Issues
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Going Again: Laura Klein Interviewed by Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker’s goal has always been to include articles written by film workers as often as possible. We’ve had many directors write pieces or conduct interviews, and we’ve had articles written by below-the-line crew, too—DPs, production designers, editors, script supervisors, even dolly grips. The only reason that there aren’t more of these pieces in every issue is that the best technicians who have the most to impart are usually busy. They work all the time. Laura Klein is one of New York’s top independent film first assistant directors. Among her recent credits are Lucky Lu, Rebuilding, Friendship, Between the Temples and […]
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Images of the World (After the Death of Cinema)
“Things happen with David differently than you’d expect them to,” director Micah Magee wrote about writer and editor David Barker in a 2017 article on Filmmaker’s website. “You walk an entirely other route than you wanted and end up right where you need to be but not knowing quite how you got there.” Spending time with Barker on his trips to New York and sharing cuts of films I’ve produced with him, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of Magee’s words. Barker thinks not just about what makes a film “work”—exist as a coherent and effective artistic object—but how it […]
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Dwelling
“Getting lost” was a goal of the Iva Asks project, for which Iva Radivojević, inspired by near-constant travel, made a weekly series of lovely, perceptive and allusive short essay films about the people and places she’d visit. In 2018, the 2013 25 New Face filmmaker moved her home base from Brooklyn to the Greek island of Lesbos. I asked her if she’d reflect on that change, and she responded with this poem accompanied by Super 8 stills of her new home. Dwelling When I inquire with Simon(e) about the idea of a return, they ask, “Does a return require something […]
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A Letter From the Brink
Brandon Harris worked with Robin O’Hara and me at Forensic Films in the aughts as our office manager and development associate, where his passion for cinema, sharp insights and loquacious charm never failed to engage the directors who’d take a meeting around our table. Long a contributing editor at Filmmaker—he remains the only of our writers to interview David Fincher—he went on to a myriad of positions and activities, including development executive at Amazon Studios. He’s currently president and, with Shaka King, co-founder of the production company I’d Watch That. For Filmmaker’s 25th anniversary issue, Harris essayed the state of […]
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A Return to the Video Store
In this business, there are people you consider friends who you largely only see at film festivals. Curator, producer and filmmaker Jonathan Marlow is one of mine, and over the years I’ve gained much from his observations on cinema and the business. Something of a bellwether, he was an early employee at Amazon, GreenCine and Fandor, among others. Recently, his innate forward-thinking has been connecting shards of the past with the future as his work has encompassed the experimental film streaming platform Paracme and, most recently, the executive directorship of a physical media video store, which he discusses here. — […]
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Film and Psychoanalysis
Andrea Sisson was a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, but I only met her in person this past spring, at the Museum of the Moving Image’s premiere of When the Phone Rang, by another New Face from that year, Iva Radivojević. Andrea, whose films include I Send You This Place and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, came up to say hello and mentioned that she had been studying psychoanalysis and is now a therapist as well as a filmmaker. I was immediately intrigued—in the past couple of years I’ve done some remedial psychoanalytic studies, finally reading Freud and Lacan and […]
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Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague”
In setting out to make Nouvelle Vague, his effervescent ode to the birth of French New Wave cinema, Richard Linklater knew from the start that realizing his artistic ambition—to dramatize Jean-Luc Godard’s making of Breathless—would involve revisiting both the film’s experimental, guerilla-style production and the larger time and place that gave rise to it. To bring audiences back through history to Paris circa 1959—not only to the same bustling streets and lively corner cafés where Breathless filmed but also the intimate apartments, hotel rooms and offices where Godard and his collaborators convened—Linklater turned to French production designer Katia Wyszkop (The […]
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Scott Macaulay’s Final Editor’s Letter as Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief
The following is Filmmaker co-founder and editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay’s final Editor’s Letter, from the Winter 2026 print issue. Edit a magazine for 33 years and by the time you must write a final editor’s letter, you have plenty of examples to draw from. Knowing that some day I’d be writing this send-off, I’ve found myself taking note of all the departing missives that have come across my coffee table and screens—quite a few, given the tumult across the film, non-profit and journalism worlds these past decades. There’s the most common type of farewell: plucky, somewhat anodyne, with the promise not […]
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Producing and Motherhood
One of my favorite Filmmaker articles is contributing editor Taylor Hess’s winter 2018 piece, “Disclosed: Producers and Therapists on Dealing with the Stress of a Demanding Profession.” Hess, whose producing credits include Between the Temples and John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, found parallels between the work producers do and that of therapists. (I suggested the article to Hess after joking for years that when two producers get together, one in production and the other not, the conversation ultimately turns into “producer therapy.”) When I asked Hess how she’d like to follow up that piece for my final […]
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One Trillion Possibilities: The Internet Archive and the Vanishing Open Web
Twelve slashed zeros and a one, made of wood and latex paint, stand tall on the roof of the former church where the Internet Archive is headquartered in San Francisco. The organization commissioned this artwork by Jesse Walton to mark an unusual achievement this autumn. For the past 30 years, the digital library has preserved websites, and its collection now exceeds a trillion pages. It’s a mind-boggling milestone that speaks to both the deluge of websites created and edited over the decades and the organization’s concurrent endeavor to catalog digital content in its vastness. The way we access web pages […]
