Issues
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Over and Over Again
If your favorite films don’t show idiosyncratic tastes, you’re not alive. It means you’re just in a bubble of the culture and your own anxieties about what you think is real and not real. Whereas if you were to be honest about what’s important to you, it would have to be the things that actually make your heart sing, which is why I’m always suspicious of people who do a 10-best list that doesn’t have at least two titles from childhood. Was it really that bad? Isn’t wonder the whole point of the fucking thing? Why haven’t those films gone […]
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Binge Watch: How Silicon Valley Lifestyles Are Being Portrayed on Screens Large and Small
A number of recent films and television shows have been set in the tech industry. And regularly, I notice these projects can’t seem to decide: What’s the problem with Silicon Valley, anyway? One might draw a straight line from a character like Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko to jobs lost and houses foreclosed upon, but the consequences of “disruption” can be trickier to distill into lines as visceral and powerful as “greed is good.” I was thinking about this when I watched part of Super Pumped on a plane earlier this year. As it happens, American Airlines is one of the […]
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A Need to Focus: Guy Maddin Interviews Kelly Reichardt About Showing Up
Talking to The Guardian’s Xan Brooks in 2014, Kelly Reichardt reflected on the students she’s taught in her teaching position as an artist in residence at Bard. “The kids I know, I love them, but they’re not mad the way we used to be,” she noted. “They seem so unafraid and so un-angry. It makes them very nice people. It doesn’t make for great art. I ask them all the time: ‘Aren’t you mad at anything?’ They look at me like I’m off my rocker.” That sense of simmering discontent percolates through Michelle Williams’s performance as Lizzy, a ceramics sculptor […]
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Producer Data: The Numbers Don’t Lie (The Truth about Independent Film Revenue)
Last fall, desiring information to aid our own filmmaking careers, we launched an experiment to see whether we could obtain hard data on independent film revenue. Having experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get this information, we created a Google form and asked filmmakers to self-submit not just their feature film top-line revenue data, but thorough, detailed and specific numbers on everything from their budgets to best- and worst-performing revenue streams to cast to how much their films made in gross and net terms. From the details of the 104 submitted films, we have drawn critically important—and many surprising—conclusions. […]
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Speaking Volumes: The Production Benefits and Challenges of Shooting on Virtual Stages
For Metropolis special effects artist Eugen Schüfftan, a model, a mirror and a sharp-edged tool were all the instruments required to create cinematic wonder in the 1920s. The mirror—placed at a 45-degree angle in front of the camera—reflected the image of a model cityscape located just out of frame. The tool then scraped away sections of the mirror’s reflective layer, leaving only glass and revealing strategically placed actors in the distance. When the mirror was filmed, the citizens of Metropolis now magically appeared to inhabit the colossal urban dystopia. A century later, virtual production is the latest evolution in cinematic […]
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Case Study: Dramarama
At the end of the 2000s, Jonathan Wysocki went to both the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, then spent years on projects that would assemble pieces of financing before falling apart. All the while, he watched colleagues from those labs launch Kickstarter campaigns and make ultra-low-budget debuts. Deciding to take a similar approach, at the start of 2019, he raised $62,000 on the crowdfunding platform and an additional $180,000 in private equity and was shooting his first feature, Dramarama, by summer. Of course, as the timeline above suggests, Wysocki’s picture will forever be asterisked in the independent film distribution history […]
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Case Study: S&M Sally
S&M Sally, the third feature in writer-director Michelle Ehlen’s trilogy of character-based comedy dramas dealing with gender and sexuality, was financed largely via crowdfunding and premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in June 2015 before going on to play more than 70 other fests, generating about $15,000 in revenue. For Ehlen, who has a devoted fanbase, festivals provide a kind of audience research: “Even if my films might land on the LGBTQ circuit, I try to go to bigger festivals, too. The festivals guide me as to how big a movie this is, how big the audience is, then I […]
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Editor’s Letter
“Go make movies.” That was my Editor’s Letter signoff here in the earliest days of this publication. And, over the ensuing 30 years, many of you did! I won’t give Filmmaker anything more than a small amount of credit for the independent production boom in the years following our 1992 launch, but we have certainly been out there issue by issue, web page by web page, encouraging new independent filmmakers. We’ve also tried in these pages to deliver doses of reality along with our encouragement. We’ve run articles on the vicissitudes of financing, the high cost of delivery, difficult sales […]
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Paradigm Shifts: TV-Focused Curriculum Changes at Three Film Schools
A couple of years ago, I was chatting with writer Jack Epps, a colleague of mine at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. We were marveling over the rise of the limited series as a format, and he explained that it allows for an expanded second act. “You can really develop the relationship between a protagonist and antagonist,” he said, using Killing Eve as a great example. I was intrigued by the idea that new formats could allow different aspects of storytelling to emerge so, for this issue’s column, I asked the heads of three […]
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New Generation: How A24 Is Helping Keep Art Films Alive
A trio of celebrated and highly distinctive breakout movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—Raven Jackson’s visionary All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Savanah Leaf’s heartrending Earth Mama and Celine Song’s gripping Berlin Competition selection Past Lives—share a few conspicuous elements: They were all debut features made by women of color, they each display an impressive mastery of their forms and they were all backed by A24. A24 has been celebrating one of its biggest years ever—a record 18 total Oscar nominations and its highest grossing film in Everything Everywhere All At Once—but amidst the genre mashups, prestige star vehicles and […]
