What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
Martin Donovan is destined to be forever remembered for his remarkable actor-director partnership with Hal Hartley during indie film’s halcyon days of the early to mid 1990s. In era-defining movies such as Trust, Simple Men and Amateur, Donovan was Hartley’s on-screen simulacrum, a smart, softly spoken man who was simultaneously familiar and enigmatic. While Hartley’s work is sadly not nearly as popular or present as it once was, it’s fitting that Donovan has made his debut feature as a writer and director with Collaborator, a knowing and witty cinematic chamber piece that feels nostalgic for the more culturally sophisticated times […]
“Fuck you.” With those opening words of Savages, author Don Winslow delivered a kick to the teeth of the literary world. The jarring and unorthodox novel — about a trio of beach bum lovers-turned-drug kingpins and with a writing style that ranges from poetry to screenplay — became a New York Times Bestseller and a shot in the arm to Winslow’s already successful career. The author had penned more than ten novels prior to Savages, including the Neal Carey series, while moonlighting as a private investigator during grad school and the meticulous DEA/drug cartel fueled intrigue of The Power of the Dog, […]
“I want to want you,” says the cripplingly depressed Miranda (Selma Blair) to her suitor with excruciating honesty. The coddled, overweight Abe (Jordan Gelber), a compulsive collector who still lives at home with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken), will take what he can get. “That’s enough for me,” he breathes. In Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, the queasy tale of a 35-year-old man-child who decides to add a wife to his possessions, the writer-director’s dialogue is as sharp as ever, each line an arrow poisoned with sincerity. Known for colorful, stylized, cynical films including Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), […]
Telling the origin story of the creature that terrified us in Alien over three decades ago, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is one of this summer’s most hotly anticipated films. But somewhat surprisingly, the origins of the screenplay came as much from a screenwriter’s general meeting as the story material developed for that original movie. At a meeting in the offices of Scott’s production company, Scott Free, screenwriter Jon Spaihts was asked to riff on the possibilities of a film that would revisit the Alien universe. What resulted is Prometheus, with a script credited to Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. Below I ask […]
The Myth of the American Sleepover has seduced audiences from Austin to Cannes with the intimacy of its look at a group of teenagers during one long, magical summer night. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell and his team discuss the film’s journey to the screen. By James Ponsoldt
The following first appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter 2010 edition. —Editor Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its story, a melancholy tale of a day in the life of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) who is still mourning the unexpected death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), is a far cry from the sex-saturated tableaus that Ford created for […]
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
The following interview appeared originally in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2007 print edition. We don’t cover enough screenwriters in Filmmaker, but that’s not entirely our fault. This magazine is devoted to independent film, and for many, the director is also the writer. Or the script has emerged from improvisation or some other nontraditional means. And while there is a new breed of independent-minded screenwriters today — Charlie Kaufman, Capote’s Dan Futterman and Juno’s Diablo Cody come immediately to mind — many of the “marquee screenwriters” still work almost exclusively in the studio world. By virtue of the unique niche that screenwriter Oren […]