Filmmaker‘s Spring 2020 issue is now online, arriving in mailboxes, and at whatever newsstands and bookstores that are still open amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. And because so many of us are working from home, sheltering in place, or on some form of lockdown, we’ve released every article from the paywall and are also providing to all a link to a free PDF of the entire issue. As Managing Editor Vadim Rizov wrote in a tweet, the issue’s runlist is one organized around something of a now-phantom slate of films and topics. Going to press at the end of February, the calendar […]
Near the start of this issue, after the latest from our stellar trio of columnists, you’ll find an article on microbudget production by producer Mike S. Ryan. Back in the mid-1990s, Filmmaker made its bones by covering the microbudget scene, printing the budgets alongside our customary director deep dives. These pieces were very much about how you make a microbudget film—the tricks, tips, cheats and hacks. But now, with Filmmaker in its 28th year, the topic is less novel. On a purely technical level, anyone can shoot a microbudget film on their phone, cut it on their laptop and post […]
2019 will soon be the past, but once it was the future — a subject explored by Joanne McNeil in her Filmmaker print and online column, Speculations. She revisited films (The Running Man, Akira, Blade Runner) specifically set in 2019, assessing not just the accuracy of their future-dreaming but also the fantasies of progress their own eras entertained. McNeil listed various aspects of the present, including policy denial around climate change, that the films missed. But considering the last quarter century, who could have predicted that filmmaking — and film culture — would have landed where it is? While there’s […]
Filmmaker‘s Winter 2020 issue — our most beautiful issue yet — is now on newsstands (and selling out, we hear), as well as arriving in mailboxes. What’s in it? Our cover is Uncut Gems, with me interviewing Josh and Benny Safdie about their adrenaline-fueled Adam Sandler-starring film — an interview that goes into the details of shooting the fountain scene with Sander that we have used as our cover image. Director Anna Rose Holmer interviews Greta Gerwig about her Little Women; Aaron Hunt talks with Pedro Costa about 2020 release Vitalena Varela; Paul Dallas interviews Mati Diop about Atlantics, currently […]
“Hollywood Flirts with Short Films on the Web” was a New York Times headline from June 2000. Sites like iFilm, Pop and, most prominently, AtomFilms were seeking broadband gold by streaming shorts online. AtomFilms even had a coup—it had just “premiered” George Lucas’s USC film school short, Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB. In the article, Atom CEO Mika Salmi talked about the new and growing audience ready to devour shorts “on airplanes, in shopping malls and even in elevators,” while the author also wrote about shorts budgets heading into the millions of dollars. Just three months later the dotcom crash would […]
For five years, I’ve been rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases of films shot, in whole or significant part, on 35mm—yes, this year’s tally is lower than any of my previous totals. The total number is unlikely to soar above 40 anytime in the foreseeable future, and every film loyalist taking the year off makes a large difference. Part of the low tally can be attributed to lack of new films from J.J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Ken Loach, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Zach Snyder, James Gray—directors who simply won’t budge on working from film. That aside, […]
For Filmmaker‘s annual look at our top posts of the year, as determined by Google Analytics, we break the list into two: the top 10 posts of the year, and the top 10 2018 posts drawn from our archives. So, jumping right into it…. The Top 10 New Posts of 2018 D.P. Larkin Seiple Breaks Down Every Shot from Childish Gambino’s This is America. I’ll immodestly say that Matt Mulcahey’s Shutter Angles column presents the best DP interviews out there, and this one, hot on the heels of the Childish Gambino viral hit, topped our list of the best new […]
This magazine is called Filmmaker, but even if you’re just a casual reader, you’ll know that we’ve always defined that term expansively. Yes, directors are usually the focus, but we apply the term across the filmmaking spectrum, fully aware of how good work by vital collaborators throughout the production process shapes the finished product — what’s commonly called “the director’s vision.” Midway through our 25th year, we stick to the term “filmmaker,” hoping that it’s elastic enough to include a wide range of visual storytellers, like this issue’s Eliza McNitt, whose VR SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime was one of the […]
With Rachel Morrison the first woman cinematographer nominated for a Best Cinematography Academy Award, we’re running today online from our current print issue David Leitner’s interview with her about shooting her nominated film, Dee Rees’s Mudbound. When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the director was returning to the fest six years after her feature debut, Pariah, launched there. The same year also marked DP Rachel Morrison’s first feature to be included in the festival, Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice, and she returned the following year with Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station; Mudbound is her eighth […]
As always, we’re breaking our annual “most read Filmmaker posts” into two lists — 10 posts published in 2017 and 10 archival posts that are still registering large readerships. Throughout the 20, and particularly in the archival posts, there’s a strong current of practical advice conveyed by working filmmakers — the hallmark of this magazine. Here are our most popular posts of 2017. Published in 2017 1. The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vaccum. Our top post in 2017 was filmmaker Nina Menkes’s preview of a presentation she’ll give at Sundance next month, one in which […]