Duplicity in all its forms lurks just below the surface in Erin Vassilopoulos’s debut feature, Superior, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival last weekend. Expanded from a short she made in film school, Vassilopoulos’s feature concerns two fraternal twin sisters (Alessandra and Ani Mesa) unexpectedly reuniting after six years apart. The film opens in October of 1987, with Marian (Alessandra), a touring musician on the run from a secretive past, returning to her hometown to spend a few days with her sister, Vivian (Ani). The two sisters haven’t spoken in six years, spending the interim leading […]
In February of 1964, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall to become the heavyweight champion of the world at the age of 22. He spent the night celebrating with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. Within two weeks of the fight, Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam and changed his name. Within a year, both Cooke and Malcolm X were shot dead. By the summer of 1966, Brown had retired from football at the age of 30. Based on the 2013 play by Kemp Powers, One Night in Miami offers a fictitious […]
Aean McMullin [pronounced Ay-In] spends his time traveling from helicopter pads in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, working with gang members in Compton and sitting in the cacophony of LA traffic (even during the pandemic) all the way from his one-bedroom apartment in Glendale to the seaside city of Long Beach—a whopping 30 + miles. A key location assistant manager from the small town of Godfrey, Illinois, McMullin received quite the culture shock upon his arrival five years ago to the city of Angels. “[My] impetus to get out of Godfrey was because there was nothing to do,” McMullin […]
What do you do when you’re a week away from finishing a documentary project about the world’s biggest and most renowned TV series and the world decides to end? It all began very normally about a year ago. AMC approached the company I work for, IKA Collective, with the concept of creating a docu-series focusing on real-world stories that mirror the fictional worlds of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The show’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were enthusiastic about the idea, and before long I was on my way to Green Bank, West Virginia to document electromagnetic sensitivity; […]
Philippe Garrel is in recognisably a “late” stage of his career as a filmmaker. He has moved past the point of going for broke. His characters, avatars for any given idea he may be preoccupied with, border on the archetypal. The settings are stripped down, reduced to their essence. His concerns, by this stage, are variations on a few basic themes. He is a commanding narrative presence, the authorial space in which he is most free to assert himself idiosyncratically. With all this in mind, viewers’ mileage may vary. Those of us who take pleasure in the relaxed vibes of […]
Four of the best performances I’ve seen so far this year are all in the same movie, Yuval Adler’s riveting thriller The Secrets We Keep. Noomi Rapace, who also co-produced the film, plays Maja, a Romanian immigrant in post-World War II America who lives a quiet life with her physician husband Lewis (Chris Messina). Their placid existence is upended when Maja becomes convinced that her neighbor Thomas (Joel Kinnaman) is a Nazi who tortured her years before during the war. When Maja kidnaps Thomas and locks him in her basement, the film becomes a morally thorny and extremely suspenseful thriller […]
People are shooting again. And as film production lurches forward amidst a mass of new protocols and restrictions, Film Finances has brought together members of their own working group — both company executives and producers — as well as producers who have been working in the field to discuss shooting in the age of coronavirus. Among the topics discussed in this very informative webinar are: * What percentage of a film’s budget should be allocated towards Covid-19 compliance? * What’s the job of the Health Safety Supervisor, and what should their team look like? * The use of apps to […]
Cinematographer Laura Merians-Gonçalves shot Pacified in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Directed by Paxton Winters, the film won awards at the 2019 San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Aruanda Film Festival in Brazil, and the Sao Paolo International Film Festival. Merians-Gonçalves received the Best Debut Cinematography at the 2019 Camerimage in Toruń. Merians-Gonçalves spoke to Filmmaker from Los Angeles in May. Filmmaker: Where were you when the lockdown began? Merians-Gonçalves: I was here in Los Angeles. I had just wrapped a project that I shot for writer/director John Ridley in March, while simultaneously prepping a new movie. We were […]
The second season of the Dead to Me marked cinematographer Toby Oliver’s first Netflix TV series production. The series has been ranked in the platform’s top ten since it was released in May, spending a week or so at number #1. Oliver, originally from Australia, has worked frequently with Blumhouse, including shooting the breakout hit Get Out. He spoke with Filmmaker from Los Angeles. Filmmaker: How were you hired for Dead to Me? Oliver: I was in Mexico working on a movie called Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar, which was written by and stars Kristen Wiig and […]
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. Read all the responses here. — Editor Now, I find myself in the middle of post-production in a post-apocalyptic New York. I lift my eyes to the calendar behind my computer and sigh at the sight of the […]