The Woman in the Yard is the latest production from horror factory Blumhouse, but tones down the jump scares in favor of visualizing the dark imaginary of a woman battling depression. It’s not what audiences have come to expect from the studio, and it has garnered wildly divisive reactions from audiences and critics alike. Woman follows single mother Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), grieving her husband’s death, who is haunted by a female specter in the backyard that is pushing her to self-annihilation. It was a very personal project for first-time screenwriter Sam Stefanak, who was channeling his own demons during the writing process and then had to adapt his words to the specific vision of director Jaume Collet-Serra (returning to horror… Read more
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and click here to read an interview with co-star Amy Irving.]
Filmmaker: You'd worked with Joan Micklin Silver before, on Chilly Scenes of Winter. What kind of an actor-director relationship did you have?
Riegert: It was very comfortable. She was a very good writer—she wrote Chilly Scenes of Winter—and knew how to take [on] a script that she didn’t write. She knew how to cast. She had a wonderful eye for talent. I had auditioned for Joan in 1976, when she was starting to shoot Between the Lines, and I was doing a play,… Read more
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and check back tomorrow to read the final part, an interview with co-star Peter Riegert.]
Filmmaker: Joan Micklin Silver is a filmmaker whose reputation has really grown over the past decade, and I’m curious what her secret sauce was, for lack of a better term. What do you remember about working with her?
Irving: Joan spent a lot of time figuring out her cast. If you look at all her movies, it’s a good group of actors. She was a New Yorker who went to the theater and paid attention to what an… Read more
When Joan Micklin Silver died on the last day of 2020, cinephiles mourned the passing of a major American filmmaker, a status to which she may have begun to ascend in late 2014, when IFC Center presented a 35mm screening of her third feature Chilly Scenes of Winter with its original title and the director’s preferred ending—the first time in perhaps a decade that the film had resurfaced in New York’s repertory scene. At that time, Vadim Rizov spoke to Silver, then in her late 70s, about her struggles to break into the film industry (“‘At that point in time, women directors just didn’t get jobs. I remember going to see one producer from one of the studios, and he… Read more
Jolene Purdy is always a standout. She gained recognition for her performance as Cherita Chen in the cult classic Donnie Darko, and later appeared in hit shows like Orange Is the New Black, Under the Dome, Breaking Bad, WandaVision, and The White Lotus. She now plays opposite Kevin Bacon in the new Amazon series The Bondsman. On this episode, she talks about how the collaborative nature of that production ignited her creativity and brought out the best in her. She tells us her secret to mastering the art of delivering exposition, why she loves to be directed, how she learned to protect her characters, why Kevin Bacon is “boss,” and much more.
Back To One can be found wherever you get… Read more
Even if you don't count yourself has a diehard Janis Ian fan, the singer-songwriter's songs, such as her 1967 hit "Society's Child," when they appear in Varda Bar-Kar's compelling bio-doc, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, will strike a memory chord, so ubiquitous they have been across radio playlists for more than half a century. It's a real strength of Bar-Kar's film, which is organized around several of Ian's most memorable albums, including the eponymous 1993 release, that she weaves these compositions into a rich fabric that places Ian's personal life story — her coming out, her relationship with and 2003 marriage to Patricia Snyder, financial disasters and contemporary recognition as an LGBTQ icon — within the larger context of social and… Read more
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay
Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control
Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to work under hard limits. This is called design. Design determines what lenses must be used, whether the camera moves or not or… Read more
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the accompanying excerpt, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts micro-budget filmmakers should embrace. And below, we chatted about his impulse to write the book and his own personal path towards micro-budget production.
Filmmaker: We selected you in 2005 for our 25 New Faces list after you premiered War at Sundance 2004. In that film, you really embraced the micro-budget philosophy you espouse in this book, deciding to shoot not the script but… Read more
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The Woman in the Yard
