Issues
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Notes on Camp: Desiree Akhavan on The Miseducation of Cameron Post, ADR Rewriting and 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up”
In Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut, Appropriate Behavior, the cowriter/director was front and center as Shirin, a young, bisexual Persian Brooklynite trying to figure out how to live her life, one sexually impulsive bad decision at a time. It was in keeping with the of-the-moment nature of The Slope, Akhavan’s reputation-making 2011 web series about a year in a lesbian couple’s New York relationship, in which she again costarred. Her sophomore feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, tackles new territory: It’s Akhavan’s first time working from an adaptation, first period piece and first time staying offscreen in her work. Miseducation was […]
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Complicated Grief: Ari Aster on Hereditary‘s Family Nightmare
There are films that scare you, and then there are films that do something more. The former are easy to name—maybe you remember a particular jump scare or chilling scene—but the latter are more difficult to describe. These are films that dig deep into your subconscious, films that identify a weakness or fear and prey upon that with their cinematic imagination. You’ll remember scenes from these movies in detail, too, but also how old you were, and where you were, and what was going on in your life when you saw them. You’ll remember how they made you feel, and […]
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Onrushing Now
Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]
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Wide Open or Ajar: Theatrical Windows in the VOD Age
It used to be so simple: Release a movie in theaters and, several months later, it would come to your local video store. Nowadays, each and every film’s release pattern and chosen distribution platforms are—or, at least, should be—idiosyncratic, unique, and specifically tailored. “The first thing you have to ask yourself,” distribution consultant Michael Tuckman says, “is who is your audience, and work backwards from there to figure out what windowing you’re going to do.” If the target audience is a young demographic who spend most of their time on devices, then, according to The Orchard’s Paul Davidson, “a SVOD […]
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The Present Moment: Sam Green on His Kronos Quartet Hybrid Film A Thousand Thoughts
There’s a sequence early in A Thousand Thoughts, Sam Green and Joe Bini’s “live documentary” about the Bay Area musicians, the Kronos Quartet, that may seem familiar to anyone who has watched a music biopic. Scored to the ticking of a metronome, it’s a “rise to fame” montage of newspaper headlines, all taken from the years in which Kronos were becoming new music superstars. On top of each article, the bold-faced type indulges in the same wordplay, a riff on the Greek meaning of the group’s moniker: Kronos’s “time is now,” one headline reads; the group has hit “the big […]
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Page View: Daniella Shreir on the Debut Issue of Feminist Film Journal Another Gaze
Feminist film journal Another Gaze heads to New York this week for two events surrounding the issue launch of their debut print edition. On Saturday at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation there will be a free day of discussions and panels, and, on Thursday at Union Docs a screening of shorts in which women filmmakers reframe onscreen sexual violence. From our own print issue, here’s our interview with editor Daniella Shreir about her decision to add an analog component to her already impressive web publication. “I didn’t want it to look too essentialist or zine-y,” says London-born writer, editor […]
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Cash Back: How Film Tax Incentives Work
Let’s assume you got into filmmaking because you wanted nothing to do with business school. Well, tough. Movies are the most expensive art form; even ones they call “no-budget” aren’t. You need to learn about business eventually, and in today’s world, even independent filmmakers need to understand terms like “transferable rebates,” “soft money” and “100 percent deductibility.” In fact, there’s one financing term both Hollywood and independent producers must know: “tax credits.” The studio world is continually on the lookout for states offering production rebates that will reduce the cost of their movies and TV shows, while independent producers scout […]
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The Irish Way
The way writer/director Michael Tully and producer George Rush tell it, Don’t Leave Home, Tully’s new feature, started with the idea of a place and a vibe. The vibe was sophisticated art house horror — something in the vein of Nicolas Roeg’s classic ghost story, Don’t Look Now — where things just feel off. And the place would be Ireland — specifically, Dublin and the spectacular mountains and eerie bogs of County Wicklow, about 40 miles south of the city. But, as Austin-based Tully — whose last feature was the Ocean City, Md.–set Ping Pong Summer — explains, there wasn’t […]
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The Explosions Within: Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here
Joe uses a hammer. A tough guy for hire — one who specializes in cases involving pedophilia and child trafficking — Joe owns a gun, of course, and he uses that, too. But for the jobs that truly matter, ones triggering the dark memories that clank painfully around inside his brain, he prefers the brutal simplicity of a simple hammer that can fell an adversary with one silent, well-timed swoop. Arrestingly embodied by Joaquin Phoenix in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s fleet, impressionistic work of hardcore noir, You Were Never Really Here, winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year’s […]
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Leslie Harris’s Return Ticket
“I was looking at old issues of Filmmaker,” says Leslie Harris — director of the 1993 indie drama Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. “There was Quentin, Robert Rodriguez, Nick Gomez, and then Matty Rich and John Singleton. And Juice was just coming out. It was a real male-dominated arena. My impetus was to see a black woman on screen, someone who wasn’t a wife or a girlfriend. Someone who had her own dreams — a strong, confident black woman’s voice.” That voice was Chantel’s — “precocious as hell, sharp as a tack,” wrote Beth Coleman, who interviewed Harris for […]
