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The App Revolution
There is a saying I once heard: “Once you change the method of distribution, the product has to change.” This itself is a take on the idea that distribution defines the product. You see this around every day in the products you buy. Cars are influenced by the dealership networks that sell them. Phones by the mobile network operators and the choice of computer you use at work by whatever the IT department or value-added reseller prefers to work with. Mass-market restaurants offer what can be sold by wholesalers — typically frozen, long shelf-life staples. Almost every product category is shaped more by […]
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Investing in Audience
There’s something we should have learned in the last five years, which is the most important lesson we can carry into the next 20 years: ignore audience at your own peril. For a while now, indie film’s m.o. has been, “Build it and they will come.” Well, audiences have stopped coming. A few years ago, if you asked a young indie filmmaker who his or her audience was, you heard “everyone.” Nowadays, ask an indie filmmaker about audience and most likely you get “I don’t know,” or perhaps just panicked silence. But we keep making thousands of indie films a […]
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Editing Life of Pi
At the start of my interview with Tim Squyres, the editor of most of Ang Lee’s films, including his latest, Life of Pi, I tell him how much I like the movie. I say that I know I like it because its images, its ingeniously affecting conclusion, and, most of all, the headspace it created for me have lingered for days. Upon waking each morning, scenes have come flooding back. And the subtleties of the film’s ending, which contains a rich meditation on the role stories play in our lives, have resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. “I get […]
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Mood Reels and Lookbooks: In Today’s Pitches, the Image Comes First
The pitch — boiled down to its simplest terms, it’s when someone with an idea tries to sell it to someone with the money or resources to get it made. Writers and directors can pitch their own original ideas or pitch their creative skills to win a job on an already-developed for-hire project. For decades, these pitches were purely verbal. They were about “being good in the room.” But today the pitch game is changing, and it’s a harder game to play than ever before. A great verbal presentation is still key, but filmmakers are increasingly supplementing their pitches with […]
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The Shooting Parties
John Cassavetes once described the role of the director as essentially indirect: “I don’t direct the film. I set up an atmosphere and the atmosphere directs.” Atmosphere and budget may seem like two very different issues, one ephemeral and elusive, the other pragmatic and denumerable, but in practice they are intimately linked. Decisions regarding the selection and number of cast, crew and locations; the scheduled duration and pace of the shoot; the resources at its disposal—each choice is at least partially determined by financial limitations, and each, in turn, affects the atmosphere of a production and the qualities of the […]
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Alternate Routes
As the keynote speaker at the Los Angeles Film Festival this June, Chris McGurk, of digital theatrical distribution platform Cinedigm, described seven signs of a resurging indie film industry — an “indie renaissance,” he called it. Most of his bullet points had to do with the ways in which digital technology and social media allow for new ways to program for and reach audiences in theaters and online. “Just as happened in the ’80s,” he said, “there is an exploding demand for filmed entertainment. There is huge competition now going on between all of these digital retailers. It’s an ‘arms […]
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Alternate Routes: New DIY Distribution
How three films are navigating the new distribution landscape.
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Good Things in Smaller Packages
For those of us excited by the advent of large-sensor motion picture cameras, this past year has been the Great Leap Forward. Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp for the November launch of its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still-budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and […]
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Cinema Eye
Each year, Filmmaker sponsors Cinema Eye’s Heterodox Award, given to the fiction film that most compellingly illuminates the formal possibilities of nonfiction filmmaking while raising provocative questions about on-going documentary orthodoxy and the perceived boundaries between narrative and nonfiction filmmaking. The winner this year was Mike Mills’ Beginners, and below, juror Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) takes you into the deliberation chamber. When asked to jury the Heterodox Award, I was eager to engage in a conversation about cross-genre filmmaking that was artist-led, the aim of the award. The panel — Alrick Brown, Shannon Kennedy, Natalia Almada, Sandi DuBowski and […]
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Changing Channels
Earlier this year, The New Yorkermagazine hosted a panel discussion titled, “Is Television the New Cinema?” In his opening remarks, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, posed the question, “Television is in the process, in many ways, of eclipsing cinema: True or false?” While the panelists didn’t give a definite answer, it was generally agreed that the TV medium — once considered a mainstream form of “junk storytelling” — has recently blossomed. Journalist Emily Nussbaum noted the rise, beginning in the late ’90s, “of a breed of irascible, aggressive and auteurist TV makers,” and the creation of shows like Buffy […]
