Reflections
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Back to Zero: 25 Fragments on Yong Soon Min, Film Theory and Genocide
Producer, director and screenwriter James Schamus has been an invaluable presence at Filmmaker from its earliest days. He wrote the introduction to our very first cover story—a dialogue between Simple Men’s Hal Hartley and Laws of Gravity’s Nick Gomez—and has contributed many articles since, including a remembrance of Raúl Ruiz, a 2017 conversation with mathematician Cathy O’Neil about how algorithms are reshaping society, his debate with Ted Hope about whether independent film is alive or dead, introductions to the work of Elia Suleiman and cultural theorist Franco Moretti and 2015’s critical manifesto of sorts: “23 Fragments on the Future of […]
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So You Want To Rule the Indie Film World (Redux)
In Filmmaker’s fall 1995 edition, producer Ted Hope’s two-part “Indie Film is Dead/Long Live Indie Film” offered a blunt critique of the independent film business coupled with a more optimistic call for a better future. (The former contained lines like, “Back-end is bullshit,” and “the IFPs and Sundance are the lone beacons, but even these not-for-profit groups are reliant on corporate dollars from the distributors for survival”; the latter, “Form an independent producers association.”) Running with a rejoinder from his Good Machine business partner James Schamus (“‘Develop a specialized film database?’ We already have one—it’s called gossip”), it was an extraordinary dialogue […]
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On Eisenstein, Godard and Welles: Michael Almereyda & Radu Jude in Conversation
This past summer I was privileged to attend the Oxbelly Retreat in Costa Navarino, Greece, and to sit in on an intimate discussion between directors Michael Almereyda (Hamlet, Experimenter, Tesla), and Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25, Dracula). While heading Oxbelly’s screenwriting labs this year, Jude interviewed Almereyda about his influences, which Almereyda distilled to a set of paintings and photographs. In their conversation, a mutual love of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard was expressed, and I was eager to read them expand on these passions […]
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Shooting the 25 New Faces
For a stretch from the aughts into the 2010s, Richard Koek was our 25 New Faces photographer. He’d meet our young selections in their homes, in restaurants and on the street, always returning with creative, alive images. He also shot several stunning covers for us, including the Safdie Brothers for Uncut Gems and Barry Jenkins, Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins for Medicine for Melancholy. Here, he remembers his early process and two specific shoots: Michel Gondry and Lena Dunham. — Scott Macaulay Filmmaker asked me for several years to photograph emerging directors for its 25 New Faces section. As a […]
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Independent Film’s Next Chapter
From observing the need to budget minimum wage when making a microbudget film to decrying the influence of television on cinema culture, producer and Emerson College associate professor Mike Ryan has long expressed a blunt, radical truth-telling in the pages of Filmmaker. Here, he asserts that the economic model that drove much independent production in the 1990s—creatively imagined features enabled by equity financing that was itself predicated on the existence of a competitive acquisitions market—is gone, but that this development is not actually one to lament. For those who transgress, the future is yours. The Hollywood-dependent system of so-called indie […]
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Historicizing the Independent Awards Race: Manohla Dargis Speaks with Scott Macaulay
A garish panel from an R. Crumb cartoon was the cover of Filmmaker’s spring 1995 edition. Inside were interviews with Hal Hartley, David Salle, Lourdes Portillo and Gregory Nava; a David Leitner article on new trends in film lighting; a survey of new independent distributors; and Mikki Halpin on how the internet could help independent filmmakers. Finally, there was “The Vision Thing,” Manohla Dargis’s take on the Spirit Awards, the fundraiser of our co-publisher at the time, the IFP/West (now Film Independent). It was a pivotal year for the Spirits: they had previously announced that for the first time films […]
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Reflecting on 33 Years of “Filmmaker” and Independent Film
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues, we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns: the struggles of early career filmmakers, changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to refer just to the past; reflections can radiate towards the […]
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A Most Violent Year: Vampires, Families, 2025 in Film
Since our 2019 winter edition, the brilliant Mark Asch has done something here that isn’t our default position; he’s examined films together, not in isolation, and has teased out what, for him, are their deeper meanings and interconnections—how they say something about our society today. Here, he considers images inside and outside the arthouse, finding trenchant, sometimes troubling messages elided by rote awards season discourse. — Scott Macaulay I remember about a decade ago when Charlie Kirk was a teenage gimmick, a debate-club prodigy haunting college campuses demanding to be taken seriously, provoking protests and deplatformings and then spinning this […]
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On “Filmmaker”‘s Fall 2003 Issue
In his 2017 25 New Face profile of writer/director Ricky D’Ambrose (Notes on an Appearance, The Cathedral), Vadim Rizov described the filmmaker as having “a disciplined, honed gaze refined over years of self-tutoring.” I ran into Ricky recently and told him I was leaving Filmmaker; he responded by telling me that it was not just the magazine but one specific issue that was a vital part of his self-education. In editing this magazine, I’ve always been conscious of the educational breadcrumbs contained within each interview, as my own cinematic self-tutoring followed similar patterns, so I was excited to learn what […]
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Richard Kern on Shooting for “Filmmaker”
In the ’80s, I’d rent Richard Kern films like Right Side of My Brain and Fingered from Kim’s Video, vibing on the mixture of artistry and exploitation contained in the work of this pioneer of the so-called Cinema of Transgression. In the ’90s, shortly after the release of his first photo book, New York Girls, we got to work with him at Filmmaker as he became one of our regular photographers of directors and talent at festivals and around New York City. Kern Filmmaker covers included Robert Duvall for The Apostle; Kimberly Peirce, Chloë Sevigny and Hilary Swank for Boys […]
