Sundance
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“Those Four Frames Made the Difference Between That Interaction Being Funny and Not at All”: Editor Zach Siegel on Quarter Life Poetry
Samantha Jayne’s Quarter Life Poetry began life as a Tumblr and Instagram, transforming her millennial 20something experiences into doodles and poems. Now it’s an ambitious series set to premiere on FX Networks later this year, brought to life with director Arturo Perez Jr. helming all ten episodes. Via email, Zach Siegel gets technical about the difference ten (or even four) frames can make when timing a laugh, invisible VFX work and learning how to edit during the boom of branded content. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
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“The Film is 99% Handheld”: DP Bryan Koss on Mope
Lucas Heyne’s feature debut Mope is based on the lurid case of aspirant porn star Stephen Hill (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and his best friend, whose porn name was Tom Dong (Kelly Sry). In 2010, Hill went on a rampage with a machete, a story is told in this LA Weekly story from 2011, forming the basis for this porn-milieu drama. Via email, DP Bryan Koss discussed taking visual inspiration from The Wrestler, shooting 99% of the film handheld and working with a complete set of all 12 Cooke Speed Panchro primes. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were […]
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“We Mostly Didn’t Shoot Traditional Coverage Because We Knew the Edit Points”: DP Drew Daniels on Quarter Life Poetry
Samantha Jayne’s Quarter Life Poetry began life as a Tumblr and Instagram, transforming her millennial 20something experiences into doodles and poems. Now it’s an ambitious series set to premiere on FX Networks later this year, brought to life with director Arturo Perez Jr. helming all ten episodes. Via email, cinematographer Drew Daniels addressed the challenges of crafting their own visual language and using a jib for a shot it wasn’t intended for. 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 job? Daniels: I’ve […]
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“The Miracle of Securing the Prison Location”: Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre | The Mustang
Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them. So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of […]
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“Make This Conversation in a Small Room with White Walls Work”: DP Anna Franquesa Solano on The Farewell
Acquired by A24, Lulu Wang’s sophomore feature The Farewell is one of the breakout films of this year’s Sundance. Adapting a story from her own family (previously told as an episode of NPR’s This American Life), The Farewell takes off when Billi (Awkwafina), a Chinese immigrant who’s lived in America since she was a child, returns home when her grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou) gets a fatal lung cancer diagnosis. That’s the unlikely starting point for what’s been described as one of the festival’s funniest film, in a story that gets stranger and stranger as it goes along. Via email, Wang’s DP Anna […]
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“We Freed Ourselves from Conventional Documentary Ethics”: Directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra | The Infiltrators
Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them. So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of […]
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“We Had Somehow Managed to Shoot a Solid Two and a Half Hours of Movie in Only 15 Days”: Editor Kern Saxton on Mope
Lucas Heyne’s feature debut Mope is based on the lurid case of aspirant porn star Stephen Hill (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and his best friend, whose porn name was Tom Dong (Kelly Sry). In 2010, Hill went on a rampage with a machete, a story is told in this LA Weekly story from 2011, forming the basis for this porn-milieu drama. Heyne called on his friend Kern Saxton to edit. Via email, Saxton described the challenges of cutting down two and a half hours, filmed in an improvisatory style, into a tight 105 minutes. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of […]
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“Cram Ten Episodes into Ten Packed Days of Filming”: Series Creator and Star Samantha Jayne | Quarter Life Poetry
Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them. So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of […]
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Sundance Film Festival 2019: The Brink, The Wolf Hour
Learning that two documentaries on Steve Bannon would be dropping within half a year of each other didn’t bring to mind face-offs like Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano so much as a dire combination of Michael Apted’s Up series (an endless series of check-ins as Bannon ages in real time) and the pre-McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible franchise, in which each installment would be a chance for a different documentarian to render their own personal Bannon. First came Errol Morris’s American Dharma (which I wrote about here), which has yet to receive distribution; Klayman’s film was picked up by Magnolia prior to its Sundance premiere. Morris’s premise was flawed […]
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“I Stayed in the Water for 10 Minutes, Risking Getting Frozen”: Director/DP Beniamino Barrese on The Disappearance of My Mother
Beniamino Barrese’s mother, Benedetta Barzini, was a famous Italian model from her discovery in 1963 to her retirement a decade later. Her photographers included Richard Avedon, and her career led her to spend time as part of Warhol’s Factory scene. Barrese’s The Disappearance of My Mother begins as Barzini tells her son she intends to disappear from the material world. Alarmed, Barrese’s response was to use the camera to both capture his mother and try to reconcile her tangled relationship with the power of imagery, acting as his own DP. Barrese answered questions via email about integrating 16 and 35mm and throwing […]
