Issues
Featured
The Real and the Poetic: DP Darius Khondji on Bardo
Daniel Giménez Cacho in Bardo. Courtesy of Netflix
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has labeled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most difficult film of his career—a bold categorization, considering the intricate single-take illusion of Birdman and the famously frigid filming conditions of The Revenant, both of… Read more
A Collective Voice: Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Women Talking
Claire Foy in Women Talking, courtesy of MGM
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So,… Read more
A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin (Photo by Jonathan Hession, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results… Read more
Two Questions: Producers on Net Profits and Sharing Their Personal Lives
Kentucker Audley in Strawberry Mansion, courtesy of Music Box Films
In this new series of articles, Filmmaker poses two questions to producers, directors and other filmmakers. One question is directed toward the nuts and bolts of filmmaking—questions having to do with terms, practices, legal issues, technology and so on. The… Read more
-
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the winter 2023 edition of Filmmaker, the second issue of our 30th anniversary year. It’s our annual awards season issue, in which we cover the Gotham Awards and devote a special section to considering our favorite below-the-line contributions of the year, profiles that reveal a lot about the new processes and technologies that inform filmmaking today. For example, in A. E. Hunt’s profile of Gotham Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Paul Rogers, the editor talks about the extensive VFX work in the film, including the use of time-remapping software as well as comping in pictorial elements to […]
-
Artistic Outputs: Filmmakers and Production Designers on Using Generative AI
Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking in the shadows. The whole image is bathed in an orange-red aura that is indeed reminiscent of Noé’s work, particularly the lighting scheme of the famous tunnel sequence in Irréversible. Fall scrolls down her wall of images in […]
-
Hit & Misses: The 2022 Releases of Six Recent Sundance Features
In just three (admittedly, very momentous) years, the marketplace for independent films has completely changed. During previous turning points over the decades, executives would use words like “waves” or “cycles” to describe instances of upheaval, but what’s happening now is more like a comprehensive reset. In a recent online article titled “The Sky is Falling, Take Shelter,” producer Rebecca Green wrote, “This year is unlike anything I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been working in this business.” If Sundance and its films are a barometer for the independent film industry, consider this comparison: The pre-pandemic class of Sundance 2019 […]
-
After the Tide Went Out: Isabel Sandoval Interviews Saint Omer Writer/Director Alice Diop
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is how the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his early work The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda) is a Senegalese immigrant to France on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, who she left on a beach to be washed out to sea by the outgoing tide. A student, Coly is writing her thesis on Wittgenstein, an academic detail she’s shamed for at the trial. (Why didn’t she write on the work of “someone closer to her own culture,” a professor wonders […]
-
Unimaginable Acts: Writer/Director Mark Jenkin and Actor Mary Woodvine on the 16mm-Shot “Folk Horror” Picture, Enys Men
Enys Men—British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight-premiering follow-up to his 2019 BAFTA-winning breakthrough, Bait, for which he hand-processed the film—is set in coastal Cornwall at the extreme southwestern tip of England, amid jagged cliffs and crashing waves. On a rocky and profoundly isolated island (the Cornish title means “stone island”) is its lone human occupant (Mary Woodvine, in a spellbinding performance), a woman of obscure purpose whose daily routine the camera dutifully catalogs—the monitoring of soil temperature at a specific site and the ritual drop of a pebble into an abandoned mine shaft, along with less cryptic activities—until semblances […]
-
Beyond the Third Act: Everest Pipkin’s Cinema-Inspired Tabletop RPG World Ending Game
“Endings are very hard,” said Everest Pipkin. “It’s one of the most difficult things about making anything, and only gets harder when you are collaboratively telling a story with lots of people.” Speaking via video chat from their home in southern New Mexico, Pipkin, an artist and game designer, recently released World Ending Game, a tabletop “falling-action game” designed for players to bring existing campaigns to a close. Say you’re part of a weekly group playing Dungeons & Dragons and everyone is ready to move on. Your party can wrap things up and bring your existing characters — the druid, […]
