Issues
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to Filmmaker’s 28th anniversary edition. If you are reading this editor’s letter, there’s a good chance you are reading it in a print issue that has been delivered to your mailbox or that you purchased at a newsstand or bookstore. After a summer issue break, when Filmmaker went PDF due to bookstores closing and all the uncertainty around the pandemic, we’re grateful to be back with a physical edition—grateful to our advertisers, our publisher, IFP and to you for your continuing readership and support. There’s a reason we pushed hard to return to print with this issue, and it’s partly sentimental: […]
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The Fear Returns: Fangoria Enters a New Era with New Ownership
“I grew up a genre fan,” Tara Ansley, independent film producer and the new co-owner of the 40-year-old preeminent horror brand Fangoria, said a few weeks after news of the acquisition was made public. “[When I was young,] Fangoria was the closest I could get to being on a set and going behind the scenes. When I saw the company was for sale, I knew it was time for there to be more female leadership and diversity within the genre world.” For more than four tumultuous decades, Fangoria has served as America’s most prolific brand covering all aspects of the […]
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Embracing Hybridity
It goes without saying that film festivals will have to be hybrid going forward—this is no longer optional but rather a requirement of the times. But the actual way the film festival circuit works also needs a revamp. The life cycle of an independent film on the festival circuit starts with, hopefully, a splashy premiere. The film is then taken to several festivals, building buzz over the course of anywhere from six to 18 months, during which time the film vies for limited distribution deals or the filmmaker has to figure out a distribution strategy of their own. While film […]
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Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk
In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]
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Ballard in the Rear View
In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, J. G. Ballard reminisces about a derelict casino he came across in his youth. The abandoned building gave him the sense that “reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.” It is a canny summation of the familiar visuals in his fiction. Ballard was obsessed with facilities like hospitals and airports, places with sterile obstructive architectures and machine-like routines for individuals to perform, and theaters of reality that break down […]
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Reconsidering Vacancy
A few years ago, I posed the following question to myself: Am I using my producing and fundraising skills to benefit too few people? What if the people or the corporations I deliver this beloved film investment to are treating people badly? Profiting at the expense of the people that made it? What does it mean that the amount of labor and the amount of pay often don’t add up? Is there another path? Because I’m decent at raising money for film, a sum between $500,000 to $1.5 million doesn’t seem daunting. I decided to explore different ways money could […]
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Flipping the Script: Mary Harron Interviews Radha Blank About Her Spirited and Wise New York Comedy, The Forty-Year-Old Version
In Radha Blank’s witty and winning feature debut, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the writer/director adopts a semiautobiographical persona: a hardworking middle-aged playwright and high school teacher who, between hustles to get her latest play produced and after the death of her artist mother, takes to open mic nights as neophyte rapper RadhaMUSprime. Onstage and in the studio with a handsome beats-supplier-turned-paramour, she raps about aging, ambition and life in New York with all the emotional honesty that’s slowly and painfully being drained from her latest play, a Harlem-set gentrification drama mounted by a patronizing white theater producer. Scanning Blank’s own biography—she’s […]
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Building the Best Future
We tend to think of the institutions and corporations that govern our working lives as solid and immutable, but extraordinary circumstances will always force them to be flexible—and right now the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing a lot about how, when and whether these entities are able to flex to meet the needs of our times. This is a good moment to ask serious questions: How can our institutions rise to these challenges? Are the working assumptions that underlie the film industry the right ones—the ones we need? We need to make sure we aren’t just issuing rally cries to save […]
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The Diagetic Prototype
“I want an app like Tinder that we can use to end genocide,” said Luis Moreno Ocampo, former first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in fall 2019. The Argentine lawyer was visiting the University of Southern California from Harvard, where he was a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He was in town to coteach a class with USC professor and documentary filmmaker Ted Braun, perhaps best known for his 2007 film Darfur Now, on the ways in which storytelling can affect our understanding of political issues. I first met Ocampo in 2008 when […]
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Can You Finance an Independent Film During a Pandemic?
In the middle of the global pandemic and one of the worst economic downturns in a century, Maven Pictures’ Celine Rattray, a producer of Driveways, The Kindergarten Teacher and American Honey, had several projects interrupted. But in early April, a timely new project—in which the crew and cast could work remotely from their own homes—was suddenly greenlit. She spoke to a private equity investor who she believed would be a good fit for the film, budgeted at six figures, and the financier agreed to fully fund it during their phone call. “The deal closed in a couple days,” says Rattray. […]
