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Sundance Critic’s Notebook 2021 1 (Vadim Rizov): The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, Flee
“We’re sad to miss you on the Park City mountain this year and look forward to the day we can once again gather under one roof,” read HBO Docs’s email leading up to this year’s Sundance. “Until then, we encourage spending lots of time in front of your screen watching documentaries.” This is admirably direct and succinct, if bleak, and thus a fitting welcome to Sundance 2021; those who’ve physically attended in recent years can stroll down Virtual Main Street and experience brand overexposure all over again. You can “Bring [Chase] Sapphire on Main Home” or pop into the area […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2021 -
“I Wanted to Romanticize a Bit and Be Nostalgic”: DP Eunsoo Cho on I Was a Simple Man
Set in the countryside of O’Ahu, Hawai’i, Director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s second feature film I Was a Simple Man is a surreal portrait of an elderly man’s final days. Told in chapters, the film follows Masao (Steve Iwamoto) as he’s visited by ghosts of his past, including his wife Grace (Constance Wu). DP Eunsoo Cho clues us in on how to capture the majesty of Hawai’i’s landscape, as well as how to portray a movie that eschews time and space. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2021 -
“The Natural World and Our Interconnectedness”: Director Sally Aitken | Playing With Sharks
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? Playing With Sharks is the story of a one-of-a-kind, passionate woman, Valerie Taylor, and her remarkable life’s relationship with the ocean’s most notorious predators, sharks. As both a contemporary and archival film, with gob-smacking real scenes of this fearless and glamorous, maverick conservationist, the events of 2020 had the potential to completely derail our production—but—fortunately, probably, ended up defining the movie, certainly, defining the way I feel now in thinking about the natural world […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2021 -
20 Anticipated Films and New Media Works at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
“It’s about energy — how do we preserve the energy around the work and the artist?” That’s Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson speaking this morning at Sundance’s opening press conference about the thinking that went in to this year’s necessarily altered pandemic edition. With a slimmed-down schedule and screenings happening through the Sundance platform as well as at various “satellite screens,” Sundance has fully embraced the challenges and potentials of translating the Sundance experience to the ways in which we are living our (viewing) lives now. But several principles guided the Sundance team, said Jackson. One was the concept […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2021 -
“The Ceilings were Only 8 1/2 Feet High”: DP Tami Reiker on Shooting One Night in Miami with Jibs and Finishing Production after COVID
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 […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 28, 2021 -
“Whether It’s a Refugee Crisis or a Pandemic, We Are All in This Together”: Director Jonah Poher Rasmussen | Flee
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I was in Oslo, Norway finalizing Flee, when the Danish Prime Minister went on TV calling for a national lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I made it home to Copenhagen just before the borders closed and from there it felt like everything went into slow motion. The very final steps of finishing the film took as long as the rest of the entire production, and as all the cinemas around me had closed […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 28, 2021 -
Fetch the Bolt Cutters: Location Scout Aean McMullin on TV Production, Shooting Lucifer During COVID and LA Permitting
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 […]
by Destiny Jackson on Jan 27, 2021 -
“God Bless Dwayne Johnson”: Richard Kelly on Southland Tales, 15 Years Later
Some films are not meant for the era in which they’re made. Such was the case with Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, a sci-fi epic from the provocative filmmaker whose first feature, Donnie Darko, premiered in 2001. Arriving five years into President Bush’s presidency, Kelly’s second feature debuted in Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received much like Bush’s tumultuous War on Terror. “More film maudit than the basis for a midnight cult,” film critic J. Hoberman observed in the Village Voice, his review being one of the few positive notices to follow the film’s disastrous world […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 26, 2021 -
“IMAX Cameras are Sewing Machines—They are So Loud”: DP Matthew Jensen on Wonder Woman 1984
“You still can’t beat reality,” says Matthew Jensen. That may seem like an incongruous proclamation from the cinematographer of a $200 million superhero spectacle that concludes with a flying goddess facing off against a half human/half cheetah. But instead of simply shooting the film’s opening Amazon Olympics flashback in a greenscreen wonderland, Jensen headed to Spain’s Canary Islands and put 10-year-old actress Lilly Aspell (as a young Diana Prince) on horseback on an IMAX-rigged process trailer. Instead of digitally returning a gutted Virginia mall to all its 1980s glory, the Wonder Woman team rebuilt more than 60 period stores. And for […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 22, 2021 -
10 Months in 10 Movies: My 2020 in Film
2020 was going to be my year of festival-enabled travel. Instead, I went home, the last place I’ve ever wanted to be. This is my year in selected viewing, which begins when my 2020 really did; nothing before March is as vivid or urgent. March A friend generously offers a ride from True/False to Chicago, site of my inadvertently final vacation week; we set out at 7:30 am, breaking for lunch just across the Missouri-Illinois state line at a Steak ’n Shake (good patty melt!). The drive takes slightly over six hours and the conversation will be one of my […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2021
