On a film screen, a single edit flies by in the blink of an eye — usually, in 1/24th of a second. In the edit room, though, a cut is teased, strategized, finessed and obsessed over. We asked six editors from six of the fall’s best films to give us the frames on both sides of one particularly noteworthy cut — and to explain why these edits are so important. Call Me By Your Name Director: Luca Guadagnino Editor: Walter Fasano Fasano: Sensual. That’s the way I’d like to define our approach to the editing of Call Me By Your […]
“We tried to do everything we could.” “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean. He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” So kicks off an iconic sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the emotional summit of a movie that’s basically one iconic sequence after another: the moment on the pay- phone when Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro) hears his old friend Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) has just been whacked. Jimmy doesn’t just hang up — he bashes the phone into the receiver, finally stomping the booth into the ground between muffled sobs while the film’s narrator, […]
So many of our film industry colleagues shift their focus each fall to awards. Here at Filmmaker, we decided to devote more of our coverage, both in print and online, to distinguished collaborators who don’t receive quite the same amount of ink as directors and movie stars. I’m talking, of course, about below-the-line, and you’ll find almost a dozen of them highlighted throughout these pages. Just after we shipped our last print issue, Filmmaker celebrated its 25th anniversary at IFP Week by hosting the opening day of panels and seminars. One highlight was contributing editor Taylor Hess’s onstage version of […]
The headlines said it all: “Hollywood Faces August Death March,” “Bummer Summer” and “Beleaguered Box Office.” OK, Hollywood had a tough year, but does that necessarily apply to independent films? Well, as the saying goes, a receding tide sinks all boats. And so it was in 2017: If people were going out to fewer movies and streaming more episodic content at home, it affected both indie films and tentpoles. But if we look back at the films that premiered at Sundance 2017, there are a few instances to inspire hope: The Big Sick, of course, was the big one; Wind […]
John Finn, founder and CEO of Greenslate, remembers the good old days — and they weren’t that good. In 1995, when he first got into the independent film industry, he was a freelance production accountant, loaning himself out to productions where every penny counted. The standard practices of production accounting were daunting back then: there were seas of paperwork, year-end production company tax filings were strenuous efforts and, on set, accountants would spend entire days running around just trying to get signatures on start paperwork from producers and crew members. “I realized there was a need for financial acumen,” Finn recalls. […]
My origins as a filmmaker split the past 25 years in two. I’m now nearly as close in time to my debut efforts as I was to the early 1990s American New Wave when preparation for those efforts began. As an aspiring filmmaker with no formal film training, nothing was more inspiring to me during the mid-aughts than soaking up the narratives of DIY filmmakers who took it upon themselves to make something from nothing, way back in the grand ol’ 20th century. In reviewing the logistical and budgetary recaps presented in these pages by Peter Broderick more than two […]
It was more than 25 years ago when James Schamus called and asked me to be the coeditor of The Off-Hollywood Report, IFP’s magazine, which he’d just been hired to edit. The pay was $600 an issue, and I moonlighted from my full-time job curating performance art at New York’s The Kitchen, while James also produced movies. After a few issues, Good Machine, James’s company with Ted Hope, took off, and I became the editor. A couple of issues after that, the IFP and IFP West — now Film Independent, our former copublisher — met up at Sundance and decided […]
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
To say that the transformations that film and film technology have undergone since Filmmaker’s inaugural year — 1992 — are revolutionary is an understatement. DVD was still on the horizon, DV camcorders were several years away and the notion of shooting and editing a full-length motion picture with no actual film seemed downright futuristic. There have been book-lengths’ worth of changes since that first issue, but here are just a few. I. Metadata The information surrounding a film has stretched far beyond mere publicity (the classical era) and merchandising (post-1977 Star Wars), becoming enmeshed within the very fabric of a […]
In the infant years of this publication, Ted Hope wrote a piece musing on the death of 1990s off-Hollywood production models, and controversy arose! I was only 12 at the time, but I glean now that there was a sense then — at least in this tiny community of cultural producers and aspirants — that the debate within Hope’s “Indie Film is Dead,” (and then-partner James Schamus’s response “Long Live Indie Film”) mattered. But here we are, making magic together still. This 25-year-old magazine, and the tiny corner of the entertainment industry it covers with a level of detail and […]