While the migration of independent filmmakers to the small screen is a much remarked about phenomenon, another entertainment platform, one growing even faster than television, is opening its loving arms to independent directors, screenwriters and producers. Podcasting, for its first decade or so, has consisted primarily of interview shows, like Marc Maron’s WTF, and the occasional fresh approach to journalism, like Serial. But now it’s moving more and more into the fiction world and creating alluring creative opportunities for independent storytellers. Founded in 2014, Gimlet Media has been making a name for itself producing shows like StartUp (about starting a […]
The Killing of America The recent Severin Films Blu-ray/DVD release of the 1981 documentary The Killing of America marks the first time this notorious cult item has ever been commercially distributed in the U.S. in any form — ironic, given that it’s a film about a particularly American issue made by two American filmmakers, but it apparently hit too close to home at the time. So despite being a top 10 box-office hit that year in the country that actually produced it (Japan), the film never saw the light of day in the U.S. other than an extended run at New […]
A year ago in this space I introduced my story on the STARZ show The Girlfriend Experience. It was our first-ever TV cover, and it kicked off a year in which the cultural conversation flowed from Moonlight to Atlanta, from Cameraperson to OJ: Made in America. I guess the Winter is our future issue, then, because, a year later, illustrated by artist Kim Dong-kyu’s witty update of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” here is our first virtual reality, or VR, cover. This time the writer is Google’s principal filmmaker for VR, Jessica Brillhart, and her […]
Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, begins with a classic horror movie trope: an evening spent in a haunted house. Kristen Stewart plays expat Maureen — not a paranormalist or twentysomething thrill-seeker but a personal clothes buyer and stylist to Kyra, a celebrity socialite and member of the Davos set. Something of a savant, Maureen does this job with an instinctual certainty but little evident pleasure. Whether that’s due to her preternatural cool or an overlay of mourning is unclear. But several months earlier, her brother, with whom she shares a congenital heart condition, died in a drafty mansion somewhere […]
Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw is an earnest, sincere work with a clean pop sensibility that also happens to be about cannibalism. When mild-mannered vegetarian college freshman Justine (Garance Marillier) joins her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school, she discovers an appetite for human flesh that she didn’t know she had. Raw is first and foremost their story, and the plot hinges entirely on whether or not their relationship is tearing itself apart or stitching itself back together. Like all siblings, they understand each other better than anyone else, simultaneously totally devoted and flippantly cruel. Marillier and Rumpf’s […]
Occasionally a movie has the look and feel of something totally original, immediately allowing one to see the protean leap its maker has taken from novice to master. Someday, when the American movie landscape is no more, simply the purview of art historians who live on Mars or on ocean front property in what we used to call Indiana, people will still regard Barry Jenkins’s startlingly effective Moonlight as a unique and supple flower, the kind of heartrending experience that gives rise to the notion that motion pictures can be a lasting, emotionally resonant art form. Drawn from MacArthur “genius” […]
Jennifer Lame is the editor of Manchester by the Sea. She’s best known for having edited all of Noah Baumbach’s narrative films since Frances Ha and is currently in postproduction on his next film, Yeh Din Ka Kissa. At what point did you join the project? I had been following it for a while, since I am a big fan of Kenny’s work. Between my agent and others, I got sent two or three drafts of the script and read them all, but I couldn’t seem to get an interview, I think because they were looking for someone with a bit […]
Before we hit the halfway mark in German filmmaker Maren Ade’s masterful Toni Erdmann, Winfried suddenly confronts his adult daughter Ines: “Are you even a human?” He’s been abandoned for hours in Bucharest’s largest shopping mall as she chaperoned the wealthy wife of her employer. For Winfried, it’s a moment of unexpected gravity that temporarily disrupts his shaggy-dog, prankster-father persona. Visibly wounded by the attack, Ines swiftly resumes her role as the sleek, self-controlled daughter, and fires back, “Of course you’d think that.” It’s painful and uneasy to watch, and, as with most of the scenes between Winfried (Peter Simonischek) […]
In the summer issue of this magazine, I wrote about how television is written and some of the ways that a screenwriter might break into writing for television — starting as an assistant in the writers’ room, fellowship programs, being hired directly to staff and selling a pitch or a pilot. As I noted in conclusion, whichever route you take, it all starts with a great pilot — that’s the sample that your agents will use to put you up for staffing, that’s the usual application piece for fellowships, and that’s even what assistants submit for consideration. So what exactly […]
This summer I have brutalized myself with one challenging theater drama after another, and I have been utterly enriched by the truthful and uncompromising bleakness of these experiences. Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning The Humans is a play about a family that comes together in a crummy New York City apartment to share secrets of infidelity, sickness, aging, unemployment and just overall sadness. It ends not with a resounding “chin up” march into sunlight but with a cinematic, dialogue-free, horrific sequence that plunges us even deeper into the dark than when it started. Watching the play in a crowded theater is […]