There’s a saying that a movie is made three times: once when it’s written, once when it’s shot and once when it’s edited. To create the new A24 release Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, that maxim had to expand to accommodate an additional creative cycle. Marcel, the story of a chatty one-inch tall seashell searching for his family, was in essence shot twice. First, cinematographer Bianca Cline captured the live-action components, leaving a Marcel-sized space in the compositions. Months later, armed with copious notes to match lighting, lensing, focus, etc., stop motion director of photography Eric Adkins brought Marcel […]
Watch the trailer for Funny Pages, the feature debut from writer/director Owen Kline. The film follows a young cartoonist (Daniel Zolghadri) whose artistic aspirations go against the conformist sensibilities of his suburban surroundings. Produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, the film will be released by A24 in select theaters and on demand on August 26.
The past haunts Marie, a chef in a retirement home in the small French village of Luchon. An exile from violence in Africa, she has closed herself off to all but a handful of friends. Then, a new arrival forces Marie to confront a world she has tried to forget. Written and directed by Ellie Foumbi, Our Father, The Devil was shot on a 20-day schedule. It was developed in part through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema. The film screened at the Venice Film Festival and recently at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award. […]
Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, the intrepid duo that wrote, directed and starred in By Hook or by Crook, still possess a collaborative spark that has outlived their ability to make art together. After their groundbreaking, ultra low-budget queer film premiered at Sundance 20 years ago, Howard immediately enrolled in film school at UCLA; Dodge, on the other hand, found the festival landscape far too overwhelming for his taste and decided to focus on sculpture, video art and writing. While they both followed their respective paths after By Hook or by Crook, they remain very close friends and respected colleagues. […]
Jessica Oreck’s One Man Dies a Million Times premiered at SXSW 2019 but is only now about to enter theatrical release. That’s because Oreck—an adventurous, hybrid nonfiction filmmaker whose previous work includes The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga and and Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo—intended for the film to only be seen in theaters beginning in May 2020, a plan delayed by the pandemic. The film continues Oreck’s longstanding professional collaboration with Sean Price Williams (Good Time, Frownland), while programmer Eric Allen Hatch (who’s written for Filmmaker before) is acting as the film’s distributor. From the press release: Alyssa (Alyssa Lozovskaya, of Russian […]
Ethan Hawke returns to the podcast (first time was episode 41) to talk about The Last Movie Stars, his epic six-part documentary that chronicles Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s iconic careers and decades-long partnership. Years ago, a friend of the couple interviewed Paul, Joanne, and many people close to them for a potential memoir, but Newman burned the tapes. Miraculously, the transcripts survive, so Hawke called on his acting friends to bring them to life. The result is both an intimate portrait of the lives and careers of this great duo and also a constant celebration of the endeavor of […]
Watch the trailer for James Ponsoldt’s sixth feature film, the girlhood coming-of-age tale Summering. Co-written by Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy, the film centers on four 11-year-old best friends during the last golden days of summer vacation. Summering immediately evokes the dramatic exploits of Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me and the girlish whimsy of Lesli Linka Glatter’s Now and Then. The trailer reveals a dead body in the woods, the friends’ dogged quest to figure out John Doe’s identity and the stress of navigating newfound adolescence. Summering premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. The film’s cast includes Lia […]
Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects […]
In 2015, Tom Secker’s website SpyCulture.com published 1,669 pages of documents from the US Marine Corps Entertainment Liaison Office obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Spanning 2008 to 2015, these internal reports from a variety of entertainment projects covering requests for support from the Marines have become freshly relevant with the success of Top Gun: Maverick and renewed scrutiny of American military involvement with film productions. Below, a selection of highlights. ** NOTICE: This report contains information on the development and progress of TV programs, feature films, and other entertainment-oriented media projects. This information is shared with the Marine […]