Filmmaker

Click here to read our fall 2024 issue, featuring the annual 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Sean Baker on Anora and more...

Winter 2023

Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) stands in a room surrounded by glass figurines on black pedestals.

Outsmarting the Disruptors: Greg Mottola Interviews Rian Johnson on Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

In August, Rian Johnson was among the directors with Netflix projects invited to show works that inspired them at the company-owned Paris Theater in New York City. Among the movies Johnson selected were two whose influence is directly perceptible on Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the first of two sequels to his 2019 hit the writer-director is making for the streamer. From his 1973 favorite The Last of Sheila, Johnson borrows the opening set-up: A dangerously wealthy man invites a group of friends (or are they just parasites?) to join him for a week of elaborate games amidst beautiful […]

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Features

A masked Alexei Navalny waves as he boards a plane while passengers take photos and videos of him.

Hit & Misses: The 2022 Releases of Six Recent Sundance Features

In just three (admittedly, very momentous) years, the marketplace for independent films has completely changed. During previous turning points over the decades, executives would use words like “waves” or “cycles” to describe instances of upheaval, but what’s happening now is more like a comprehensive reset. In a recent online article titled “The Sky is Falling, Take Shelter,” producer Rebecca Green wrote, “This year is unlike anything I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been working in this business.”  If Sundance and its films are a barometer for the independent film industry, consider this comparison: The pre-pandemic class of Sundance 2019 […]

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  • A Black woman sits in a courtroom, wearing a brown sweater and straight black hair pulled back in a low ponytail. After the Tide Went Out: Isabel Sandoval Interviews Saint Omer Writer/Director Alice Diop

    “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is how the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his early work The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda) is a Senegalese immigrant to France on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, who she left on a beach to be washed out to sea by the outgoing tide. A student, Coly is writing her thesis on Wittgenstein, an academic detail she’s shamed for at the trial. (Why didn’t she write on the work of “someone closer to her own culture,” a professor wonders […]

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  • The 24 Features of 2022 Shot on 35mm

    The main poster for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans displays its characters within the frames on three strips of celluloid: young Steven Spielberg stand-in Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) holding a 16mm camera, mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) dancing in car headlights, etc. This makes sense for the “childhood of a 1970s filmmaker” plot, and it tracks technically as well. Like every Spielberg feature—save the digital-world portions of Ready Player One, the CG of The BFG and the mocap experiment of The Adventures of Tintin—The Fabelmans is shot on 35mm. But look closely and this key art doesn’t make any sense: The vertical […]

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  • Seeing Eye to Eye: Color Correction Styles Across Today’s Film Restorations

    Going to the cinema to see a 4K restoration or buying a Blu-ray of a beloved classic from a boutique publisher, one is never quite sure what one will get, colorwise. Frequently, a distinctly tinted veil seems to have fallen over the screen from the first frame. Sometimes, this is a chilling greenish blue, one that bronzes flesh tones and adds a steely, Melvillean atmosphere to the proceedings. On other occasions, it is yellow, as if golden hour had found a way to fall day and night, indoors and out, then curdled from its newfound monotony into a stubborn, pissy […]

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Other articles

  • A man wearing a suit and top hat stands in front of walls lined with built-in bookcases, each shelf filled with VHS tapes. Two Questions: Producers on Net Profits and Sharing Their Personal Lives

    In this new series of articles, Filmmaker poses two questions to producers, directors and other filmmakers. One question is directed toward the nuts and bolts of filmmaking—questions having to do with terms, practices, legal issues, technology and so on. The second question deals with topics that are softer or more amorphous—questions that necessarily can’t have right or wrong answers and whose replies are based on the personalities and practices of the individual participants. This issue, we directed our questions to producers, both fiction and doc, and asked them: What are points, or backend, and how do they work? What’s your […]

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  • A blond woman conducts a string orchestra, wearing a black long-sleeve button up and slacks. She poses dramatically with her arm bent at the elbow and her fist pumped toward the air. Within the Silences: The Sound Team Behind TÁR

    TÁR opens with its namesake, played by Cate Blanchett, being interviewed in front of a packed audience at The New Yorker Festival. The chat serves multiple functions. It delivers the character’s backstory as an EGOT-winning classical composer and conductor, establishes the film’s immersive, observational style and lets the viewer experience sound the way that Lydia Tár experiences it. During the interview, the festival’s audience is only heard as a communal mass. It laughs together. It applauds together. There is no ambient chatter, no whispered asides, no rustling clothes or shuffling feet. It’s only when the interviewer asks about the influence […]

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  • An elderly Irish man named Colm (Brendan Gleeson) sits in a chair next to a window. His younger friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell) stares at him through the window. They do not make eye contact. A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin

    Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results for them both. The film is set on a fictional Irish island in 1923, and the combination of wide-open spaces and unfussy but handsome costuming adds visual dynamism to a film whose appeal is largely rooted in whip-smart dialogue. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s filmography includes works by Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto) and Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship), which […]

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Also: Daydreaming, Neuroscience and Screenwriting: The Imaginative Teaching of Mary Sweeney The Carrier Bag Theory of Nonfiction Filmmaking: What Documentarians Can Learn from Ursula K. Le Guin Editor’s Letter

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