Sundance
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“We Didn’t Want to Just Chuck in a Bunch of New Bits”: Editor David Timoner on Dig! XX
Winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2004, Ondi Timoner’s DIG! used the developing careers of indie rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre to examine the complex, often incompatible relationship between art and commerce, as well as the one between the bands’ frontmen. Now, Dig! XX revisits the story, digitally remastered and enhanced and complete with an additional 35 minutes of footage. Below, Editor David Timoner, Ondi Timoner’s brother and frequent collaborator, discusses revisiting his first major project and how he sought to improve it for its twentieth anniversary. See all responses to our annual Sundance […]
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“The Images Mostly Emerged Intuitively”: DP Yunus Roy Imer on The Outrun
In The Outrun, a London woman’s return to Scotland’s Orkney Islands as she attempts to reconcile herself with the past and her drug addictions. Based on the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot and directed by Nora Fingscheidt (The Unforgivable, System Crasher), the film includes on-location shooting in both London and on Orkney. Below, cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer recounts the difficulty of shooting a harsh Orkney winter during the summer and explains the various cameras and lenses he used to make sure the look of the film was always perfect. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How […]
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“Never Being Satisfied and Always Asking the Hard Questions”: Editor Joseph Krings on Winner and Love Me
Joseph Krings (Galveston, Captain Fantastic) is the credited editor on two films at Sundance this year: the sci-fi animated Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and Winner, a biopic about Reality Winner, the imprisoned whistleblower who leaked NSA documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Below, Krings discusses both films at length, touching on the challenges of editing a film that is going to be heavily reworked in animation, finding the right balance between tragedy and gallows humor, and the peculiar VFX challenges of both films. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: […]
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“Simplicity Would Become One of Our Fundamental Rules”: DP Ximena Amann on Sujo
Sujo, the Sundance 2024 World Cinema Dramatic Competition premiere directed by Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, follows the life of a Mexican boy who is orphaned when his father, a cartel gunman, is killed. Below, cinematographer Ximena Amann, who also shot Rondero’s previous film, The Darkest Days of Us, discusses the challenges and delights of working with children and shooting in a protected natural area with minimal equipment. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led […]
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“Creating Editorial Iterations Can Often Be Like Smelling Too Much Perfume”: Editor Susan Korda on Sujo
In Sujo, co-directed by Astrid Rondero (The Darkest Days of Us) and Fernanda Valadez (Identifying Features) and premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, the eponymous child is left orphaned when his father, a cartel gunman, is killed. The film then follows the turbulence that echoes throughout his life as he grows older. The film’s editor, Susan Korda, is best known for the Oscar-nominated For All Mankind, but she also edited Rondero’s The Darkest Days of Us and Valadez’s Identifying Features. Rondero and Valadez also worked on each other’s films, making this […]
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“We Knew It Was Going to Be a Bit of a Sprint”: Editor Arielle Zakowski on Didi
In the U.S. Dramatic Competition film Didi, the feature debut of writer-director Sean Wang, a Taiwanese American boy learns to skate handle the emotions of adolescent longing in the summer before high school. Set in 2008, the film is replete with period signifiers familiar to any child of the era, including MySpace friend rankings, AIM messaging, and Windows XP. In her discussion of Didi below, editor Arielle Zakowski, whose most recent credit is the 2023 computer screen film Missing, explains the importance of test screenings and how she brought the film’s period setting to life and contrasted the excitement of the […]
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“I Get to Work with So Many Talented People”: DP Kevin Fletcher on It’s What’s Inside
In the Sundance 2024 Midnight premiere It’s What’s Inside, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, an uninvited guest with a mysterious suitcase derails a pre-wedding party. The film’s colorful visual palette, realized by Kevin Fletcher, echoes the high-octane nature of the plot. Below, Fletcher shares some of the influences on the film’s distinct look and extols the virtues of preparatory work. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this […]
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“Can Someone Who Uses a Wheelchair Access this Location?” | Amber Sealey, Out of My Mind
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? There was a practical aspect to choosing our locations and sets for Out of My Mind that is not usually at the forefront of filmmakers’ minds: Can someone who uses a wheelchair access this location and every aspect of this location? Our […]
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“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]
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“Trying To Fit Someone’s Dream Into a Confined Budget Is Not Easy”: Producer Sam Intili on I Saw the TV Glow
A strange late-night TV show entrances teen loners, played by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine, in I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature. The program depicts a supernatural world existing underneath the duo’s suburban sprawl, hinting at the horror that lurks just under the surface of white picket fence aspirations. First-time producer Sam Intili shares how they came on board the project and their pride in the finished film never compromising on “the queerness or explicit transness” of the material. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path […]
