Issues
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to our Fall 2019 edition, marking the start of our 28th year of publication. And, if you’re reading this letter, you’re most likely reading it in print or in our digital edition, so thank you for buying or subscribing to this publication. As this 28th year begins, Filmmaker finds itself in the happy position of having a successful, much-read website as well as a robust, healthy and burgeoning print publication. The sometimes mentioned “death of print media” hasn’t afflicted us here—this issue is larger than ever, we’re doing more bonus distribution to film festivals and industry events and, with […]
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Made For These Times: Ulrich Köhler on In My Room
Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room begins with what looks like a DCP glitch. The view is from a handheld news camera entering a press conference scrum, its operator confirming in voiceover that he’s rolling while roaming from lectern to lectern. Each time an official statement is delivered, the image cuts to the aftermath—the as-yet-unseen cameraman, Armin (Hans Löw), has confused the “off” and “on” switch, and the inadvertent B-roll he shot is unusable. All of Armin’s life is similarly shabbily disarrayed: At a club, he picks up a young lady and brings her home, but an ill-phrased refusal to let […]
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They Came From Within: Bong Joon-ho on Parasite
“This is so metaphorical!” Ki-woo’s metatextual reaction to the unlikely gift of a stone from his friend Min early in Bong Joon- ho’s Palme d’Or–winning Parasite isn’t the film’s most startling moment, but it’s an early jolt that both sets and undermines viewer expectations. Ki-woo (wide-eyed Choi Woo-shik—Okja, Train to Busan) lives in an underground apartment with his underemployed family, including humbled but unvanquished father Ki-taek (Bong regular Song Kang-ho, unsurprisingly great) and scheming sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam, cynical and hilarious). When Ki-woo becomes a tutor for the daughter of a rich family, the action settles into that family’s stunning […]
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The Business Cycle: Anthony Kaufman On the Legacy of Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen’s Production Company Parts & Labor.
“What always attracted me to the work is that there’s something impossible about it,” says Jay Van Hoy, cofounder of Parts & Labor, the New York–based independent film production company that helped develop a wave of new auteurs over the past 15 years, from Kelly Reichardt to David Lowery to Robert Eggers. While Parts & Labor no longer exists as it once did as a partnership between Van Hoy and producer Lars Knudsen (the two split in 2016, with Van Hoy retaining the brand), its legacy lives on, as one of the most prolific independent film companies of its time, […]
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25 New Faces of Independent Film 2019
Click here to read this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list.
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End of the Road: Jim Jarmusch on His Johnny Depp-Starring Western Death Trip, Dead Man
The following interview of Jim Jarmusch about Dead Man was published originally in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1996 issue. It is appearing online for the first time. Dead Man was reissued last year by and is now available from Criterion. In Jim Jarmusch’s new Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant who travels by train across the frontier West to work in a bookkeeping firm run by a crazed, gun-toting Robert Mitchum. When, as in a Kafka novel, the job vanishes before it’s even begun, Blake finds himself a hunted man, pursued for a murder he didn’t commit while […]
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Factory Outlet: Rose Troche Talks with Director Mary Harron about I Shot Andy Warhol
[Editor’s Note: The following piece was originally published as the cover story of our Spring, 1996 edition. It appears online here for the first time.] When we invited Go Fish director Rose Troche to interview Mary Harron, the director and co-writer of I Shot Andy Warhol, we hardly anticipated such a happy chain of coincidences. On the subject of bio-pics, Harron’s film explores the political and psychological contradictions of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, while Troche is currently at work developing a film on Dorothy Arzner, perhaps Hollywood’s greatest female director. Both Solanas and Arzner, while ostensibly […]
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The American Way: Writer/Director Rick Alverson on The Mountain
Divisive. Vexing. Hilarious. Disturbing. Stimulating. Exhilarating. However one feels about the films of Rick Alverson, one thing’s for certain: the adjectives used to express that opinion will be strong. From The Builder (2010) to Entertainment (2015), Alverson has relentlessly challenged his audiences to confront—and dare to release—their preconceived notions of narrative cinema. At a time when the independent festival circuit has begun to feel more like a breeding ground for the major studios and television networks than a showcase for brash, defiantly original stand-alone works of art, Alverson is providing a desperately needed jolt—a reminder of what truly independent cinema […]
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Show Us the Money
For anyone who follows the TV business, the end of HBO’s Game of Thrones this year has raised all kinds of big, potentially era-defining questions. Will Thrones be the last series that tens of millions of people around the world watch together each week? Can HBO find another zeitgeist-y hit that fans flock to social media to discuss? Will the network have to make major changes if it doesn’t? And, perhaps most important: Will anyone again ever make another show that looks so staggeringly expensive? We don’t talk about television enough in terms of money: not just which shows and […]
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The Clear Identification of Priorities: Ricky D’Ambrose on Being His Own Graphic Designer
It was apparent early on that I would design most of the paper props for Notes on an Appearance: The film’s predecessor, a short called Spiral Jetty, relied, in a similar way, on a cache of fictitious newspaper and magazine clippings. Both films were made quickly, with meager ledger books (Spiral Jetty, if memory serves, cost less than $500; Notes on an Appearance was shot, edited, color-corrected and sound-mixed for less than $30,000); and both films were made without much infrastructure, relying on small, resourceful crews. Under these conditions, I became the films’ art director and production designer, learning and […]
