At the moment, Harry Lennix is perhaps best known for his portrayal of FBI agent Harold Cooper on NBC’s The Blacklist. The breadth and depth of his work on the stage and screen go well beyond that hit show, however, with film roles spanning from Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats and Julie Taymor’s Titus, to General Swanwick in both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman, and on Broadway in August Wilson’s final play Radio Golf, and Cymbeline at The Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2014 Lennix created Exponent Media Group and began producing his own content, such as H4, a […]

Expanding on the subject of his first feature, the both-sides-of-the-border drug wars documentary Cartel Land, director Matthew Heineman’s latest project is a five-part documentary series for Showtime. The first two hours premiered at Sundance. Prior to the screening, DP Matt Porwoll explained the difficulties of working on a project following both drug cartels in Mexico and stories of addiction and counter-law enforcement in the States in multiple cities. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Porwoll: When Matthew Heineman first […]

As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? As a documentary filmmaker, my favorite approach to storytelling is through the freshness and spontaneity of cinema vérité. With Studio 54, we were presented with the challenge of telling a story built on the unique and intimate friendship between the founding partners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, while grappling with the reality of Steve’s untimely death […]

Paul Thomas Anderson held a Reddit AMA today, where the subject of a video from 1992 came up. In the video, Anderson wanders the set of the Robert Conrad movie Sworn to Vengeance, asking various crew departments about their work and which one is the most important while generally being very snarky and making Clinton jokes. It’s a fun curio.

If you were a director or producer coming up in the New York independent film scene of the early 1990s, you wanted to work with Thérèse DePrez. Right out of the gate as a production designer, DePrez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away Tuesday in New York City, defined for herself an imaginative, boldly-colored and stylized approach that brought a high level of ambition and finesse to often meagerly-budgeted films. Not settling for generic indie naturalism — the gentle accenting of our everyday world that is the default approach on so many low-budget pictures — she cited […]

The following profile of production designer Thérèse DePrez was written by producer Ted Hope for Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1994 issue, and is being rerun on the sad occasion of DePrez’s passing this week in New York. After the standard art school stint, and the pay-your dues PA/grip/electric rigmarole, Thérèse DePrez nabbed her first designer gig on Tony Jacobs’s low-budget consumer/horror send-up, The Refrigerator, which sent her further down the blood-spewed path to art direct three straight-to-video horror pics. The creepy crawlers allowed DePrez to hone the “specialty prop” and set design skills she would later call on for Tom Kalin’s Swoon, […]

For Filmmaker‘s 25th Anniversary issue, we took note of production designer Judy Becker’s lovely Instagram, where she posts location scout photos and other inspirations that inevitably find their way into her design work. We asked her to write more about this convergence with social media and production design practice, and here’s what she wrote back. To: Filmmaker Magazine From: Judy Becker Subject: My Instagram Today at 11:34am I’m happy you guys liked my Instagram. I’ve taken photographs pretty much my whole life. I got my first camera when I was about seven, when my family spent the summer in Rotterdam, […]

Modern cinema, deconstructed to its most basic elements, is the art of combining light and sound to tell stories. If you’re reading this, chances are you can name five cinematographers. But how many production sound mixers can you name? To find out what it’s like to be in this essential line of work — and to hear their hard-earned advice on getting great sound — I spoke with three sound mixers working in independent film about a job that is, by its very nature, the sort of thing audiences only tend to notice if there’s a problem. Gillian Arthur, 30, […]

Opening tomorrow at New York’s Metrograph and the Maysles Documentary Center is In Transit, about Amtrak’s long-distance passenger train, the Empire Builder. It was legendary Direct Cinema pioneer Albert Maysles’s final directing credit, a collaboration with young directors Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu and David Isui. Below, from our Spring, 2015 print issue, is Paul Dallas’s report on the film. An attractive, middle-aged woman sits isolated against a snowy landscape that sweeps by. Her eyes are bright and sad. “I’ve always been a wife, a mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s something,” she explains. “But it didn’t matter. I was just […]

While David Lynch fans eagerly await the premiere of the new Twin Peaks on Sunday, a documentary that peers deep into the iconic director’s life is currently making its way around theaters across the U.S. After premiering last year in Venice to rave reviews, we caught David Lynch: The Art Life at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland toward the end of its festival circuit. The film will play local dates this summer before being sent out to the film’s thousand-plus Kickstarter backers who have been waiting on the documentary since its 2012 campaign. The film’s young director, Jon Nguyen, […]