Features
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The Art of Listening: Discovering the Rhythms of a Picture Edit
I’ve had a lifelong love of music. I’m immersed in it most of the time, whether at home or on the street listening to headphones—I’m listening to Apple Music on shuffle play as I write this. I always hear the melody and instrumentation first, and can hear a song dozens of times before I even begin to notice the lyrics. I suppose this is why, as a film editor, I see film dailies first as image and second as dialogue being spoken. Image always trumps text for me. I’ll notice small movements in an actor’s face well before I hear […]
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The Kindest Denial
“Life is not just about what you do but how you do it,” says Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou) to Billi (Awkwafina), her New York–based struggling writer granddaughter, toward the end of writer/director Lulu Wang’s triumphant sophomore feature, The Farewell. It’s the type of aphoristic advice passed on by an elder that, on its face, may not seem like much. But given where it’s placed in Wang’s film, after all that has come before and what Billi is certain will come after, it lands with disarming, laconic gravity. And as much as it subtly refers to the film’s central storyline—Billi travels […]
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Seamless Transitions: Remembering Stanley Donen
In 2003, I was at Columbia University getting a masters degree in film and television. A friend who had just graduated called me with a rather unusual offer. Stanley Donen—the prolific and award-winning director of Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, who died this February at age 94—was looking for a producer. My friend had been talking to him about taking the job, but when Stanley found out he would be graduating in a few months, he asked him to find someone who was still a student. “It’s a student film,” he said. I didn’t get […]
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Mansion on the Hill: Jimmie Fails and Joe Talbot on The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Jimmie Fails and Joe Talbot, the creative team behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco, have the kind of backstory that’s the stuff of publicists’ dreams, a compact anecdote that grounds their feature debut. Both are native San Franciscans and met around age 10: Talbot had gotten into a fistfight, and Fails came onto the street just in time to help. The two became lifelong friends, a relationship that mutates into new form in their film. Fails (who cowrote the film’s story with director Talbot; the script’s cowriter is Rob Richert) stars as a version of himself: a lifelong […]
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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 […]
