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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]