Features
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Revision Mode: Co-creator Leslye Headland on Russian Doll
You start with a character, or a situation, perhaps, and then…what? You work out the next step, get through maybe a scene, or an episode, or a first act, and larger themes and ideas emerge. And then, realizing that what you’ve done is all wrong, you rip it all up and start over. When the eight episodes of Russian Doll—the New York East Village–set fantastical time-loop drama starring Natasha Lyonne and created by Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland—dropped on Netflix earlier this year, my social media feeds all exploded. Everyone seemed to be watching this show, its storyline connecting […]
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Ungentrified: Production Designer Scott Dougan and Visual Effects Supervisor Jim Rider on The Deuce
David Simon’s latest HBO series, The Deuce (co-created with George Pelecanos), represents another entry in a career-spanning investigation of institutional corruption and decay, this time focusing on the sex and pornography industry in New York City during the 1970s. Primarily viewed through the eyes of bartender and club owner Vincent Martino (James Franco) and sex worker-turned-pornographer Eileen “Candy” Merrell (Maggie Gyllenhaal), The Deuce uses the sex trade as a microcosm for various developments in late-stage capitalism, including gentrification and urban renewal. As the series shifts periods over the course of its three-season run—1971–1972 in the first season, 1978 in the […]
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Pulp Fantastic: Geoffrey O’Brien on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
The cover of Filmmaker‘s seventh issue was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, considered here in this original essay by Geoffrey O’Brien that unpacks the film’s genre literature influences. In the lead-up to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, it’s being posted online for the first time. — Editor The two dictionary definitions of “pulp” which Quentin Tarantino posts at the beginning of Pulp Fiction both have a direct bearing on what follows. The first, “a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter,” recalling as it does the phrase “beat to a pulp,” invokes from the outset those catastrophes of the flesh […]
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Locked in Rage: Writer/Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on The Mustang
A wild horse is captured, transported to a prison facility where he will be “broken,” or trained, in a program that doubles as a form of therapy for the inmates inside. A broken man is released from solitary confinement into the main population, where his ability to banish his anger is dependent on the relationship he forges with that horse, a brilliant brown mustang. The Mustang, the first feature from Paris-born, LA-based filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is an artfully restrained, quietly moving film built around the most elemental of oppositions: freedom vs. imprisonment, man vs. animal, violence vs. self-control. And […]
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Moonshot: Todd Douglas Miller on Apollo 11
Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]
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Audiences in the Sky: How to Sell Your Film to the Airlines
In 1996, flying home from Slamdance, I was stuck on the tarmac at the Salt Lake City airport in a blizzard. After an hour and a half, a Sundance actor and I tried to talk the flight attendants into playing a VHS tape of my film Omaha (The Movie) in the cabin. They were happy to but said we had to clear it with the pilot and led us into the cockpit. The pilot thought it was a cool idea, too, but ultimately wondered whether the corporate office might object and decided he probably shouldn’t play the film. To this […]
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No Money, No Problem?
They’re the two most beautiful words in the cinematic language: tax credits. Almost no one who practices the seventh art got into it to learn about business; if anything, they got into it to avoid it altogether. Alas, it’s almost impossible to participate in the most expensive art form without being at least semi-fluent in business jargon. State film tax incentives are a crucial part of most American films’ financing these days, be they giant Marvel productions filming in incentive-rich Atlanta or a tiny indie shooting in Albuquerque, mere miles from the set of Better Call Saul. As of this […]
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Troubling the Desktop
In an age when digital screens mediate hours of daily existence, it seems logical to turn that experience into the basis for a movie. Low-budget narrative features like Unfriended and Searching are widely known examples of desktop cinema, but the approach flourishes in a range of other practices, from YouTube videos (Klaire fait grr…) to experimental media art (Nick Briz, Foundland Collective). Our own desktop cinema practice deals with it specifically as documentary, starting with Kevin’s 2014 video Transformers: The Premake and leading into our current project, Bottled Songs, a feature-length investigation of online terrorist media. Leading a workshop with […]
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Distant Locations
Deciding where to shoot a movie can be one of the most consequential decisions a filmmaker can make. There are numerous and obvious reasons, but when deciding how to allocate resources, location is one of the most pressing riddles to solve. “Put your money on the screen” is a mantra producers mutter in their sleep; the meaning, of course, is to prioritize expenses that will discernibly make the final film better, avoiding big spends that are invisible to the eye of the audience. Despite where a script takes place on the page, it’s no secret that artful filmmaking can often […]
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Lookbook Case Study: The Evening Hour
For Braden King, the lookbook process is an iterative one that doesn’t even stop with a film’s production. “In the case of my last feature film, Here, the lookbooks were very close to the final film, both tonally and imagewise,” he writes in an email. “But they were also completely comprised of my own photographs and functioned as a part of the larger, multiplatform project. We created a three-screen installation with live soundtrack accompaniment and several gallery exhibitions, [and] the lookbook for that film was also featured in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.” King’s […]
