6301 Results for “Open ”
-
Back to One: Back to the Future Actor and The Year of Spectacular Men Director Lea Thompson on How Actors Need to be “Director-Proof”
Lea Thompson has a lot of wisdom to share. Her work as an actor spans three decades with hit films like the Back To The Future trilogy and Some Kind of Wonderful to successful television shows like Caroline in the City and Switched at Birth. She recently started a second chapter as a director. Her first feature film The Year of Spectacular Men (opening Friday June 15th) stars her daughters, Madelyn and Zoey Deutch, and was written by Madelyn. We talk about how this true family affair was stitched together with nothing but love, and how actors need to be […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jun 12, 2018 -
Watch (?): Donald Trump’s “Action-Movie Style Trailer,” Shown to Kim Jong-un, Ostensibly For Diplomatic Purposes
I have written before about the remarkably shoddy aesthetics of the videos put out by Team Trump, and I’m not the only one to have noticed: last year, over at The Outline, Tolulope Edionwe wrote a sharp post about “the iMovie president.” The whole post is worth reading, but this assessment rings particularly true: “This has become a pattern for Trump: poorly-edited digital content in which serious and significant subjects are given bad color treatments, low resolution, and carelessly incorrect accoutrements.” In the Ernest Goes to Pyongyang reality which we are on course to enter shortly, our lawfully elected president (or whatever) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 12, 2018 -
Back Page
Not too long ago, I watched Kevin Smith talk about having a near-fatal heart attack. It was from his hospital bed, streamed on Facebook Live, the day after doctors put a stent in his left anterior descending artery—the so-called widowmaker that felled writer John Gregory Dunne in the opening pages of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Smith’s a great storyteller, so his recounting was hilarious, full of dick jokes and such—his quick mind had already assembled the events of the previous 24 hours into the funniest PSA for cardio health ever made. And indeed, by the time […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
You Are Not A Unique Snowflake: Sean Porter on How to Get Ahead in Filmmaking
I don’t think I’d be out of line if I said the DP job market is heavily saturated. IATSE wouldn’t tell me the actual number of jobs available last year, but according to the internet there were 157 TV shows in production and roughly 250 features released (both union and non-union). Currently, there are more than 2,000 Local 600 members on the active DP roster, and while some of them are retiring this number doesn’t include the many operators stepping up and shooting on their way to re-rating. Add to that a small number of in-demand cinematographers who take up […]
by Sean Porter on Jun 11, 2018 -
Action and Cut: Film Schools, Guerrilla Filmmaking and the New “Saudi Cinema”
“End the trip? I’ll take you to the police.” The driver, Saudi, early 20s, looked into the rear view mirror at me and the woman next to me in the back seat. I had asked him, “You always ask your riders their nationality?” Finally, he responded, “You’re in an Islamic state, and you must respect the laws of this country!” Having lived in Sudan and Libya and grown up in largely conservative Chad just a couple countries over, I was not new to “Islamic states.” Despite Saudi Arabia’s massive economic and cultural overhaul in recent years, the legal system still […]
by Bentley Brown on Jun 11, 2018 -
Strength Through Humility
You’ve heard it before: “It’s better to fail than never to have tried.” While this may be true, if you’re a director there’s no reason why you should trip over your own feet like I did. After making a few features, I learned you could get pretty far by just believing your own narrative. However, the “fake it till you make it” approach has its limits. While I was making feature after feature, deep inside I was actually harboring a growing insecurity, an insecurity for which, ironically, I compensated with more drive. Thinking I could do no wrong, my ego […]
by A.D. Calvo on Jun 11, 2018 -
Teaching on the Horizon Line
In last summer’s issue, I looked at the development of new virtual and augmented reality programs on campuses throughout the United States, examining how they were funded and formed, what type of equipment they were using, which departments administered them and how they fostered cross-departmental collaboration, and what types of projects students were undertaking. I found that universities were using VR in a variety of ways unrelated to filmmaking, including advancing research in medicine, architecture and other fields. But the strongest programs that taught VR as a discipline were oriented toward gaming and narrative storytelling, in both fiction and nonfiction. […]
by Randy Astle on Jun 11, 2018 -
This is Where We Blow Up: Writer/Director Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You
“The papers on the boardroom table were stained from corpses.” Those lyrics, from The Coup’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You, offer some idea of the ideological imperative propelling Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, Brazil-meets-Afrofuturism satire of the same name. Struggling to make ends meet in Oakland, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) takes a job with telemarketing firm RegalView, where he finds himself rocketing to the top of the corporate ladder after he uses his “white voice” to drum up sales. His activist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) disapproves, especially after Cassius comes to the attention of deranged tech bro Steve Lift (Armie […]
by Nelson George on Jun 11, 2018 -
Class Review
When it came time for A.B. Shawky to make Yomeddine, a road movie about a leper trekking across Egypt in search of lost relatives, he turned to his NYU Tisch School of the Arts colleagues and faculty for advice. After all, the movie is both his first feature as well his NYU thesis film. Unlike many film schools, “NYU encourages you to do features for your thesis project,” Shawky told Filmmaker’s Tiffany Pritchard, explaining that the school granted him an extra year on top of the two normally allowed to complete the arduous production. The school also granted him key […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Creative Critical Writing
In 1993, I was a graduate student in a Critical Studies Ph.D. program studying independent, avant-garde and feminist film and video, figuring out how to write about them, and thinking about what it meant to write at all. I adored high theory—the thickness of it, the heady political ambition, the philosophical complexity. But I liked zines and the wild world of alternative publishing, too, along with the community of readers eager for experiments that these publications augured. My advisors discouraged involvement with Filmmaker—a career-killer, for sure—and when I was offered a short-term job at Variety one summer, they rolled their […]
by Holly Willis on Jun 11, 2018
