Features
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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 […]
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Elementary Force: Claire Denis on High Life
No one expected Claire Denis to soften with age. At 72, the French auteur has been a daring and unpredictable force in cinema for three decades now. After delivering last year’s talky romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In, which offered the unexpected sight of Gérard Depardieu as a lovesick psychic, Denis has returned with a certified leap into the unknown. High Life is the filmmaker’s first English-language film, her first science fiction foray, and her first featuring eye-popping CGI. Boasting an international cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth and André Benjamin, and set to be released by […]
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Lookbook Case Study: The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me
Writer/director Cedric Cheung-Lau says the initial version of the script for his in-development debut feature, The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me, consisted solely of 44 images. Then came the words. For the lookbook, Cheung-Lau took sentences from the finished script and married them to images of his location, the Annapurna section of the Himalayas. The script tells the story of a grieving older woman and a young Nepalese man who meet in the mountains and go on a journey together, and Cheung-Lau stresses the importance of the setting to the story. “The landscape surrounding them is real,” […]
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On Decks: The Art (and Necessity) of the Independent Film Lookbook
Lookbooks are an increasingly vital part of the filmmaking process. A good lookbook can make a pitch, just as a bad one can dissuade an investor, producer or financier from a project. Yet the creation of lookbooks is rarely discussed. The topic is missing from the many labs and tutorial programs set up to help first-time filmmakers—even though a good lookbook is perhaps the quickest way for a project to stand out. Simply put, refined visual knowledge and the skillful conveying of that knowledge is power for a director. When we interviewed Reed Morano last year about her work on […]
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Lookbook Case Study: 306 Hollywood
“With our lookbook, we wanted to capture our visual aesthetic and emphasize the importance we place on images,” write directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarín about the presentation deck for their hybrid documentary, 306 Hollywood. A work years in the making, the doc details the sibling filmmakers’ excavation of their grandmother’s New Jersey home in the years after she died. The archeological metaphor here is intentional; the Bogaríns describe the house in their 2017 Filmmaker 25 New Faces profile as “a microcosm, a universe… The whole history of the 20th century can be found in the layers of this house.” 306 […]
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A Dream Within A Dream: Bi Gan on Long Day’s Journey Into Night
After his road movie Kaili Blues became an international success, writer and director Bi Gan turned to the film noir genre for his follow up, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The layered, dreamlike plot follows Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) as he returns to his hometown, looking into the past for clues about what happened to Wildcat (Lee Hong), a lost love he last saw more than a decade ago. Set in the bars, alleys and seedy hotels of Gan’s home province, the film is divided into two parts. Elliptical scenes and a fractured timeline give the first half […]
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Lookbook Case Study: A Woman, A Part
“I knew from looking at lookbooks that people pull images from online, but I didn’t see the point of doing that,” says writer/director Elisabeth Subrin. “Because then you are just saying, ’I want my film to look like someone else’s film.’” For the lookbook for her first feature, A Woman, A Part, Subrin says, “I thought it would be fun to see if I could create the images from the script that I had in my head for years.” (Disclosure: I produced A Woman, A Part along with 2019 Film Independent Producers Award winner Shrihari Sathe.) Subrin, previously best known […]
