Issues
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Replicating Images: Submerged, AI and Immersive Cinema
In October, Apple released its first scripted immersive film production, Submerged, on Apple Vision Pro (AVP), its mixed-reality headset. The film follows a submarine crew during World War II who fight for survival after enduring a torpedo attack. The high-end technological production included a submarine set, a proprietary 3D camera by Apple and headsets for the crew to monitor the shots in real time. The production design is impressive, the use of close-ups peculiar and novel—it’s a well-crafted film. However, more than the film itself, the experience of watching Submerged on the headset is what truly shines. A making-of trailer […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the winter 2025 edition of Filmmaker. This quarter, we’re honored to have on our cover, photographed by Misan Harriman, RaMell Ross—an extraordinary director, photographer and artist who first graced these pages when we highlighted him on our 25 New Faces list in summer 2015. At the time, he was at work on his debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which we were fortunate to screen early footage of. In my interview with RaMell, he said about his work: “I enter filmmaking as an artist who is wild about poetics and its emotional influence. The film […] uses […]
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
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Ways of Seeing: DP Jomo Fray on Nickel Boys
From RaMell Ross’s first meeting with cinematographer Jomo Fray, the director was clear on why he wanted to lens his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys from a first-person point of view. How to do it was an entirely different matter: A puzzle that required months of tests, a 33-page typed shot list and an assortment of creative camera rigs to solve. The debut narrative feature from Oscar-nominated documentarian Ross, Nickel Boys details the brutal experiences of two Black teenagers at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1960s. Initially, the […]
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Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
At the beginning of Blitz, London is on fire. Against a night sky striated by German bombs, flames engulf obliterated city streets and brick buildings. A platoon of firemen scramble through dense smoke and charred remains to control an errant water hose, which whips around and knocks one of them unconscious. Within the foggy confusion, their shouts and commands get lost in the unrelenting, roaring soundscape, punctuated by distant air horns, panicked screams and a whistling aerial assault. It’s a blistering sequence, an aural nightmare that sets the mood for a war movie full of unexpected, terror-filled situations. Normally, sound […]
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Until the Last Beat: Nick Emerson on Editing Conclave
In Conclave, corruption, betrayal and clashing ideologies turn the selection of a new pope into fertile ground for a taut political thriller as English cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is caught in the middle of the struggle between a conservative caucus wishing to return the Catholic church to its dogmatic past and a liberal wing pushing for a more open-minded future. As dean of the proceedings, Fiennes is tasked with shaking off his own crisis of faith in order to guide 120 fractious cardinals sequestered in the Vatican to a consensus on a new leader. The parallels between the film’s […]
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Gale Force Cinema: Studying with Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson
On September 26, I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta, then drove north toward Rabun Gap, eventually turning west on Bettys Creek Road to find the sprawling 600-acre campus of the Hambidge Center in the heavy rain preceding the arrival of Hurricane Helene. I had signed up for a workshop called “Cinema From Scratch: From Camera Obscura to Handmade Film,” with Brooklyn-based artists Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, and the urge to meet the pair, whose work with the materiality of cinema I’ve loved for two decades, overrode this Angeleno’s terror of foul weather. Carefully tracking what was being called […]
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Talking About the Movies: Sigrid Nunez at the Cinema
When author Sigrid Nunez tells people that two of her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, have been adapted into films, she’s amused by their inevitable reactions. “They say very somberly, ‘Are they faithful to the book? Have [you] been insulted?’” “It’s charming because it’s so naive,” she laughs. “You’d never want a transcription!” For a novelist who’s been publishing since 1995, that two strong adaptations suddenly exist—both auteurist affairs retaining their novels’ concerns and essential architecture—is quite remarkable. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is a warm, witty adaptation of Nunez’s 2018 National Book […]
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Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
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Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
