There’s been a great deal of talk recently in our film community about the concept of sustainability. There hasn’t, however, been a great deal of precision. Take the word itself — “sustainable.” It’s most often defined by its absence. But by the time we ask, “What is a sustainable career?” the answer comes back, and it’s usually simply: “Not this.” We’ve adopted the idea of sustainability from the environmental movement, where it describes the quest to make an ecosystem stable and long-lasting. Sustainability’s myriad definitions range from the utopian (“all systems in dynamic balance”) to the terse, harsh pragmatism of its Latin root, […]
Just days after the March 2011 tsunami off the Japanese coast, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and documentarian Jake Price found his way to the Tōhoku region of northern Japan, the area hardest hit by the devastation. He stayed for months, living with Japan’s internal refugees and carefully chronicling their lives as they sought to come to terms with the disaster and rebuild. The result, Unknown Spring (2013), is an online interactive documentary that testifies to its subjects’ resilience and humanity in the face of unspeakable odds. But Price, who has had photography assignments across the globe, is no “parachute journalist.” Even before […]
Cannes 2016 By Blake Williams Sometime around the fourth week of April — after word got out that Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux had rejected Bertrand Bonello’s highly anticipated new film, Nocturama, in which a gang of young radicals plant bombs all over Paris (a film that was definitely finished and was definitely submitted to and seen by the selection committee); after various news outlets began circulating footage of the Cannes municipal police force’s elaborate terror drills at the Palais des Festivals, with faux wounded tourists writhing in agony on the pavement, simulated car bombs, coordinated police raids and all; […]
Maybe you’ve had some success writing features. You’ve sold a spec, landed an assignment, made the Black List or wrote and directed your own indie feature. Maybe you’re a playwright, or you’ve got a web series, or you’ve made a few shorts, or even written a few good features. Or maybe you’re simply an emerging writer working toward that first sale or produced credit. No matter — in today’s film business, you can be any one of the above and still be thinking about one thing: moving into television. If you’re thinking about trying a TV staffing job, or even […]
David Lowery has directed love stories about siblings, spouses, parents and children, so it follows logically that his next film would be a love story between an orphan and his dragon. Pete’s Dragon, Lowery’s nominal remake of the 1977 Disney film, lives in a tender, magical world that exists outside of time, in the wilderness of childhood imagination. The wonder, lack of cynicism and strong imagery of the natural world evoke cinema of the late ’70s and early ’80s; The Black Stallion and E.T. come to mind. Lowery seems fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves, the tall tales, the […]
The following article appears in our Spring, 2016 print edition and is appearing from behind our paywall today for the first time. Will 2016 be remembered as the year that Amazon and Netflix gobbled up the indie film market? Probably. While the two online behemoths could always change their strategies in the next several months, the ramifications of their first quarter dominance stretched far and wide, sending shockwaves through the business. But there were other changes afoot, as well. Here are five industry trends that continue to linger long after Park City. 1. The Enduring Impact of Amazon and Netflix Okay, Amazon […]
Many years ago I was invited to be the co-editor of The Off-Hollywood Report, the precursor magazine to Filmmaker, by its new editor, James Schamus. To start me off, James handed me a long-form assignment. He told me about several UCLA film school students who were skipping their thesis shorts and going straight ahead to making no-budget features while in school. I talked to a number of them, including Caveh Zahedi, whose first feature (directed with Greg Watkins), was just one of these films — A Little Stiff — and that feature appeared in our first issue. So, I’m finding […]
“I was once Inside Llewyn Davis. Now I am Mad Max: Fury Road.” I came up with that Instagram caption while working a festival in suburban New Jersey last spring. Toward the end of the festival, UPS made a delivery of a couple of battered Deluxe/Technicolor cases that had seen better days. The label on the box read Tina’s Heroes, which was the secret title that Warner Brothers shipped Mad Max to theaters as. I chuckled at the reference to the hit song from Beyond Thunderdome, and then I looked at all of the other labels. There was a large piece of […]
Throughout the history of cinema, from It’s a Wonderful Life and Doctor Zhivago to Fargo and The Ice Storm, filmmakers have relied on snow to create authentic settings and magical worlds. But in the age of climate change, capturing snow on film has become a serious challenge for filmmakers no longer able to count on the real thing, as was the case with last year’s The Hateful Eight and The Revenant. Of course, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro Iñárritu have the financial resources to enable them to wait for snowfall, generate artificial snow, create CGI snow, or any combination […]
Regional film festivals all start to feel the same after a while. There’s at least one feature dramatizing the life of a white guy in Brooklyn. The organizers tell you about a farm-to-table restaurant down the street from the movie theater with craft beer you just have to try. When you ask the volunteer driving you around if they grew up in town, they answer, “sort of,” and give the name of some nearby suburb. And usually there’s a VIP party in an antique store or a mansion owned by the town’s historical society where you meet white-haired locals wearing […]