It might be hot. There are several quarries for swimming. It might be cold and rainy, and we’ll be in a non-heated, non-air conditioned barn. There will be mosquitoes. So began a long list of somewhat unsettling particulars describing conditions for the six-day DesignInquiry residency that took place at the end of June 2018 on Vinalhaven, an island halfway up the coast of Maine. I had applied six months earlier, intrigued by the year’s theme, “Rewrite,” and was delighted when I was accepted. I was stepping down from a decade-long leadership stint, having cocreated and chaired a new department in […]

When the media world’s most predatory shark realizes he’s about to be someone else’s lunch, you have to wonder whether we all might need a bigger boat. Only four years ago, Rupert Murdoch was circling the waters of Time Warner in the hope of hooking those prized assets and feeding them into his own 21st-century entertainment factory. Today, he is the one hocking most of the family jewels to the Walt Disney Company in a $71.3 billion deal that leaves his clan with a stripped-down entity focused on live news and sports, as well as a passive stake in a […]

With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]

I don’t think I’d be out of line if I said the DP job market is heavily saturated. IATSE wouldn’t tell me the actual number of jobs available last year, but according to the internet there were 157 TV shows in production and roughly 250 features released (both union and non-union). Currently, there are more than 2,000 Local 600 members on the active DP roster, and while some of them are retiring this number doesn’t include the many operators stepping up and shooting on their way to re-rating. Add to that a small number of in-demand cinematographers who take up […]

In 1993, I was a graduate student in a Critical Studies Ph.D. program studying independent, avant-garde and feminist film and video, figuring out how to write about them, and thinking about what it meant to write at all. I adored high theory—the thickness of it, the heady political ambition, the philosophical complexity. But I liked zines and the wild world of alternative publishing, too, along with the community of readers eager for experiments that these publications augured. My advisors discouraged involvement with Filmmaker—a career-killer, for sure—and when I was offered a short-term job at Variety one summer, they rolled their […]

It used to be so simple: Release a movie in theaters and, several months later, it would come to your local video store. Nowadays, each and every film’s release pattern and chosen distribution platforms are—or, at least, should be—idiosyncratic, unique, and specifically tailored. “The first thing you have to ask yourself,” distribution consultant Michael Tuckman says, “is who is your audience, and work backwards from there to figure out what windowing you’re going to do.” If the target audience is a young demographic who spend most of their time on devices, then, according to The Orchard’s Paul Davidson, “a SVOD […]

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 […]

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.) […]

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…. […]

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 […]