Features
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In Every Dream Home a Heartache: High Rise Director Ben Wheatley on Adapting Ballard, Practical Special Effects and ’70s Parenting
I first met and spoke with Ben Wheatley in Brighton, where he lives with his wife and collaborator, Amy Jump. I was there for the inaugural Dark and Stormy Crime Festival, where Wheatley was screening his existential hit man thriller, Kill List. That film, along with Sightseers, Down Terrace and A Field in England, comprise a body of work that has rightly cemented Wheatley’s status as a raucous, disruptive, independent voice within the sometimes staid confines of the British specialty film industry. Wheatley’s new film High-Rise — an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s 1975 dystopian sci-fi novel and his highest-budgeted to […]
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The Data Says, “We Have a Problem”: Finding Solutions for Film’s Problems with Diversity
Since the publication of “The Data Says, ‘We Have a Problem’” in our Winter print edition, the conversation around diversity and the movie business has become louder and even more urgent. As more and more studies are published detailing Hollywood’s biased hiring practices and hashtags like #oscarssowhite explode across social media, now, during the lead-up to the Academy Awards, is an apt time to unlock from our paywall this article by Esther Robinson. It cogently articulates the reasons why all of us must care about these issues before it then goes on to offer actual and practical solutions that we […]
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Mathieu Amalric on My Golden Days
I spoke with Arnaud while he was here for the festival. One of the things he talked about is that he’ll model things for you, that he’ll show you where to touch your nose or how to grab a glass. He’s very specific when he’s blocking. It’s very good. He said that that’s something that you’re not supposed to do when directing actors. Were you the one who asked him to do that for you, initially? Oh, he does that for himself, to find all the characters. He plays all the characters, especially women, extraordinarily well. It’s impressive. He’s such […]
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Learning Not to Share: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Social Media for Independent Films
Mynette Louie, president of Gamechanger Films, recently had a problem. She caught a stand-in on set not only taking photos of her film’s star, whose contract had specific photo approvals in place, but posting the photos to Facebook. “I told him to delete them from his Facebook, then I went through his phone and deleted all the photos he took on set.” Traditionally, producers, marketing departments and publicists labor over key stills and publicity images, methodically crafting a film’s identity in careful, strategic installments. This practice continues today, but can quickly be subverted by a tweet, post or status update. […]
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Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on The Girlfriend Experience
Shot in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, Steven Soderbergh’s feature The Girlfriend Experience was a cool movie about a hot topic. Ostensibly about a “new” kind of prostitution, where escorts would simulate the casual intimacy of a real relationship, it starred real-life porn star Sasha Grey even as it contained virtually no sex. But what began as a look at how the Internet enabled a new kind of solo entrepreneur sex worker — “As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything,“ Soderbergh said then — wound up a trenchantly austere […]
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Now It’s Dark: Robert Eggers on The Witch
Read about Robert Eggers’s staggeringly accomplished first feature, The Witch, winner of the 2015 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Best Director Prize, and the first thing you’ll learn about is the writer/director’s obsession with authentic detail. As he has explained in articles like the one Filmmaker published when selecting him for our 2014 25 New Faces list, the writer/director developed his 1630s-set story of a Puritan family under attack by a witch living in a nearby forest from not just period fairy tales but diaries, court records and other primary source materials. He wrote his dialogue in the Caroline-era English of the […]
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The Pre-Fight: Arnaud Desplechin on My Golden Days
Arnaud Desplechin invigorates through assault tactics: aggressive camera movement, even more aggressively fragmented editing, seemingly irreconcilable musical cues that butt chromatic classical cues up against golden age hip-hop, a university library’s worth of citations and allusions. His films are scarcely less restless than their characters, who chafe against themselves and others. In his 1996 breakthrough My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument, Desplechin promoted Mathieu Amalric from supporting bit player (in 1992’s La Sentinelle) to his regular onscreen alter-ego. A philosophy graduate student adept at tormenting both himself and girlfriend Esther (Emmanuelle Devos) while putting off completing his […]
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Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
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A Hole in the Heart
Ever since her work on 2008’s Sundance award-winner Frozen River, cinematographer Reed Morano has been a prominent voice in American independent film, with credits including Little Birds, Kill Your Darlings and The Skeleton Twins. Her method of creating what she calls “elegant naturalism” has made her Rob Reiner’s go-to director of photography on his recent films (The Magic of Belle Isle, And So it Goes), and has graced television screens via HBO’s Looking last year and its upcoming rock-and-roll series, Vinyl. Aside from her work in film, Morano is also an articulate commentator on film, and has given numerous interviews […]
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Bizarre Love Triangle: Gaspar Noé on Love
A threesome in 3-D and unsimulated sex in a simulated cinematic hyper-reality: that’s what Gaspar Noé’s latest film Love has been promising for months. At Cannes in 2014, producer Vincent Maraval teased audiences with explicit promo materials, pledging plenty of penis, nipple and onscreen ejaculate. While the film has all three in abundance, it turns out Love is more about loss than sex. The surprisingly sentimental tale begins with Murphy (Karl Glusman) receiving a desperate voicemail message from an ex’s mother. Murphy’s an American in Paris with a French girlfriend, crying baby and New Year’s Day hangover — a trifecta about […]
