Issues
-
Editor’s Letter
I spoke to a writer/director friend last week who lives in Los Angeles, where, at the time, coronavirus case numbers were still escalating. My friend hasn’t shot anything during the pandemic but has been using these months to work on a new script and develop a TV show. But in the last few weeks, this writer/director has been getting urgent calls from execs to board shows and features that are financed and ready to go. It’s a bit of a whiplash, my friend said—trying to remain cautious, to be cognizant that the pandemic is still ongoing, but while grappling with […]
-
Uprooted: Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung on Minari
The following interview appears in Filmmaker‘s current Winter ’21 print edition and, a day after Minari won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, appears online for all readers for the first time. “There’s a difference between something having happened or something being true,” says writer/director Lee Isaac Chung about the interplay between memory and creation that graces his fourth dramatic feature, Minari. Based on the filmmaker’s childhood—his family moved to the South, where his father hoped to develop a farm—Minari captures a time of familial change and uncertainty with seemingly effortless poetry and wonder. It’s the early 1980s […]
-
Post Empire
Empire, Nevada, “felt like a town suspended in the 1950s, as if the postwar economy had never ended,” writes Jessica Bruder in her nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. The small mining town consisted of four main roads, lined with homes populated by the workers of United States Gypsum, the manufacturer of Sheetrock. Subsidized rents were as low as $250 a month, the company covered TV and internet and, as one resident told Bruder, there were “no gangs, no sirens, no violence.” But economic forces caught up with Empire. In 2011, U.S. Gypsum, a company with a […]
-
How to Cut a Trailer Redux: The Styles and Trends Reshaping the Art of Film Advertising
The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. We’re drowning in entertainment. Dozens of streamers, from mainstream catnip like Netflix and Disney+ to niche platforms like the Criterion Channel, each offer hundreds of feature films, limited series and TV shows. National theater chains like AMC and arthouse cinemas like the Alamo Drafthouse—at least before and hopefully after the pandemic—serve up fresh options every week on more than 40,000 screens. And legacy networks on basic cable, from NBC to TBS, continue to deliver a firehose of prerecorded content and live broadcasts every day. How to choose? Simple: […]
-
Crime Family
“We don’t call you ’hun’ or ’sweetheart’ or ’baby,’” says Theresa (Debra Winger) to her daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) late in Miranda July’s new Kajillionaire, the filmmaker’s dreamily eccentric interrogation into the social construct of familial love. “We don’t wrap little birthday presents with ribbons,” she continues, acidly, as Old Dolio looks on in despair. Old Dolio has just brought in $1,575 from an airport luggage scam—the family, which includes dad Robert (Richard Jenkins), makes their living from a succession of convoluted small-time cons that net in the two and three and, only sometimes, four figures—and she’d just […]
-
Seeing the Unseen: Charlie Kaufman’s 2020, Antkind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things
“My thinking is silly. My memories are preposterous. My ideas are laughable. I am a pompous clown. I can, on occasion, become aware of this. There are moments of clarity that I find all the more humiliating because I can see myself as others likely do, but I cannot control any of it. The pathetic, comical thought process continues, almost as if a script is playing out. Almost as if I myself am a puppet, defined by some external force, written to be the foil in some strange cosmic entertainment witnessed by someone somewhere. But who or what? And why? […]
-
Audiences Are Our Biggest Stakeholders, And We Can’t Leave Them Behind
The daunting prospect of capturing the attention and engagement of new audiences is not a recent development. For years, the Film Festival Alliance has held panel sessions like “What Millennials Want” and “Cultivating A Love of Cinema Culture in Young People,” but the pandemic, which has people affixed to their devices 24/7, has certainly heightened the urgency for film festivals, while also blowing the lid off an old model, exposing all of its cracks and forcing us to do the essential hard work of thinking differently. In a post-COVID-19 world, assuming a vaccine does become readily available late next year, […]
-
New Authority: The Film Set Job of the COVID-19 Compliance Supervisor
The following article on film-set COVID-19 safety departments was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print issue. When Heather Drake-Bianchi landed her first job as a COVID-19 compliance supervisor, the New York–based set medic didn’t realize the gravity of the responsibility she’d been given. “At first, I thought I was just going to be like a ’set medic plus,’ Drake-Bianchi said. “Then, on day one of the shoot, when we did the first morning safety briefing, one of the producers said, ’Just so everybody knows, whatever Heather says goes. She has the capacity to shut this entire shoot down.’” Drake-Bianchi’s […]
-
Viewing Disability
“Do disability differently,” disability activist and media critic Lawrence Carter-Long begs in his irreverent survey of the state of disability on film for the recent manifesto issue of Film Quarterly. Defending genre curios such as the 1970s exploitation thriller Mr. No Legs, about a drug ring enforcer with shotguns built into his wheelchair, as more interesting than treacle like the Andrew Garfield–starring biopic Breathe, about British independent-living activist Robin Cavendish, Carter-Long points to a common complaint within disability circles about the narrow frames of reference through which disabled people tend to be seen. Disability movies, the thinking goes, too often […]
-
The Clock is Ticking: Filmmakers on Surviving Through the Pandemic
Time may be running out for independent filmmakers. Sure, even as the pandemic has completely disrupted their entire workflows and business models, they’re a scrappy and resourceful bunch. Like restaurants pivoting to drive-thru, delivery and take-out to outlast our current infectious plague, filmmakers are moving forward in myriad ways, whether in post-production on already completed films, developing new scripts or trying to produce new films self-insured by funders with scaled-down crews and robust coronavirus prevention measures in place. But survival is tricky right now and dogged perseverance may only work for so long. To stay afloat, for example, one New […]
