Issues
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Made in the USA: Tax Credits in 2025
Canada has long been known as “Hollywood North,” with American production companies taking advantage of the country’s favorable exchange rate, tax incentives and crew base to make movies for cheaper than they can in the United States. But, increasingly, a number of other countries and regions—the United Kingdom, Spain, the Canary Islands, Eastern Europe—have instituted enticing tax credits aimed at attracting international production, so much so that, for many U.S. independent producers, making a low-budget indie in the States is no longer an automatic proposition. After considering multiple locations, for example, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist wound up faking the […]
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Arriving at a Resolution: Remastering Movies for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
We have reached a tipping point in the format wars, with UHD poised to overtake standard definition DVDs for first place. Now, there’s a new species of reply guy—one who responds to every Blu-ray release announcement with, “Why no 4K?” As a home video producer for Kino Lorber, I will try to explain the continuing rise of 4K UHD, as well as the economic realities of why it’s not possible to release everything in the format. 4K UHD (full name: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray) is the highest resolution disc available and the one preferred by collectors. Introduced in February 2016 […]
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Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across his filmography, resulting in new sensations, desires and ways of being in the world. In Videodrome, unusual orifices form, as stomachs become insertion points for violent VHS tapes. Real and virtual worlds blur in eXistenZ as videogame controllers jack directly into spinal cords; more recently, in Crimes of the Future, the surgical removal of surreal organs is the latest form […]
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Passing Through the Black Lodge: David Lynch and Native Culture
There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert: It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and […]
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Speaking in Tongues: How Koyaanisqatsi Was Reborn as The Vivid Unknown
When I step into the exhibition hall, three large screens display rapidly shifting, AI-generated images of natural and industrial landscapes. The overstimulating visuals resist easy interpretation, and they are also responsive to the viewers in the room. The video stops when the room is empty and speeds up as the room becomes more crowded. The longer one stays in the room, the more one’s “shadow” on the screen becomes visible—effects all made possible by a complex real-time vision-tracking system. This is The Vivid Unknown, an immersive installation that recreates the groundbreaking 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi using AI. The piece is a […]
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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 […]
