The following interview with director Ira Sachs by director Stephen Winter was published in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Sachs’s film Passages arrives in theaters from MUBI. There are acclaimed films about filmmakers set during production—Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Day for Night and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, to name three. But there are far fewer set during what might be an even more psychologically fraught time: post-production. For some directors, it’s when a film wraps that things become unstable. The ersatz family of cast and crew retreat, the militarized schedule lessens somewhat and […]
Given our tech-driven and communication-obsessed culture, it’s highly likely that you’re reading this article while multitasking on your smartphone. But as is the case with so many commodity industries like data, the true cost of all this connectivity often eludes us. This disconnect is what drove us to write the film HIGH, set in the fascinating and rarely seen world of telecom tower climbers. In the aftermath of a tragic accident, team foreman Butch Robbins leads his crew through the brutal Buffalo winter to finish their job on deadline and save the company, all without losing the connection he needs […]
We see a childhood photograph nearly centered in the frame on a black backdrop. In the photograph, a boy of three or four years of age smiles inside the bathtub with his two dogs. A few seconds later, the black screen around the photograph becomes part of the photograph; the image expands and the rest of the room is revealed. Everything looks familiar and slightly off at the same time. The tiles are slightly skewed, as if the wall has melted. The shape of the bathtub looks normal but perhaps larger than usual. There are suddenly three more dogs in […]
“How much time will you need for the shot-up?” the assistant director asks the DP. The DP looks at the grip crew for answers and responds, “Uh, 10 minutes?” “Shot-up in 10,” the AD announces to the crew. The DP isn’t sure how much time she’ll need because she isn’t sure how to use the lights she just rented. She had seen someone use them once before on set but had never used the new LED lights herself. So, to figure out how to use them on the fly, she does what many Gen-Z filmmakers do when we have questions—we […]
Remember “Peak TV”? It was a good run, starting more than a decade ago with the launch of filmmaker-driven shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO, David Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake on Sundance Channel, not to mention episodic heavyweights like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men and The Walking Dead, all of which supplied steady work for a plethora of indie writers and directors. But that party is over—or at least taking a break. If the corporate mergers and media layoffs of the past year weren’t enough of a […]
An application like ChatGPT is “taking the last 20 years of the internet and chewing it up, then producing a system that draws from that,” Allison Parrish explained when we spoke over Zoom last month. To the poet and programmer, generating content with large language model (LLM) neural nets is like “powering an engine with the methane that comes from decomposing corpses in a graveyard.” Few artists working today have Parrish’s depth of experience with generative text. You have likely encountered her work online, especially if you were active on Twitter in the “Horse_ebooks” era. Early on in her career, […]
There are two long back-and-forth tracking shots in Savanah Leaf’s wise, emotionally full debut feature, Earth Mama. In the first, the pregnant Gia—a 24-year-old Oakland single mother fighting for custody of the two young children she already has lost to state-sponsored foster care—purposefully strides across a playground, the camera focused on her as she passes expensive strollers and children playing in the background in soft focus. Moments before, she has asked the owner of the photo studio she works at for a cash advance: “I don’t want my baby coming out with no clothes or nothing,” she says. (Leaf cuts […]
Currently boasting 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and heading into its second weekend in New York theaters is Brian Vincent‘s Make Me Famous, a self-distributed documentary about the 1980s New York art world centered around painter Edward Brezinski. A notable figure from the era that spawned Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, he never attained their level of recognition and subsequently disappeared — a disappearance the filmmakers try to solve. From the press materials: A madcap romp through the 1980’s NYC art scene amid the colorful career of painter, Edward Brezinski, hell-bent on making it. What begins as an investigation […]
Dave Burd, known by his stage name Lil Dicky, is a multi-platinum rapper, comedian and actor. For three seasons now, he has been the co-creator, executive producer, writer and star of the critically acclaimed comedy series, Dave. In this hour, he takes us from the beginning, being the laugh machine for his friends, through the discovery of his musical talent and the viral comedy video years, and finding his happy place in pitch meetings, convincing the money people that he could not just make a good TV show, that’s easy, but maybe one of the great shows of all time. He talks about […]
After more than 30 years of collaborating as a writing-directing duo, the Coen brothers have decided to embark on solo projects for the foreseeable future. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth back in 2021, and Ethan Coen debuted Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind last year at Cannes. While that documentary still awaits a release, Ethan’s lesbian road movie Drive-Away Dolls is set to hit theaters early this fall. Co-written by spouses Coen and Tricia Cooke (who also edited Drive-Away Dolls together), the film stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in the lead roles with Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, […]