Issues
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The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee”
What if Jesus already made his way back to us in the 18th century, and we just missed it? The titular British-born spiritual leader played by Amanda Seyfried in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee believed herself to be the female embodiment of Jesus Christ and brought her scripture to Colonial America, enticed by its supposed promise of spiritual freedom. Co-written by Fastvold, who directed, and her partner Brady Corbet, and arriving only a year after their architectural epic The Brutalist, Ann Lee continues the pair’s interest in eccentric individuals who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of what […]
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Revolutionary Sounds: Sound Editor Christopher Scarabosio on “One Battle After Another”
Christopher Scarabosio only needed 15 minutes to start dreaming. The supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer was jet-lagged, drifting between trips to London, when writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to watch the first hour of One Battle After Another. The dialogue was rough, the score spare, but even in that stripped-down state, Scarabosio was astonished at what his longtime collaborator had put on the screen. There were imposing semi-trucks darting across a bypass; fireworks lighting up the night sky; car chases and shootouts across Southern California. When the projector shut off, Scarabosio only had one question for the filmmaker: […]
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I Want Aura
Filmmaker has always had a sideways relationship to film criticism, mostly commissioning various “Critic’s Notebooks” out of festivals. An exception has been the original, paradigm-shifting work of Nicholas Rombes, whose various Filmmaker columns over the years—“Time and Tempo,” “Into the Splice” and his magisterial magnum opus, “The Blue Velvet Project”—have found transformative new ways to animate the ways we experience feature films. As Rombes begins a new project—he’s the series editor of Bloomsbury’s new Timecodes book series—I asked him to consider the virtues of the edited publication in the age of websites and Substack. — Scott Macaulay My first exposure […]
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The Way It Was
Among the canonical pictures of my youth were the New York No Wave films of the 1980s, with my favorite being Eric Mitchell’s Underground U.S.A., a sardonic reworking of Sunset Blvd. starring gallerist Patti Astor. I saw it first on a New York public television station, then programmed it at my campus film club. As for Mitchell, I spot him around from time to time, usually at Anthology Film Archives, where I bumped into him last spring at a screening of another No Wave classic, Michael Oblowitz’s King Blank. He told me that he was in the process of restoring […]
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Tension and Releases: Editor Ronald Bronstein on “Marty Supreme”
Ronald Bronstein premiered his feature Frownland at South by Southwest the same year as Josh Safdie’s short We’re Going to the Zoo played, and he felt a pang of insecurity when he saw it. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s somebody also vying for the same kind of immediacy,” said the veteran writer-editor. “It was like my feet were made of lead; this guy was like a helium balloon.” Back in New York City, Josh introduced himself to Bronstein and convinced him to play a character based on his own father. Bronstein helped write and edit the project, which […]
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Microbudget Case Study: “Free Time”
Filmmaker’s coverage of the microbudget film movement was a large part of putting us on the map in the early 1990s. In a series of articles, Peter Broderick broke down the budgets of films such as Clerks; El Mariachi; Clean, Shaven and others, delivering on our mission of demystifying the process of independent film production. (Several years later, I contributed one of these pieces when I broke down the budget of Pi.) With microbudget filmmaking making a resurgence lately, I asked Ryan Martin Brown from this year’s 25 New Faces list if he’d give us the budget of his extremely […]
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An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”
Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and […]
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Revisiting the Neoliberal Echo Chamber
Of the millions of words we have published in thousands of articles, one sentence continues to haunt me, so trenchant and unsparing is its critique of the system undergirding so much of the work we champion here at Filmmaker. In a 2023 article titled, “Rebelling Against the Independent Film Industrial Complex,” Keisha Nicole Knight and Sophia Haid wrote, “In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics.” With […]
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The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams”
Composers are often brought on to score a film very late into the process, but Bryce Dessner was writing music for Train Dreams before director Clint Bentley began production. A longtime collaborator of Bentley’s, alongside his creative partner Greg Kwedar, Dessner has scored every narrative film project of theirs, either alone or with his brother Aaron, beginning with Transpecos. “Because we’re old friends, I was aware that they were thinking about [adapting Train Dreams] for a long time,” explains the musician. “I had read the book [and] early versions of the script. There’s a lot of information in the early […]
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Making The Mastermind: A Conversation with Kelly Reichardt Producers Neil Kopp and Anish Savjani
I’ve been working on film sets in New York, and recently Los Angeles, over the past decade, but my personal goal, shared with many friends and colleagues, is to write, direct and produce independent films that are impactful and culturally relevant—and to find financially sustainable ways to do so. Working multiple production jobs (2nd AC, carpenter, truck driver, key PA, line producer) on shorts, TV shows, commercials as well as features—the latter including Michel Franco’s Memory, Olmo Schnabel’s Pet Shop Days, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante and Sean Baker’s Anora—I’ve tried to soak up as much knowledge as […]
