Issues
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Sometimes You Die
Ryan Green’s son, Joel, was diagnosed with terminal cancer just before his second birthday. There were surgeries. Chemo. Joel’s eyes turned in. He lost his hearing. After work done on his spine, he had to learn to walk again. But he didn’t die, and Green wanted to show the world “the miracle” that was his son. That Dragon, Cancer, due out later this year on the Android console OUYA, is hard to play. It’s not hard because the controls are difficult, or because there are millions of screens of data to manage or because of puzzles that hurt your brain […]
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Theatrical, Regained
In 2008, Jake Perlin launched his specialty repertory film label The Film Desk with the first U.S. release of Philippe Garrel’s 1991 I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore, a compressed tragic romance doubling as a eulogy for the director’s ex, Nico. Perlin followed with reissues of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Susan Sontag’s Promised Lands. Today, Perlin thinks that adventurous opening trio still represents the kind of movies he wants to reissue. “I go after movies I’m interested in, and part of my interest in them is that I can make prints.” With a few exceptions made for films where […]
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Editor’s Letter
Moments before writing this Editor’s Letter, an email landed in my inbox — a check-in from a writer/director who appeared in our very first edition of 25 New Faces, way back in 1998. That edition featured, among others, the actor Peter Sarsgaard, directors Jessica Yu and Jamie Babbit, d.p. Amy Vincent, and film composers Nathan Larson and Craig Wedren. All still active, as is the email-writer, Christina Ray Eichman (now just Christina Ray). “Some years are busy and some years are really lean,” she writes, “but there’s nothing that I’d rather be doing. I’ve done everything from directing and writing […]
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Still on the Job: Filmmakers on Their Second Jobs
Here’s the funny thing about an article on second jobs in filmmaking: It’s always relevant. The last piece I wrote for Filmmaker on this topic is still referenced: people continue to call me up to talk about it, and nearly as often as they did when it first appeared. But it’s been five years since I wrote it. So, as part of our ongoing look at the financial lives of artists, we thought it would be a good idea to revisit some of the filmmakers we interviewed in 2009 and see how their relationships with their second jobs have evolved […]
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All Together Now: Ned Benson on The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
When Ned Benson started writing The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby 10 years ago, he had no idea his directorial debut would permutate into a unique creature, or, by present count, four unique incarnations, all of which are equally subjective movie-going experiences. Eleanor Rigby world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 as two features, Her and Him, joined into a 201-minute juggernaut. Her immediately immerses us into the sorrow of one Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain), a woman who’s suffered a loss but cannot bear to talk about it, whether with her estranged husband, Conor (James McAvoy), her sister Katy […]
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Parting Shot
You won’t find a more disturbing portrait of psychopathology on screen than in James Franco’s upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. In a lead performance both riveting and repellent — and worthy of comparisons to Klaus Kinski — Scott Haze plays Lester Ballard, a necrophiliac killer inhabiting the back woods of Eastern Tennessee. And while there are plenty of awful acts one could note, the overriding feeling emitted by Haze’s primal performance is one of sheer, suffocating estrangement — a man’s near redaction from the human race. “I needed to go all in,” says Haze of his preparation […]
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Load & Play
12 O’Clock Boys Oscilloscope Laboratories — Aug. 5 Lotfy Nathan’s debut documentary gets up close and unsentimental with preteen Pug, whose only dream is to join the title crew of Baltimore’s weekend motorbike and four-wheeler riders. It’s a physically dangerous spectacle and a law-baiting traffic hazard for the city, but in Nathan’s NFL Films-style super-slow-mo it’s also a majestic procession and one-day release from systemic economic inequity and urban racial division. 12 O’Clock Boys sets four years of Pug’s life against the danger and thrill of his stunting idols’ most questionably liberating processions. — Vadim Rizov Under the Skin Lions […]
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The Last Mile
In the battle between big telecoms and tech companies over the issue of net neutrality, independent filmmakers are inevitably going to be collateral damage. While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hasn’t yet gone forward with plans to allow Internet Service Providers to charge websites for faster service, the current proposals suggest that challenging times are ahead for media makers and companies who use the Web, with potentially higher costs and increased barriers to entry. As Jamie Wilkinson, CEO of digital distribution platform VHX questions, “As the market gets more crowded, will the prices be driven up?” Without the deep pockets […]
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Maine Course
Ready for a big change, back in 1997, I packed up my L.A. apartment, loaded the cat into a pet carrier and hopped on a flight to the East Coast. It was May, and I was joining the team at the Maine Photographic Workshops for the summer to help edit a new publication devoted to toy camera photography. The Workshops were a major advocate of the Diana and the Holga, cheap plastic cameras used by amateurs and pros alike to create unpredictable, often stunning, black-and-white photos. In the tiny plane between Boston and Portland, I tried to ignore my BlackBerry’s […]
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Note This! How to Successfully — and Thankfully — Receive Notes on Your Film or Screenplay
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” – Bernard Malamud “Relax and take notes, while I take tokes.” – Notorious B.I.G. I was once at a work-in-progress screening of an independent film for which we were asked to give notes. It was a long cut, and we’d all come out in the rain. After the screening, the director sat by himself near us. When someone addressed him directly, he […]
