Columns
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Was 2018 the Year of the Woman at the Sundance Film Festival?
After the Sundance Film Festival’s awards ceremony, when female directors swept all the top categories, the response was ecstatic. “Women dominated Sundance,” cried the headlines. Social media blew up with congratulatory hashtags #womeninfilm and #femalefilmmakerfriday. “It felt like a revolutionary moment,” says Celine Rattray, who produced Sara Colangelo’s directing-award winner The Kindergarten Teacher. At the festival’s opening press conference, Robert Redford’s most memorable line was: “The role of men right now is to listen.” But did the film industry hear that? More than two weeks after Sundance concluded, five of the festival’s female-led jury winners had still not closed distribution […]
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The Art of (Not) Compromising: DP Sean Porter on When and How to Hold Your Ground
For those of you following along, I had intended to continue my interview series on parenting — and had some cool interviews with people like Rachel Morrison (before she was nominated, OK?) — but Filmmaker, with its abundance of (truly) great interview features, politely requested I stay with my format, so you’re stuck with yours truly. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Speaking of compromises! That’s yet another topic I’d love to hear other DPs talk about, but they don’t. So, instead, one of my favorite pastimes is getting my DITs to tell their stories. (Hint: they have good stories.) […]
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What I Learned in Film School
I learned a bit about cinema studies while getting an MFA at Columbia in the late 1970s and a good deal more once I began teaching, first at NYU and then Cooper Union, around a decade later. Always curious as to why students wanted to study film to begin with, I gave a standard first assignment that included a request for a description of the first movie that a student remembered seeing in a movie theater. As at least a third of the Cooper students were born outside the United States, the answers were fascinating. Really should have saved them…. […]
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Editor’s Letter
This magazine is called Filmmaker, but even if you’re just a casual reader, you’ll know that we’ve always defined that term expansively. Yes, directors are usually the focus, but we apply the term across the filmmaking spectrum, fully aware of how good work by vital collaborators throughout the production process shapes the finished product — what’s commonly called “the director’s vision.” Midway through our 25th year, we stick to the term “filmmaker,” hoping that it’s elastic enough to include a wide range of visual storytellers, like this issue’s Eliza McNitt, whose VR SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime was one of the […]
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A Necessary Rethink
A few months ago, one of my students tried to kill himself. He took a handful of pills and got into bed. Luckily, he mentioned what he had done to someone else, and a little while later, the campus police showed up at his dorm door. They took him by force to the hospital, and then — a day later, again by force — from the hospital to a lockdown facility on the edge of Los Angeles. And so, late one Friday night, I found myself handing over my keys, cell phone and identification to a stern guard inside a […]
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Traditional Teaching Ends Here
This is a secret: For the past seven years, each fall semester, the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (where I work) has hosted an alternate reality game called Reality Ends Here for the incoming cohort of freshmen students. It is completely unacknowledged by the faculty; participating students get no credit for playing; no school equipment can be used to make projects; and to play usually means to collaborate, not hone your own individual career trajectory. And here’s another secret: The game may be home to some of the best teaching and learning in the entire […]
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Legacy
storyteller stôrē tel r noun 1. a person who tells stories 2. a liar I thought we’d take a quick detour into something that came up during Bradford Young’s interview last issue. I feel like so many of the ideas he talked about warranted their own dedicated roundtable conversations, but one thing that really struck me was the notion of legacy: the idea that what we do, here and now, has a far greater shelf life than any of us may want to accept. And this doesn’t just apply to people with kids. We all are constantly weaving the very […]
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Editor’s Letter
So many of our film industry colleagues shift their focus each fall to awards. Here at Filmmaker, we decided to devote more of our coverage, both in print and online, to distinguished collaborators who don’t receive quite the same amount of ink as directors and movie stars. I’m talking, of course, about below-the-line, and you’ll find almost a dozen of them highlighted throughout these pages. Just after we shipped our last print issue, Filmmaker celebrated its 25th anniversary at IFP Week by hosting the opening day of panels and seminars. One highlight was contributing editor Taylor Hess’s onstage version of […]
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Hits and Misses: Anthony Kaufman Surveys the Sundance Class of ’17
The headlines said it all: “Hollywood Faces August Death March,” “Bummer Summer” and “Beleaguered Box Office.” OK, Hollywood had a tough year, but does that necessarily apply to independent films? Well, as the saying goes, a receding tide sinks all boats. And so it was in 2017: If people were going out to fewer movies and streaming more episodic content at home, it affected both indie films and tentpoles. But if we look back at the films that premiered at Sundance 2017, there are a few instances to inspire hope: The Big Sick, of course, was the big one; Wind […]
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Seducing the Future
To say that the transformations that film and film technology have undergone since Filmmaker’s inaugural year — 1992 — are revolutionary is an understatement. DVD was still on the horizon, DV camcorders were several years away and the notion of shooting and editing a full-length motion picture with no actual film seemed downright futuristic. There have been book-lengths’ worth of changes since that first issue, but here are just a few. I. Metadata The information surrounding a film has stretched far beyond mere publicity (the classical era) and merchandising (post-1977 Star Wars), becoming enmeshed within the very fabric of a […]
