Issues
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Among the Ashes: Iterating the Generative Documentary Where There’s Smoke
I grew up in a firefighting culture full of pancake breakfasts, fire parades and beef and beers. For 20 years my dad was a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. He shot thousands of 35mm slides of blazes, often capturing moments of destruction that are disturbing and yet at times hauntingly beautiful. However, my dad’s obsession with fire would eventually intersect with our lives in devastating ways. In the 1980s, while on a family vacation, our van erupted in flames. 11 months later, our house burnt to the ground. For over 30 years, I’ve wondered if those two fires […]
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Punching Down: Emma Seligman on Bottoms
The following interview was published in Filmmaker‘s Summer 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Bottoms arrives in theaters via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bottoms, the sophomore feature from Shiva Baby writer-director Emma Seligman, takes the concept of blood and guts in high school to a queer, campy pinnacle. Co-written by Seligman and Rachel Sennott—who starred in Shiva Baby and returns to act in Bottoms alongside frequent comic collaborator Ayo Edebiri—the project embraces a streak of absurdist satire that’s been present in Sennott’s sensibility since launching her highly popular, if now infrequent, Twitter presence. Coupled with Seligman’s directorial desire to “always do […]
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Acting Their Age: Dustin Guy Defa on The Adults
“It was a highly anticipated scene for me,” Hannah Gross told me with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd. For anyone who has a complicated relationship, spoken or unspoken, with a sibling, it’s the ideal scenario: to get to express your grievances through the safety of these voices.” I’d asked her about a memorable moment near the end of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2017). Gross, Michael Cera and Sophia Lillis star as estranged siblings still reckoning with the death of their mother and still adjusting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to the disappointments of […]
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Crash Course: A Professor Quickly Learns about AI
Earlier this year, as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Runway and a long list of other AI tools ignited a national conversation about artificial intelligence, many of my colleagues in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California shuddered in horror over the displacement of human craft and creativity by visuals created through simple text prompts. Published in The New York Times in February, columnist Kevin Roose’s description of his creepy conversation with Bing added gasoline to the fire, prompting a desire to prohibit the use of all AI across all of our programs. And what about plagiarism?! The general […]
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Earth Mama DP Jody Lee Lipes
Jody Lee Lipes likes to ask questions—so many, in fact, that the cinematographer says it can sometimes annoy directors. However, Lipes found a collaborator with an equally inexhaustible inquisitiveness in Savanah Leaf. “Savanah wanted to go through every scene together [during prep],” said Lipes. “I loved it because that’s my favorite thing to do. We would talk about a scene for like three hours. We went literally word by word through the script.” Lipes, whose credits include Manchester by the Sea, Martha Marcy May Marlene and I Know This Much Is True, first met Leaf on a commercial. They developed […]
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Rebelling Against the Independent Film Industrial Complex
The hyper-industrialization of the independent film space and the shift away from in-person screening to the vertically integrated streaming-sphere means that content curation is increasingly more general (massified), with fewer people participating in the process of sharing films with the public. In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change. Perhaps it’s time to turn away from the independent film industrial complex and toward […]
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A Productive Friction
The restructuring of media conglomerates in the wake of streaming’s stagnating growth has left documentarians on shaky ground. Industry efforts to impress stockholders with cost-cutting measures and broad appeal entertainment have led to some high-profile layoffs in the nonfiction field and the sense among independents that there are few financing and distribution deals for formally experimental projects that challenge viewers’ political assumptions. So, what films are being made right now? What do alternative paths to exhibition look like? And how might thinking through the relationship between commercial and public media present possibilities for a more inclusive documentary culture on and […]
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Editor’s Letter
I can’t think of a better film to grace the cover of the final issue of Filmmaker’s 30th anniversary year than Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama. From its opening scenes, it impresses as a work of classic independent cinema—social realism shot through with unexpected creative flourishes and informed by the personal life experience of its maker. A version of this film might have been made in each of Filmmaker’s three decades, but with different emphases, of course, and perhaps under very different circumstances. The story of this one—a U.K./U.S. production backed by Channel 4 and A24—was told last issue by Anthony […]
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Life (And Work) After Film School
When I graduated film school after years of grueling work, I really felt like my university should have rolled out a cannon and launched me directly at the Hollywood sign. With my diploma in hand, the industry was my oyster. I knew everything there was to know—I thought. Instead, it was as if somebody had forgotten to aim the cannon properly, because it felt like I was hurled at a brick wall, Looney Tunes style. As stars and birds circled my head, I thought, “Now hang on—wasn’t film school supposed to be a literal launchpad into the industry? Didn’t I […]
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How and Why to Set Up a Production Company
In today’s entertainment industry, owning a production company has become synonymous with having a trainer, manager or overall deal—no celebrity can be seen without! But what exactly makes owning a production company such a crucial and sought-after asset? How can aspiring producers, particularly those who are young and not yet famous or well-established, go about creating one? What are the key factors that contribute to making it successful? Drawing from a decade of observing producers, learning from their triumphs and setbacks, as well as my personal experiences, here I explore the anatomy of a production company, the elements that lead […]
