Reflections
Featured 1/4
Out of the Ashes: Life after the Fires
Los Angeles after the January 2025 fires
The first few days of 2025, I had been asking myself if this would be the year that Sarah—a film I’ve been making for 12 years, about a girl I met when I was making my second feature, Rich Hill—would… Read more
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Necessary Filmmaking: An Excerpt from Jake Mahaffy’s Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to […]
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Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California
On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David […]
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Stepping Inside: How David Lynch Tapped Into the Unconscious
David Lynch’s death was a big personal loss of a friend, confidant and mentor, but it’s been astonishing to me how many people who knew him only through his art have been affected. He got inside our heads so effectively; like Kafka, he had remarkable access to his unconscious. He seemed as though he could dream while awake, and being on a set with him, not only were you entering his dream, but everybody there was having a collective dream. I saw Eraserhead when I was in high school; friends took me to a midnight showing at the University of […]
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Weird Life Events: Universal Language Director Matthew Rankin’s Awards Season Diary
30 August 2024. Montreal. Our movie has been named as Canada’s Official Supplication to the Academy Awards. Lord, please increase my bewilderment! So crazy. I think it’s the first Winnipeg movie to enter this horserace since Richard Condie’s La Salla in 1996. We are told that months of campaigning await! We are not competitive people, but Pirouz Nemati came over and led the whole team in a 12-minute group hug, and we started practicing our back-slapping and glad-handing techniques. David Lynch says, “Look ‘em in the eye and speak from the heart.” FOOTNOTE: My Hater has started an ambitious letter-writing […]
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Passing Through the Black Lodge: David Lynch and Native Culture
There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert: It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and […]
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Access Against Common Sense
“Just because we are in the same room does not mean that we belong to the room or to each other.”—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 10 “We come to this place for magic.”—Nicole Kidman, “AMC Theatres: We Make Movies Better,” 2021 I recently began reading New York Film Festival co-founder Amos Vogel’s 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, because my film An All-Around Feel Good was premiering at this year’s festival. I had seen several people on social media urging filmmakers to boycott the event for its entanglements with sponsors complicit with Israel’s genocidal siege […]
