Issues
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Making of the Murray Hustle
It might have seemed like an odd fit when I was brought in to help launch the new Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri’s esteemed School of Journalism in 2015. If one were to describe my films, such as Kate Plays Christine or Actress, the word “journalistic” isn’t likely to come to mind. Yet there I was, in the hallowed halls of the world’s oldest journalism school, working with Stacey Woelfel, a 30-year veteran of the institution, to build a new program from scratch. We wanted to create what Woelfel calls the “pirate radio […]
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Parting Shot: Naomi Ackie
“A cheerful lass around town” is how actress Naomie Ackie describes herself on her Twitter account. It’s an ingratiatingly modest introduction that belies the sense of discovery surrounding this British actress who makes her feature debut in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth. Ackie, who studied at London’s Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, had a career in U.K. television (Doctor Who is a notable credit) before she was cast by Oldroyd to play the quietly observant maid in his microbudget adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Russian novella, a role she imbues with an unexpected power. The success of the film […]
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Currents and Currencies
Ophélia Claude Chabrol was the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd to direct a feature film with Le Beau Serge in 1958, and he scored the first box-office hit of the French New Wave with his second movie, Les Cousins (1959). Yet it took almost another 10 years for him to hit his commercial and critical stride with a series of thrillers (most notably La Femme Infidele, La Rupture and Le Boucher) that would firmly establish Chabrol as the most reliable genre stylist of his generation. In between were a series of flops and for-hire assignments, all of […]
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Message From the Other Side
Matthew Heineman’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Cartel Land was a visceral cinematic journey into the Mexican drug wars, focusing on a pair of citizens hailing from both sides of the border who take vigilante action against the cartels. Heineman shot most of the movie himself, and his approach was to startle viewers with his level of access — he and his fellow shooters were in real danger — while, in postproduction, crafting his images, sounds and music with the emotional sweep of a narrative feature. Just two years after Cartel Land, Heineman has returned with another riveting doc, City of Ghosts, […]
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Editor’s Letter
As a number of our filmmaker readers wrap up classes and prepare to head into their senior year, whether high school or college, the question of film school arises. What’s the utility of film school in a time in which the very notion of film — or, perhaps, work within the film industry — is changing so much? This issue, Filmmaker brings you a suite of articles looking at a number of issues facing film schools — and, by extension, their students — today. Calum Marsh considers a number of broad trends affecting schools in this time of disruption, from […]
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Check Your Canon
The issue of diversity in the film canon — the movies celebrated and studied at film schools across the country — has come under hot debate in the past couple of years, with students starting conversations about the larger consequences of curricular omissions. “When I look at a syllabus and there’s no one from my perspective on there, I wonder if my ideas will be taken seriously by Hollywood or by any producer,” admits Zsaknor Powe, a junior studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It really affects the artistic self-esteem of the students,” explains Powe, […]
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Reactionary Wokeness
Near the beginning of Peter Watkins’s still-astounding 1971 fictional dystopian documentary Punishment Park, one of the African-American defendants, Lee Robert Brown, is hauled in handcuffs before a makeshift, extra-legal tribunal in the sweltering California desert, where he is instructed to defend his counter-cultural militancy. He says, in part: “You talk as if this is some great, civilized, nonviolent place. It ain’t. America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only goddamned thing that will command your attention.” These lines floated to the top of my head while sitting though James Mangold’s Logan, widely praised for its […]
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Spinning Out: Edgar Wright on Baby Driver
Writer and director Edgar Wright has long been a fan of mixing tones and genres in his movies, from his celebrated feature debut Shaun of the Dead and its unofficial companion pieces (Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) to the graphic novel adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of those movies were at least partially, if not primarily, comedies, and Wright’s latest film Baby Driver, which shares its title with a memoir by Jan Kerouac (Jack’s daughter), has plenty of verbal and visual laughs scattered throughout its narrative. This time, however, the laughs coexist with an emotional weight that’s […]
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Pedagogical Praxis
George Bernard Shaw’s famous adage, “Those who do do, those who can’t, teach. He can do, does. He who cannot, teaches,” fails when it comes to film schools. Scratch the surface of most film school faculty lists, and you’ll find filmmakers who not only do but are also doing. Developing scripts, raising financing and shooting while on sabbatical, university-ensconced independent filmmakers have one foot in the ivory tower and one foot in the shape-shifting world that is today’s independent film production. Inevitably, then, they bring their hard-fought wisdom into the classroom, which means they must also grapple with one tough […]
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All Day and a Night: Josh and Benny Safdie on Good Time
I’m in the Safdie brothers’ office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, looking at a giant Japanese King of New York poster, and we’re talking about fired FBI director James Comey, whose awkward dinner with Donald Trump has just hit the news. “The guy is 6 foot, 8 inches,” Benny says. Or maybe it’s Josh. My tape recorder isn’t turned on yet, and the two talk rapid-fire, trading sentence fragments and out-exclaiming each other. “And he refused to play basketball with Obama! The one president who played basketball, Comey would be the tallest guy on the court, and he didn’t want […]
