Features
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Letter From Rome
For Abel Ferrara, now living and working in Rome, there’s no love lost between the renegade director and the New York of yesteryear, the New York of Bad Lieutenant. “Being in Europe, it’s very different,” Ferrara explains. “We thought we were free then, but it’s nothing compared to where we’re at now. We’re outside the system, working within the European financial community, which includes the socialist brand of government financing and various cultural ministries.” Continues Ferrara, “On Bad Lieutenant” — the cover of Filmmaker’s second issue — “we were totally free. The director has to have absolute freedom. Now, you […]
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Forced Perspective: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]
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Independent Film’s Sorry Quarter Century?
The American independent film movement began in a movie theater a little over 100 years ago when Oscar Micheaux watched, through clenched teeth, the racist Hollywood establishment blockbuster The Birth of a Nation. A few years later, the first American indie film was released to a targeted niche audience; Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader announced the beginning of a movement born of rage and profound personal vision. What followed were deeply personal, formally inventive narratives from such innovators as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Ida Lupino, Melvin Van Peebles and John Cassavetes. The films were made on low budgets with little to […]
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A Wonderstruck Tweetstorm
Larry Gross first appeared in Filmmaker with the Todd Haynes/Safe cover story of our Summer 1995 issue. A screenwriter (48 Hours, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Porto), producer and director, he has contribued many interviews and essays since, but, in our Winter 2015 “Super 8” column, we took note of another element of the Gross oeuvre: his seductive and compelling use of Twitter, in which carefully honed critical arguments on myriad topics cascade onto screens in the form of tweetstorms. For this 25th anniversary issue, we asked Gross to commit one of these tweet storms to dead-tree media before he […]
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Indie Film is Alive
“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]
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Friend Zone: Should You Make Movies with Your Friends?
The first article I ever wrote for Filmmaker was a survey and analysis of an ascendant film movement called “mumblecore.” The label was still new enough ten years ago to get quotes around it. I interviewed Joe Swanberg, Jay and Mark Duplass, Ry Russo-Young, Aaron Katz, Matt Dentler, Greta Gerwig, Frank V. Ross, Andrew Bujalski, Anish Savjani and many more. The article was very long, and Scott put it on the cover. I have forgotten everything I wrote in the article, but I have never forgotten a post on Gothamist about it, which read, “Note to film journalists: Don’t interview […]
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In the Realm of the Possible: Hal Hartley on Restoring His Early Films and Working in Television
I interviewed Hal Hartley for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue this past Fall and am posting this piece online today as Hartley is in the final days of a Kickstarter to fund the release of the very films discussed here. If you’re a fan of this paradigmatic indie director please consider supporting! — SM I catch Hal Hartley — whose third feature, Simple Men, was Filmmaker’s very first cover back in 1992 — as he’s spending the day creating bonus features for new DVD and Blu-ray box sets of the three films in his “Henry Fool Trilogy.” As international distribution licenses […]
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Judy Becker’s Instagram: A Production Designer Catalogs Her Visual Inspirations
For Filmmaker‘s 25th Anniversary issue, we took note of production designer Judy Becker’s lovely Instagram, where she posts location scout photos and other inspirations that inevitably find their way into her design work. We asked her to write more about this convergence with social media and production design practice, and here’s what she wrote back. To: Filmmaker Magazine From: Judy Becker Subject: My Instagram Today at 11:34am I’m happy you guys liked my Instagram. I’ve taken photographs pretty much my whole life. I got my first camera when I was about seven, when my family spent the summer in Rotterdam, […]
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What’s in a Word?
“Adele Romanski is an independent producer who, Academy Award– and Golden Globe–winning producer whose …” This is what my assistant, April Moore, sent back to me in March of this year when I asked her to please take a pass at revising my bio. (I needed to provide it as part of closing a loan against the tax credit for a television show I was producing.) It had been about a year since I had updated my bio. April made quite a few changes to the document, but striking out the word “independent” was the one I obsessed over. Why […]
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The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
