Reflections
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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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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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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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A Man in a Room: Joe Bini’s Burden of Other People’s Dreams
When the premise or form of a documentary film is difficult to explain, one is often hit with phrases like “Trust me” or “You just have to see it.” This has been an eventful year for such works, from Julian Castronovo’s byzantine Debut to the final stretch of Caveh Zahedi’s long-running The Show About the Show. Often falling between the cracks of the documentary world, these are not simple projects to describe, but in London they have a welcoming home at the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend. The festival describes itself as a home for unconventional nonfiction—everything that the genre can […]
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Going Up: Knoxville’s Elev8or Pitch Competition
With submissions currently open for the 2025 Elev8tor Pitch Competition at FILM FEST KNOX (deadline July 9!), we’re unpaywalling Scott Macaulay’s article on the program from Filmmaker’s Summer, 2025 print edition. — Editor There’s a familiar ritual when you arrive at a film festival: check into your hotel, AirbnB or friend’s couch, pick up your lanyard and head to the opening night event. Most often, that event is an out-of-competition, relentlessly inoffensive opening night film provided by a sponsor that stimulates polite but limited conversation at the afterparty. I’ve participated in that ritual so many times that I was pleasantly […]
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Moments of Flight: Lili Taylor and Amalia Ulman Go Birding
I was listening to the radio when Lili Taylor came on the air to talk about her first book, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. I immediately got excited: I have loved Lili’s work (Dogfight, Arizona Dream, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, The Addiction, I Shot Andy Warhol, Things I Never Told You, Pecker) for the longest time, so learning that she was a birder only added to her immensely cool aura. Until now, my relationship to birding had been via New York’s most famous bird, Flaco the owl. He took a fancy to one of the water tanks […]
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Open House: Callie Hernandez’s Berskhire Home and Temporary Film Studio
In 2023, Callie Hernandez turned her temporary home into a DIY movie studio. The actress, writer and producer had gone through major professional and personal upheaval when COVID upended her studio acting career and, shortly after, she lost her father. She kept working any way she could by collaborating on microbudget projects, such as Pete Ohs’s 2022 comedic ghost story Jethica, produced for less than $10,000 in a New Mexico Airbnb with just a handful of actors and Ohs taking on every behind-camera role himself. So, when a friend, dancer Brittany Bailey, asked whether Hernandez wanted to share an old […]
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Out of the Ashes: Life after the 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 finally be finished and whether I should sell my set of vintage lenses to pay for it, an action that meant I would likely not be able to make any more independent films. Sarah would be my swan song, finished in 2025 and then over and out. But on January 8th, our entire block in the Palisades burned, along with […]
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From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know […]
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Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and […]
