Issues
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Life, Compressed: Austin Bunn’s Short Film Screenwriting: A Craft Guide and Anthology
Familiarity is where short films go to die. So says Austin Bunn, rephrasing a statement by the British-Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa, who feels that the abundance of shorts characterizing our moment makes playing it safe as a screenwriter the biggest risk of all. Boulifa is just one of many filmmakers cited in Bunn’s new book, Short Film Screenwriting: A Craft Guide and Anthology, published in October 2024 by Bloomsbury. Bunn may be best known to Filmmaker readers as the co-author, with Christine Vachon, of 2007’s A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and […]
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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased. From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo. […]
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Blue Skies in Park City: Against the “Off Year” Sundance 2025 Narrative
Reports of Sundance’s death are greatly exaggerated. Even before this year’s festival was over, industry journalists rushed to declare its demise, from The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman (“Low Sales. No Standouts. Slow Sundance. Where Does Independent Film Go From Here?”) to The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (“Get it Together, Indie A-Holes. What part of ‘extinction event’ do you not understand?”). But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe “the vibe was off,” as one producer notes, but what do you expect after twin catastrophes—the Los Angeles fires and the inauguration of Donald Trump—were still smoldering during the event? “I think the market was […]
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Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
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Access Against Common Sense
“Just because we are in the same room does not mean that we belong to the room or to each other.”—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 10 “We come to this place for magic.”—Nicole Kidman, “AMC Theatres: We Make Movies Better,” 2021 I recently began reading New York Film Festival co-founder Amos Vogel’s 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, because my film An All-Around Feel Good was premiering at this year’s festival. I had seen several people on social media urging filmmakers to boycott the event for its entanglements with sponsors complicit with Israel’s genocidal siege […]
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Replicating Images: Submerged, AI and Immersive Cinema
In October, Apple released its first scripted immersive film production, Submerged, on Apple Vision Pro (AVP), its mixed-reality headset. The film follows a submarine crew during World War II who fight for survival after enduring a torpedo attack. The high-end technological production included a submarine set, a proprietary 3D camera by Apple and headsets for the crew to monitor the shots in real time. The production design is impressive, the use of close-ups peculiar and novel—it’s a well-crafted film. However, more than the film itself, the experience of watching Submerged on the headset is what truly shines. A making-of trailer […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the winter 2025 edition of Filmmaker. This quarter, we’re honored to have on our cover, photographed by Misan Harriman, RaMell Ross—an extraordinary director, photographer and artist who first graced these pages when we highlighted him on our 25 New Faces list in summer 2015. At the time, he was at work on his debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which we were fortunate to screen early footage of. In my interview with RaMell, he said about his work: “I enter filmmaking as an artist who is wild about poetics and its emotional influence. The film […] uses […]
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
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Ways of Seeing: DP Jomo Fray on Nickel Boys
From RaMell Ross’s first meeting with cinematographer Jomo Fray, the director was clear on why he wanted to lens his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys from a first-person point of view. How to do it was an entirely different matter: A puzzle that required months of tests, a 33-page typed shot list and an assortment of creative camera rigs to solve. The debut narrative feature from Oscar-nominated documentarian Ross, Nickel Boys details the brutal experiences of two Black teenagers at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1960s. Initially, the […]
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Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
At the beginning of Blitz, London is on fire. Against a night sky striated by German bombs, flames engulf obliterated city streets and brick buildings. A platoon of firemen scramble through dense smoke and charred remains to control an errant water hose, which whips around and knocks one of them unconscious. Within the foggy confusion, their shouts and commands get lost in the unrelenting, roaring soundscape, punctuated by distant air horns, panicked screams and a whistling aerial assault. It’s a blistering sequence, an aural nightmare that sets the mood for a war movie full of unexpected, terror-filled situations. Normally, sound […]
