Issues
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Before and After Sunlight: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on “Sinners”
Set in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s, Sinners finds twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), flush with bootlegger cash, returning to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint. The venture proves short-lived as an Irish vampire (Jack O’Connell) and his minions crash the party on opening night. Once the fangs come out, Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, a horror neophyte, found herself in unfamiliar territory, especially compared to the film’s genre aficionado director Ryan Coogler. “I’m actually not that well-versed in horror,” said Durald Arkapaw. “It was a new genre for me […]
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Reflecting on 33 Years of “Filmmaker” and Independent Film
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues, we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns: the struggles of early career filmmakers, changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to refer just to the past; reflections can radiate towards the […]
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Crafting a Personal Poetics: The Pleasures of Critical Writing
In January, I’ll teach another version of my favorite class, “Creative Critical Writing,” a graduate writing workshop dedicated to exploring diverse techniques for writing about—and with, next to or nearby—film, video, still images, sound and other media forms. Moving beyond the conventions of scholarly writing, the course offers students a chance to dive into forms that have been variously dubbed creative nonfiction, the hybrid essay, the fourth genre, the lyric essay, the video essay and poetic or vernacular criticism, considering writers who have contributed incredible experiments to the writing form, with the ultimate goal being expansive experimentation for students. One […]
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Horrifying Looks: Costume Designer Kate Hawley on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”
Guillermo del Toro’s films are instantly recognizable for their fantastical Gothic imagery, and the director’s adaptation of Frankenstein is one of his most decadent stylized works yet. The film—which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as the Creature and Mia Goth as Lady Elizabeth Harlander and Baroness Claire Frankenstein—boasts stunning costumes befitting its epic scale. Frankenstein’s costume designer, Kate Hawley, is no stranger to the writer-director’s distinctive visions, having previously worked with him on Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak. She likens this film, with its two-and-a-half runtime and intricate worldbuilding, to “a massive opera.” Earlier in her career, […]
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A Most Violent Year: Vampires, Families, 2025 in Film
Since our 2019 winter edition, the brilliant Mark Asch has done something here that isn’t our default position; he’s examined films together, not in isolation, and has teased out what, for him, are their deeper meanings and interconnections—how they say something about our society today. Here, he considers images inside and outside the arthouse, finding trenchant, sometimes troubling messages elided by rote awards season discourse. — Scott Macaulay I remember about a decade ago when Charlie Kirk was a teenage gimmick, a debate-club prodigy haunting college campuses demanding to be taken seriously, provoking protests and deplatformings and then spinning this […]
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On “Filmmaker”‘s Fall 2003 Issue
In his 2017 25 New Face profile of writer/director Ricky D’Ambrose (Notes on an Appearance, The Cathedral), Vadim Rizov described the filmmaker as having “a disciplined, honed gaze refined over years of self-tutoring.” I ran into Ricky recently and told him I was leaving Filmmaker; he responded by telling me that it was not just the magazine but one specific issue that was a vital part of his self-education. In editing this magazine, I’ve always been conscious of the educational breadcrumbs contained within each interview, as my own cinematic self-tutoring followed similar patterns, so I was excited to learn what […]
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Richard Kern on Shooting for “Filmmaker”
In the ’80s, I’d rent Richard Kern films like Right Side of My Brain and Fingered from Kim’s Video, vibing on the mixture of artistry and exploitation contained in the work of this pioneer of the so-called Cinema of Transgression. In the ’90s, shortly after the release of his first photo book, New York Girls, we got to work with him at Filmmaker as he became one of our regular photographers of directors and talent at festivals and around New York City. Kern Filmmaker covers included Robert Duvall for The Apostle; Kimberly Peirce, Chloë Sevigny and Hilary Swank for Boys […]
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Hits & Misses: The Sundance Class of 2025
By conventional measures, the 2020s have not been very good for the movies. At mid-decade, there’s the nagging sense that the pre-COVID years represented glory days that will never be recaptured. Corporate media consolidation, the dominance of streaming and short-form content and the rapid rise of A.I. have far-reaching implications for the future of the medium. In many ways, independent film and filmmakers are in a far more perilous position than ever, increasingly squeezed out on screens big and small by an algorithmically driven and politically pressured media ecosystem irrevocably moving toward the middlebrow, mediocre and mainstream. Yet, independent filmmakers, […]
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On “Filmmaker”‘s First Decade: A Dialogue Between Scott Macaulay, Karol Martesko-Fenster and Holly Willis
Curious as to what it would say, I recently asked ChatGPT for a history of Filmmaker. It returned a biography that incorrectly listed one of our longest-running occasional contributors as a founder, which made me realize how very little of Filmmaker’s origin story is online, available to be scraped by LLMs. To put some of that history officially on the record, and to salute my original co-founding partners, I sat down via Zoom with founding publisher Karol Martesko-Fenster and founding west coast editor Holly Willis to discuss our earliest days, before the internet succeeded in fully disrupting the arts publishing […]
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Anthony Dod Mantle on Cinematographer Origins
The Copenhagen-based British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is known for his innovation around diverse shooting formats, from the MiniDV of The Celebration to the SI-2K digital camera of Slumdog Millionaire and iPhone of his most recent, 28 Years Later. But as a producer who has worked with Anthony—on Harmony Korine’s MiniDV-shot julien donkey-boy and Gus Van Sant’s Easter—what I most associate with him is his ability to locate a script’s latent, least articulable meanings and then, using a combination of instinct, storytelling insight and technical prowess, bring those images to the screen. Recently, I shared a script with Anthony, and […]
