilion Opens at IFC Center
One of our favorite recent films at Filmmaker and IFP is Tim Sutton’s dreamy and at times disquieting evocation of youth, Pavilion. The film went through the IFP Labs, and its d.p., Chris Dapkins, made our 25 New Faces list last year. And, just this year, Sutton took part in the Venice Biennale College Cinema, which is partnered with IFP, and because of its support, is set to make his new feature, Memphis, this Spring. As Sutton enters pre-production, Pavilion hits the theaters from Factory 25. It opens at IFC Center in New York tomorrow, and is recommended to all […]
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Five Questions with A Fierce Green Fire Director Mark Kitchell
In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola and the cast and crew of The Godfather Part II took over a Lower East Side block in Manhattan. An NYU film student and resident of that block, Mark Kitchell, focused his camera on the proceedings. The result, The Godfather Comes to 6th Street, was not a fluffy “making of” film but a document of the good, the bad and the ugly that happens when a film crew descends on a neighborhood. A portrait of a community, the film also captured the efforts of a group of local activists who objected to the film’s presence; […]
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Dan Sallitt on The Unspeakable Act
With an exacting intelligence, a hyper-articulate quality that brings to mind the characters of American systems novels, Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act meditates on the burgeoning mutual attraction of two Brooklyn siblings in a manner that, while leaving many unsettled, has already marked his third feature as a potential breakout for the critic-filmmaker. The scions of an old-school Brooklyn bohemian writer, Jackie Kimball and Matthew Kimball (Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron) have long harbored a forbidden desire for one another, although it is most intensely felt on Jackie’s side. Medel’s big green eyes under dark, foreboding bangs fill in all the gaps […]
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Director Keith Miller on Welcome to Pine Hill
Keith Miller readily admits that when he first tried to make a film he didn’t really know how to talk to actors. He wasn’t quite sure of himself. He thought he was doing a feature; he ended up with a film that was a half-hour long. But over the next few years he kept writing, kept shooting. After a time, he gained his footing, thanks in no small measure to the fellowship he found amongst the directors, writers and actors of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. These days he’s confident enough in his vision — and his collaborators — that he […]
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Five Questions with Remedy Writer/Director Cheyenne Picardo
Opening the 10th anniversary edition of CineKink NYC tonight is writer/director (and “habitual submissive”) Cheyenne Picardo’s Remedy, a look at the business side of BDSM through the eyes of a character crafted from Picardo’s personal experience Filmmaker spoke with the accidental director – who originally set out to be a critic – about converting a barn into a NYC dungeon, casting non-kinksters, and why Steve Martin’s The Jerk is more influential than Godard. Filmmaker: I noticed this quote from you in the press notes, “I’m hoping to demystify professional BDSM in a way that’s personal and accessible by showing it […]
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Animating 1000 Parts: Creating the Short Day Shift
Ian Timothy, 18, is about to graduate high school — applying to art schools hoping to study animation — but he already has several years of animation experience under his belt. He created his first stop motion at 12 using a DV camera, and quickly discovered he liked doing it so much that it became “pretty much a full-time thing.” Timothy won a Silver Telly Award for animation in 2013, has created animation for music videos, and is currently working on an animation for Adult Swim for the Cartoon Network. In the following interview Timothy talks about the short Day […]
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Christine Turner on Homegoings
Just in the nick of time for Black History Month, and debuting at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, is Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a poetically crafted exploration of the history of African-American funeral traditions. Told via the Harlem neighborhood’s legendary funeral director Isaiah Owens – who found his calling as a small child, burying all deceased animals he stumbled across in his South Carolina surroundings – the doc manages to be poignant, inspirational, and unexpectedly uplifting. In other words, as one subject says about black burials themselves, a “sad good time.” Filmmaker spoke with the doc’s […]
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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Benh Zeitlin
Despite legions of advice to the contrary, there is no quick-fix scheme toward making a feature film. What it really comes down to is creating a universal story and surrounding yourself with people who believe in your vision enough to see it come to life. Benh Zeitlin proves that to make a powerful film today, you don’t need gimmicks, a convoluted strategy, or even connections in the business. All you really need is a story so strong that it’s impossible not to make. The 30-year-old Zeitlin’s journey from short to feature is a true fairytale in the landscape of American indie […]
