The following first appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter 2010 edition. —Editor Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its story, a melancholy tale of a day in the life of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) who is still mourning the unexpected death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), is a far cry from the sex-saturated tableaus that Ford created for […]
Both a Cannes sensation and a hit television miniseries in France, Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, an incisive and exciting look at left-wing mercenary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez and the political culture that sustained him, now comes Stateside.
Charles Ferguson follows up his hard-hitting Iraq War documentary, No End in Sight, with another investigative look at a complicated and controversial subject: the global economic crisis. In Inside Job, Ferguson indicts the growth of the banking industry for causing the global economic crisis, asking why not a single person has gone to jail because of it. By Scott Macaulay
Roberto Quezada-Dardon learns why digital intermediate has become an essential tool for filmmakers.
Making a business out of independent film is harder than ever. But still, great films are being made. In this series of short profiles, Filmmaker asked a number of leading independent producers about their producing models and how they’re finding everything from financing to material to office space.
Lena Dunham and Caveh Zahedi are among a surprisingly small group of filmmakers who make themselves the subjects of their own films. Whether it’s a man dealing with his sexual urges (Zahedi’s I Am A Sex Addict) or a girl searching for her place in a post-collegiate world (Dunham’s Tiny Furniture), their sometimes painful honesty makes audiences both laugh and cringe. We had them sit down to talk about the joys, frustrations and creative rewards of making autobiographical films.
It’s tempting to get distracted. It happens to filmmakers all the time. Concern over gear, building audiences, developing social media strategies, new tools, new services. The promise of transmedia (the ability for a story to live beyond a single screen, device or medium) offers such rich storytelling potential. But for some it will become yet another distraction. Case in point: After a recent speaking engagement I was approached by a group of filmmakers. Some were trying to figure out the value of transmedia while others said with a sense of pride that they’d designed the perfect transmedia experience, as if […]