Reflections
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On “Filmmaker”‘s First Decade: A Dialogue Between Scott Macaulay, Karol Martesko-Fenster and Holly Willis
Curious as to what it would say, I recently asked ChatGPT for a history of Filmmaker. It returned a biography that incorrectly listed one of our longest-running occasional contributors as a founder, which made me realize how very little of Filmmaker’s origin story is online, available to be scraped by LLMs. To put some of that history officially on the record, and to salute my original co-founding partners, I sat down via Zoom with founding publisher Karol Martesko-Fenster and founding west coast editor Holly Willis to discuss our earliest days, before the internet succeeded in fully disrupting the arts publishing […]
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Anthony Dod Mantle on Cinematographer Origins
The Copenhagen-based British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is known for his innovation around diverse shooting formats, from the MiniDV of The Celebration to the SI-2K digital camera of Slumdog Millionaire and iPhone of his most recent, 28 Years Later. But as a producer who has worked with Anthony—on Harmony Korine’s MiniDV-shot julien donkey-boy and Gus Van Sant’s Easter—what I most associate with him is his ability to locate a script’s latent, least articulable meanings and then, using a combination of instinct, storytelling insight and technical prowess, bring those images to the screen. Recently, I shared a script with Anthony, and […]
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Images of the World (After the Death of Cinema)
“Things happen with David differently than you’d expect them to,” director Micah Magee wrote about writer and editor David Barker in a 2017 article on Filmmaker’s website. “You walk an entirely other route than you wanted and end up right where you need to be but not knowing quite how you got there.” Spending time with Barker on his trips to New York and sharing cuts of films I’ve produced with him, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of Magee’s words. Barker thinks not just about what makes a film “work”—exist as a coherent and effective artistic object—but how it […]
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Going Again: Laura Klein Interviewed by Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker’s goal has always been to include articles written by film workers as often as possible. We’ve had many directors write pieces or conduct interviews, and we’ve had articles written by below-the-line crew, too—DPs, production designers, editors, script supervisors, even dolly grips. The only reason that there aren’t more of these pieces in every issue is that the best technicians who have the most to impart are usually busy. They work all the time. Laura Klein is one of New York’s top independent film first assistant directors. Among her recent credits are Lucky Lu, Rebuilding, Friendship, Between the Temples and […]
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Dwelling
“Getting lost” was a goal of the Iva Asks project, for which Iva Radivojević, inspired by near-constant travel, made a weekly series of lovely, perceptive and allusive short essay films about the people and places she’d visit. In 2018, the 2013 25 New Face filmmaker moved her home base from Brooklyn to the Greek island of Lesbos. I asked her if she’d reflect on that change, and she responded with this poem accompanied by Super 8 stills of her new home. Dwelling When I inquire with Simon(e) about the idea of a return, they ask, “Does a return require something […]
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A Letter From the Brink
Brandon Harris worked with Robin O’Hara and me at Forensic Films in the aughts as our office manager and development associate, where his passion for cinema, sharp insights and loquacious charm never failed to engage the directors who’d take a meeting around our table. Long a contributing editor at Filmmaker—he remains the only of our writers to interview David Fincher—he went on to a myriad of positions and activities, including development executive at Amazon Studios. He’s currently president and, with Shaka King, co-founder of the production company I’d Watch That. For Filmmaker’s 25th anniversary issue, Harris essayed the state of […]
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A Return to the Video Store
In this business, there are people you consider friends who you largely only see at film festivals. Curator, producer and filmmaker Jonathan Marlow is one of mine, and over the years I’ve gained much from his observations on cinema and the business. Something of a bellwether, he was an early employee at Amazon, GreenCine and Fandor, among others. Recently, his innate forward-thinking has been connecting shards of the past with the future as his work has encompassed the experimental film streaming platform Paracme and, most recently, the executive directorship of a physical media video store, which he discusses here. — […]
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Film and Psychoanalysis
Andrea Sisson was a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, but I only met her in person this past spring, at the Museum of the Moving Image’s premiere of When the Phone Rang, by another New Face from that year, Iva Radivojević. Andrea, whose films include I Send You This Place and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, came up to say hello and mentioned that she had been studying psychoanalysis and is now a therapist as well as a filmmaker. I was immediately intrigued—in the past couple of years I’ve done some remedial psychoanalytic studies, finally reading Freud and Lacan and […]
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Producing and Motherhood
One of my favorite Filmmaker articles is contributing editor Taylor Hess’s winter 2018 piece, “Disclosed: Producers and Therapists on Dealing with the Stress of a Demanding Profession.” Hess, whose producing credits include Between the Temples and John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, found parallels between the work producers do and that of therapists. (I suggested the article to Hess after joking for years that when two producers get together, one in production and the other not, the conversation ultimately turns into “producer therapy.”) When I asked Hess how she’d like to follow up that piece for my final […]
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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 […]
