Features
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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 […]
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Lookbook Case Study: About a Mountain
“Because I was a no-name filmmaker,” says Lily Henderson, who made Filmmaker’s 2014 25 New Faces list on the strength of the lookbook and demo reel for her forthcoming documentary, About a Mountain, “I felt I needed to go to Nevada on spec and shoot some images for myself to see whether it was worth it to make the film.” Her initial trip was a fruitful one, generating footage—shot on the URSA Mini—and photos that captured both the lonely, dry heat and consumerist fantasy world that would be the stage for her film. As she writes in the lookbook’s introduction, […]
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Income Forecasting
“There’s a great infrastructure, and the credit is solid,” said Entertainment Partners (EP) executive vice president, John Hadity, in these pages one year ago about the New York State Film Production Tax Credit Program. Governor Andrew Cuomo had just extended its sunset date until 2022, with $420 million in annual funds appropriated. “That means television series that do their planning 18 to 24 months in advance have certainty that the program is going to be around for another few years,” he said. But just a year later, Hadity cites the New York program as one of his worries when surveying […]
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Editor Joe Walker on Cutting Steve McQueen’s Widows
“A stroke, and then a slap,” says editor Joe Walker. That’s how director Steve McQueen described the tone he wanted in the opening scenes of Widows. The movie opens with a remarkable sequence, intercutting glimpses of the main characters’ family lives with images from a horrifically bloody heist gone wrong — showing, in effect, how four of the women at the heart of the film become widows. So, for example, we see Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings passionately kissing her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) and then suddenly we’re in the back of Harry’s van as police fire on it. We see […]
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“Love and Injustice”: Composer Nicholas Britell on the Score for Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk
New York City in the 1970s occupies a special place in the popular imagination; there was a look and feel and, more important, a sound that captured the range of the city from grit to glitz. Barry Jenkins’s new If Beale Street Could Talk is set during this era of New York City, and the look is unmistakable: The backdrop is full of Impala yellow taxis, small shops and cool lofts. Yet the city fades into the background, giving way to the compelling and un-self-consciously presented love story of Tish and Fonny, childhood best friends in Harlem who become lovers […]
