Issues
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Victims of the Dance: Gaspar Noé Breaks Down a Scene from Climax
“Birth is a unique opportunity. Death is an extraordinary experience. Life is a collective impossibility.” –CLIMAX (2018) The film A dance company celebrating the end of their rehearsal on a snowy night in 1996 lose themselves to bacchanalian depravity in Climax, divided into two parts, each shot in long, continuous takes. The latest from Gaspar Noé, the director of Enter the Void and Love, returns to themes of his greatest dreams turned into nightmares through the hypnotic expressions of dance — and some surreptitiously drugged sangria. Who I spoke with Gaspar Noé: Director, Writer, Co-Editor, Co-Producer Serge Catoire: Line […]
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Sundance Hits and Misses: How MoviePass, Politics and Streaming Boosted the Indie Theatrical Box Office of 2018
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. After theatrical box office numbers for indies looked hopeless last year, 2018 proved all the doomsayers wrong. That’s thanks to such non-Hollywood hits as Hereditary, a Sundance Midnight entry partially financed and released by A24, which grossed more than $44 million in the United States and $35 million internationally. And it’s thanks to Searching, a Screen Gems acquisition out of the NEXT section, which grossed $26 million domestically and another $42 million abroad. Even Sundance’s 16-film Dramatic Competition — which offers a decent test sample of the overall truly indie marketplace — saw […]
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Your Film is Too Long: 11 Tips on How To Get Your Film to Its Correct Runtime
I know, it’s maddening. People watch 10-hour series that take five hours to get good, but your 101-minute comedy is too long. Michael Bay makes three-hour Transformers movies, but your 95-minute drama is too long. Critics love seven hours of Sátántangó, but your 18-minute short is too long. Sorry, but it’s probably true. I learned this the hard way on my first feature film, Jake. After our initial 118-minute cut, we proudly got it down to 104 minutes. We couldn’t cut a frame more! We locked picture and sent out our perfectly formed film to festivals. Final runtime? 88 minutes. […]
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Disclosed: Producers and Therapists on Dealing with the Stress of a Demanding Profession
There’s a simple definition of producing that mostly has to do with developing and financing a production, overseeing the shoot, protecting a vision. But scratch a little deeper, and producers will open up with more personal responses. Producing is about love, for example — loving the movie, above all, and continuing to love it over the years and decades of its existence. Producing is about support — being everyone’s advocate, from the director to the actor to the crew. Producing is about protecting a vision, yes, but also assuaging the fears of partners who worry that that vision is too […]
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Filmmaker‘s Look at the Below-the-Line Stars of Some of the Awards Season’s Best Films
Movies aren’t just willed into existence, however much Alfred Hitchcock might have wanted them to be. We love to talk about visionary directors, but we often fail to properly acknowledge the artists, craftspeople and technicians who make their works possible. Luckily, many of these individuals — the below-the-line talent, as they’re sometimes called — receive some recognition during awards season, particularly from the guilds and, ultimately, the Oscars. And those who look at the late-year awards rush only through the lens of who’s going to win the big prizes — picture, director, performance, etc. — risk missing out on some […]
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“Everything’s Corrupted by Politics”: Paweł Pawlikowski on the Not-Quite Biographical Cold War
The success of 2015’s Ida — an art house hit in America and an Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film — took writer and director Paweł Pawlikowski to the next level. In his new film, Cold War, a romantic epic spanning some 15 years, Pawlikowski uses music, politics and a love story to illuminate a turbulent period of Polish history. Pawlikowski dedicated Cold War to his parents, Zula and Wiktor, who died in 1989. The protagonists — a singer (played by Joanna Kulig) and a composer/arranger (Tomasz Kot) who fall in and out of love, over and over again, […]
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“I Learned From the First Film Exactly What He Wants”: Jon Davey, Frederick Wiseman’s Longtime DP, Speaks
In another life, John Davey could have been a doctor. He was studying to become one in 1966 when a mining disaster struck the Welsh village of Aberfan, some 20 miles from his campus. Davey heard the news and set off to volunteer with a group of fellow med students. They didn’t know it at the time, but the avalanche had hit an elementary school, burying more than 100 children alive. Their job, it turned out, was to retrieve the bodies. The experience rattled Davey, who was just 19 at the time. “I realized,” he recalls now, “I wasn’t really […]
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I See a Darkness: Karyn Kusama on Making Nicole Kidman Wild in Destroyer
Ever since her auspicious debut with Girlfight in 2000, director Karyn Kusama has been drawn to stories about flawed, driven protagonists, but she’s never had a heroine as forceful or complex as Erin Bell, the LAPD detective played by Nicole Kidman in Destroyer. Bell is a onetime undercover cop whose experience infiltrating a gang of thieves went horribly wrong, and who lives in a constant state of regret, resentment and rage — a volatile combination when the murder of one of her former associates opens up old wounds. The expertly constructed script, by Kusama’s frequent collaborators Phil Hay and Matt […]
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Criterion Collection to Launch Their Own Streaming Channel Post-FilmStruck
Some good news for those crushed by the looming demise of FilmStruck: The Criterion Collection, a major part of the cinephilic streaming site that’s coming to an end on Nov. 29, will be launching its own freestanding service. Their solo venture is scheduled to go live in spring of 2019, and it will act much as it did on its FilmStruck channel, with thematic programming, spotlights, retrospectives, supplemental features, double features and guest introductions. Those interested in signing up as a “charter member” — meaning you’ll be notified when the service is officially launching and receive a subscription at a […]
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Twilight Hours: Shevaun Mizrahi on Her Elegiac Documentary, Distant Constellation
With Shevaun Mizrahi’s documentary Distant Constellation opening at NYC’s Metrograph today from Grasshopper Film, we’re unlocking from our print issue this feature with the director. It’s not news that nonfiction editing can be an attenuated process. Still, with footage so fully formed, I didn’t expect that Mizrahi would keep returning to Istanbul for three more years, logging more hours on the way to showing a nearly-locked cut at 2017’s True/False Film Festival, with her world premiere following later that year at Locarno. The additional time she took turned out to be crucial for capturing two additional strands that give the […]
