The first filmmaker I ever interviewed was Don Coscarelli. It was 1998 and I was a junior in college, toiling away at the University of Kentucky student newspaper. Coscarelli agreed to chat about his career for the paper’s Halloween movie page and, clueless as to proper interview decorum — or what might be an appropriate amount of time to monopolize — I asked him about every movie he had ever made. Every. Single. Movie. It was a Frost-Nixon length tête-à-tête, but he was nice enough to humor me. Two decades later — and on the eve of another Halloween — I had […]
The phrase “1980s horror” connotes a certain VHS aisle of franchised faces: Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Michael Myers, Pinhead. Far from that pack, like the anti-social loner of John McNaughton’s 1986 landmark film, we have Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Henry looks like a guy you’d actually see on a police lineup, intimidating but anonymous. As conceived by McNaughton and co-screenwriter Richard Fire, Henry lives in a nondescript Chicago apartment, works part time as an exterminator, and, in his spare time, kills people with nauseating ease. McNaughton films the carnage with a radical matter-of-factness, stripping an ostensible horror film of […]
When legendary producer and studio executive Robert Evans penned his autobiography — later adapted into a documentary — he picked a telling title: The Kid Stays in the Picture. You would think that after producing films like Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, Evans could happily rest on his laurels, but his book’s title, with its defiant use of the present tense, speaks to the ambitions and anxieties affecting every filmmaker with producer DNA. These, of course, are issues of continuing relevance and professional durability — or, to use the independent film parlance of the moment, sustainability. Contrary to the imagination of […]
With his last film, 2013’s Sacro GRA, Italian Gianfranco Rosi became the first documentarian to win the Golden Lion at Venice. He was also the first doc director to win the Golden Bear at Berlin with Fire At Sea, a disciplined, urgent look at the migrant crisis anchored on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, whose proximity to the African coast has made it a target destination for those fleeing their countries. It takes a while before the migrants appear onscreen: initially, Rosi divides his attention among various islanders, including a radio DJ whose tunes are heard all over the island […]
Tonight, Friday, October 14, 2016, the Film Society of Lincoln Center makes cinema history with the New York Film Festival’s world premiere of Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, presented at the 600-seat AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 IMAX theater on its 100-foot-wide screen, the largest in North America. The brief on this technological milestone? Images shot and projected at 120 fps, dual 4K RGB laser projectors that display wide color gamut and high dynamic range, bright RealD 3D, 12-channel audio with overhead speakers plus sub-bass. Talk about immersive! And what of the film itself? Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime […]
Filmmaker Theodore Collatos appeared recently on the site when he and Christopher Jason Bell interviewed each other about their latest pictures. He’s now at work on a new feature, Tormenting the Hen, produced with Matt Grady from Factory 25, Ben Umstead (Slamdance programmer, Screen Anarchy) and George Manatos (editor on Come Down Molly). He’s also in the midst of an Indiegogo campaign to support its co-production. Below, he reveals how — and why — he shot his new movie in six days (and how you might be able to do the same). Read on, and please consider supporting his campaign. […]
Receiving its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Katherine Dieckmann’s fourth feature, Strange Weather, a Southern road trip movie in which the landscape is both physical and psychological. Holly Hunter stars as a fifty-something academic administrator whose job is suddenly in peril due to university budget cuts. Her son committed suicide seven years ago, and when she learns that his best friend is now profiting from a restaurant concept he stole from him, she decides to hit the road and possibly settle an old score. Before the festival we asked Dieckmann to tell […]
Canon has announced two new cameras, one expected, the other a bit of a surprise: the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Canon C700 Cinema Camera. Ever since the amazing success of the Canon 5D Mark II, the announcement of new cameras from Canon has tended to provoke a fairly standard response from bloggers and social media; in their still cameras, the video functions are always considered hobbled in some way, and their video cameras are always too expensive and don’t have the features found in some of the latest cameras. And then Canon sells a boatload of the cameras, […]
[Editor’s note: the following interview is an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Oliver Stone Experience, out September 13 from Abrams Books. This excerpt from Seitz’s book-spanning interview with the director covers Stone’s life and career from his first feature, Seizure, through the production of Midnight Express and his initial, frustrated efforts to get Platoon made.] I had a nightmare, and it became the basis of Seizure. It came to you all in a dream? Yeah, it did. It felt like a fever dream. A father ends up betraying his son, like a coward, and runs away and wakes up, and of course he thinks it’s all […]
One of the most visually arresting pieces of filmmaking I saw last year was the pilot episode of Blindspot, an NBC series that slyly reinvigorates the network procedural genre by fusing the raw materials of 70s conspiracy thrillers with an ingenious puzzle device. The puzzle comes in the form of a body covered with tattoos; the body belongs to “Jane Doe” (Jaimie Alexander), a woman who, in the opening scene of the pilot, is discovered zipped up in a duffel bag left unattended in Times Square. Jane has no memory of who she is or how she got in the […]