Sundance
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“How the Hell Do We Make this Watchable for 78 Minutes?” Director Maxim Pozdorovkin | Our New President
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Our New President tells the story of Donald Trump entirely through Russian propaganda. As such, it is a film that was edited “live” as Trump’s first year in office unfolded. Unlike most films, this one could not be thought through in advance. We had to roll with the headlines. The storytelling adjusted to the events and […]
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The Sundance Question: What Roles did Chaos and Order Play in Your Films?
Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year, our question involves an issue that might be appropriate given the dramas of the previous year: chaos and order. This year’s question: As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? “We Used Chaos to Clarify Our Senses and Capture True […]
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“The Film of a Drunken Monkey”: Directors Nico Casavecchia and Martin Allais | BattleScar
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Nico Casavecchia: In Drunken Master (Jackie Chan, 1978) young Wong Fei-Hung meets Beggar So, an old drunkard picking a fight in a bar. Beggar turns out to be the famous drunken master who uses fighting techniques resembling those of an intoxicated monkey that stole wine and drank it all. Wong reluctantly enters training with Beggar and in […]
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“We Went Where the Story Took Us”: Director Derek Doneen | Kailash
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Kailash is about a man who risks his life and the lives of his family and colleagues by breaking into factories to rescue children from slavery. Being that we chose to tell the story with vérité filmmaking — in realtime — the very nature of what we set out to shoot was inherently chaotic. We knew […]
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“Documentaries Are Less an Act of Creation and More an Act of Discovery”: DP Bob Richman on The Price of Everything
Brooklyn-born DP Bob Richman began his career as a production assistant for Albert and David Maysles. He’s since gone on to shoot some of the most widely seen documentaries of the past 20 years: An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for ‘Superman’, the Paradise Lost trilogy and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, to name a few. His latest feature, The Price of Everything, is a vérité doc on the puzzlingly astronomical price of fine art. Richman spoke with Filmmaker ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere about his preferred camera for vérité filmmaking, reuniting with director Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect) and the essential importance of a good […]
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Sundance Notes: Disarming a Film Festival
On Friday, January 27, as I attended the second half of Sundance, Trump signed an executive order barring Syrian refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. “We’re not willing to be wrong on this subject,” said White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Face the Nation two days later. “President Trump is not willing to take chances on this subject.” The following Monday, The New York Times reported that senior White House officials “were proud of taking actions that they said would help protect Americans against threats from potential terrorists.” This year at Sundance […]
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Sundance Notes: RISE to RUMBLE, must-see TV… from Canada
Malcolm Forbes, of all people, once memorably said, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” I’d like to extend that principle: You can easily judge the character of a nation by how it treats the indigenous people from whom it took its territory. I’m from Chattanooga, near the Chickamauga battlefield, just east of the Ocoee and Hiwassee rivers, in the southeast corner of Tennessee. I grew up on an Appalachian mountain, dated a girl in nearby Ooltewah. I now live in Manhattan. All indigenous names. Where are […]
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“You Are Forced to Look Very Carefully”: DP Alan Jacobsen on Strong Island
Hailed by Filmmaker as one of the 25 New Faces of independent cinema in 2011, Yance Ford makes her feature film debut with Strong Island, an intensely personal documentary on the 1992 death of his brother. Ford worked with DP Alan Jacobsen to create the film’s singular aesthetic, which combines long takes and a camera that never pans or tilts. Ford and Jacobsen drew inspiration from the long take masters, from Tarkovsky to artist Sharon Lockhart. Jacobsen spoke with Filmmaker ahead of Strong Island‘s premiere in the U.S. documentary competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Below, he touches on the painful nature of […]
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“Anthologies Are All about Communication”: Director Roxanne Benjamin | XX
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Anthologies are all about communication – you’re dealing with multiple productions in multiple states (if not countries) with quadruple the number of creatives and producers using different camera equipment, different lenses, with different visions, different styles. To that end, in my experience the biggest challenge for these types of productions usually lies in tying all of those disparate elements together into one cohesive whole that benefits and […]
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Editor Evan Schrodek on the Fraternity Hazing Drama Burning Sands
A producer on Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Gerard McMurray makes his debut as a writer/director with Burning Sands. The film tells the story of five college students who embark on a “Hell Week” of hazing and abuse in order to receive admission into a prestigious black fraternity. Evan Schrodek, an editor on The Walking Dead, cut the film after he became friends with McMurray at film school at USC. Below, Schrodek speaks about the film’s nuanced portrait of fraternity hazing, the personal nature of this story and his love of genre filmmaking. Burning Sands premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be […]
