Interviews
Interviews
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TikTok, Building a Slate, and the Life of an Independent Producer: It Ends With Us Producer Alex Saks
If you’re a TikTok-using film producer, then the feed of Alex Saks has undoubtedly been delivered straight to your phone by that platform’s ruthless and unerring algorithm. Over the past year-and-a-half, and across nearly 200 clips, Saks, a former ICM financing agent and more recently a producer of such films as The Florida Project, Thoroughbreds, and Sometimes I Think About Dying, has been dispensing on the platform pithy, direct pieces of advice on topics such as securing book rights, defining the role of the line producer, imposter syndrome and the state of the industry. There’s the occasional stitch or commentary […]
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“You Don’t Have a Lot of Control Over a Head Exploding”: MaXXXine Cinematographer Eliot Rockett
After the 1970s grit of X and the Technicolor sheen of Pearl, Ti West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett turn to the 1980s with MaXXXine. Shot with the same combo of Sony Venice and Vantage MiniHawks, the L.A.-set story finds adult actress Maxine Minx’s big break into mainstream films curtailed by a series of giallo-esque murders. With the movie freshly out on VOD, Rockett spoke to Filmmaker about the concluding chapter in the trilogy. Filmmaker: Ti talked in an interview about how MaXXXine is his first film shot in L.A. despite living there for 20 years. X and Pearl were both […]
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“I Wanted to Make a Black, Gay Paris, Texas“: Shatara Michelle Ford on Their BlackStar-Premiering Sophomore Feature Dreams in Nightmares
Three cross-coastal best friends reunite for a spontaneous road trip across the American underbelly in Dreams in Nightmares, the sophomore feature from writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford. Though a significant pivot in theme and scope from their lean yet intense debut feature Test Pattern, Ford’s latest continues to plainly indicts the oppression that finds Black, femme, queer bodies at a stark institutional disadvantage. After being laid off from their respective jobs in academia and finance, Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère) hop on the phone to reschedule a planned trip to the Dominican Republic. Instead of lounging in paradise, Tasha […]
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“I Can’t Run a Control Experiment with No Cameras”: Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber on War Game
On January 6th, 2023 in Washington, DC, the advocacy group Vet Voice stage an elaborate mass role-playing scenario inspired by the attempted insurrection in the Capitol two years before. The loser of a presidential election declares the result illegitimate and encourages the public to rise up, and an extremist militia group with sleepers inside the National Guard does just that. Within the simulation, one side roleplayed the incumbent presidential administration (with former Montana governor Steve Bullock portraying the president), while the other was the terrorist “Red Cell” attempting to stop Congress from certifying the election results. If the Red Cell […]
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“Playing in the Best Sandbox Ever”: DP Chris Teague on The Acolyte
Set a century before The Phantom Menace, The Acolyte follows a Jedi master (Squid Games star Lee Jung-jae) and his former apprentice (Amandla Stenberg) as they hunt for a killer who’s dispatching Jedi. The new series holds a distinction that no other live action Star Wars saga can claim—not the half dozen Disney Plus shows or the eleven feature films, not the Star Wars Holiday Special, not even that Ewok movie with Wilfred Brimley. The Acolyte is the first live action story set in the heretofore unseen High Republic era that served as the zenith of Jedi influence and power. […]
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“We’ve All Gone a Bit Broke Making It”: Lucy Walker on Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa
Nearly twenty years ago, Lucy Walker was making a film on the slopes of Everest following a group of blind teenage Tibetan climbers. While on the mountain, she heard of an incident that had taken place when a male guide attacked his wife and climbing partner, a Nepalese woman named Lhakpa Sherpa. Lhakpa’s cursed expedition was the focus of a damning book published a couple of years later, as well as a feature in Outside Magazine. At that point Lhakpa had summited Everest seven times but was living in a cramped apartment in Connecticut as an illiterate single mother, still […]
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“Everybody Passed on It”: Sean Wang on Dìdi
If having your first feature premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is an accomplishment, being nominated for an Academy Award the same week is pretty much unheard of. Nonetheless, that’s what writer-director Sean Wang experienced last January when his coming-of-age narrative feature, Dìdi, premiered to glowing reviews (and a distribution deal with Focus Features) while his nonfiction portrait of his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Still in his 20s, Wang’s career has skyrocketed over the past year, and now Dìdi “younger brother” in Chinese) opens in theaters riding a […]
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Three Weeks in July: Greg Kwedar on Sing Sing
The first and best reason to see Sing Sing, the new feature from Transpecos director Greg Kwedar, is for the lead performance of Colman Domingo. One year after receiving an Academy Award nomination for his title role in Rustin, Domingo is even better as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a wrongfully incarcerated inmate of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. An accomplished author, Divine G was a member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a program founded at Sing Sing in 1996 that “helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on […]
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“I Could Do a Dynamite Directors Cut, Because I Know Where All the Best Stuff is, But That Would Defeat the Whole Purpose of the Project”: Gary Hustwit on ENO
What used to be known, literally, as “the cutting room floor,” now exists as a digital bin, an assortment of deleted scenes, unused (and in today’s mode of industrial documentary production, perhaps even unviewed) footage — material that, through its absence, haunts any finished audiovisual work. Often when this material is revealed, on a Blu-ray supplemental features disc, for example, the director’s elisions affirm the strength of their initial creative editorial decisions. Other times, particularly in biographical documentaries, the unused material becomes a kind of lacuna, suggesting not only paths unexplored but a failure to engage with all that’s messy, […]
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“Shooting on Film Remains Somewhat of a Black Art”: DP Adam Stone on The Bikeriders
After eight years—much of them spent developing projects that never came to fruition—Mud and Midnight Special filmmaker Jeff Nichols is thankfully back with a new movie. That means cinematographer Adam Stone is back with a new movie too. After meeting Nichols at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Stone has been behind the camera on all six of the director’s features. Every one of them has been shot on 35mm, including the pair’s latest collaboration, The Bikeriders. Lensed in and around Cincinnati, the movie takes its inspiration from the photographs and stories in Danny Lyon’s titular 1968 […]
