6302 Results for “Open ”
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“How the Hell Do We Make this Watchable for 78 Minutes?” Director Maxim Pozdorovkin | Our New President
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? Our New President tells the story of Donald Trump entirely through Russian propaganda. As such, it is a film that was edited “live” as Trump’s first year in office unfolded. Unlike most films, this one could not be thought through in advance. We had to roll with the headlines. The storytelling adjusted to the events and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“We Went Where the Story Took Us”: Director Derek Doneen | Kailash
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? Kailash is about a man who risks his life and the lives of his family and colleagues by breaking into factories to rescue children from slavery. Being that we chose to tell the story with vérité filmmaking — in realtime — the very nature of what we set out to shoot was inherently chaotic. We knew […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“If You Want That Melodramatic Shaft of Light, You’d Better Mean It”: DP Sam Levy on Shooting Lady Bird
There’s a tradition of young directors looking for inspiration in the bygone eras of their adolescence. For George Lucas in American Graffiti, it was the California car culture of the early ’60s. For Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused, it was the Texas high school rituals of the ’70s. And for Greta Gerwig in Lady Bird, it’s Catholic school and the suburban doldrums of early-aughts Sacramento. Written and directed by Gerwig, Lady Bird follows the titular character (Saoirse Ronan) through her senior year of high school as she fights with her mom (Laurie Metcalf), pines for a philosophical dilettante from the […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 17, 2018 -
No Poster is Better than an Amateur Poster: Five Takeaways from the IFP Narrative Lab
My first feature film, Kids Go Free to Fun Fun Time, is a drama/romance that takes place in three different countries, showing how a couple’s relationship evolves over the course of a decade. I have been working on this film for longer than I’d like to admit. I had little luck getting the funding or support needed to get the film done, but then I got accepted into the IFP Narrative Lab, and my world completely changed. To talk about everything I learned during the IFP Narrative Lab would take about 40 pages, so I’m going to try and boil it […]
by Ben Hicks on Jan 17, 2018 -
Time’s Up for the War on Stories
Christina Kallas, writer-director of multi-protagonist feature films 42 Seconds of Happiness and The Rainbow Experiment, which will have its world premiere at Slamdance on Saturday, January 20, takes a look at the current shift in storytelling and shares her thoughts on how to pursue a more inclusive cinema by redefining the past. A few years ago I wrote a series of articles including an eight-point plan of action for Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film blog, “How to Change the World (And Most Importantly, Why).” As one of my sources, I used the 2013 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s study, which is […]
by Christina Kallas on Jan 17, 2018 -
“Things Happen that are Too Big for You…”: Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan on the Director’s Cut of his Masterpiece, Margaret
Margaret may be one of the best movies you’ve never seen. It’s the second film from writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose first, You Can Count On Me, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000, and third, Manchester by the Sea garnered two Academy Awards for Lead Actor and Original Screenplay. But Margaret suffered a different journey, shooting in 2005 and being released much later in 2011 for a very limited run — and a cut 36 minutes shorter than the one Lonergan preferred. As part of its series, “The Way I See It: Directors’ Cuts,” the Quad in New […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jan 15, 2018 -
DP Rachel Morrison on Mudbound, Her Ideal Extinct Film Stock and Using Waveform Monitors
In Mudbound, a friendship between two returning soldiers – one white (Garrett Hedlund) and one black (Jason Mitchell) – sets a pair of neighboring farming families on a path to tragedy in post-World War II Mississippi. For cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Fruitvale Station, the upcoming Black Panther), filmic references for the harshness of agrarian life in the Jim Crow South were few and far between considering the Hollywood studio offerings of the era were preoccupied with propagandistic war movies and opulent musicals. Instead, Morrison looked to the Depression-era photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration – specifically the work of Gordon […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 11, 2018 -
The 50 Most Anticipated American Films of 2018
Last year I put together a list of my 50 most anticipated American films of 2017, and this year the fine folks at Filmmaker invited me back for a new edition. Before we get started, I’ll share some quick notes about methodology. First, this list is entirely the work of one person. It’s not aggregated through dozens of industry insiders or compiled via ballots or anything fancy like that. As a result, I’m sure it’s woefully incomplete. I have no doubt that there are still a bunch of American films out there waiting to be discovered that will bowl me […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 9, 2018 -
DP Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water, Judging Exposure without a Meter and Capturing Rich Blacks
There’s a line in Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl” that goes, “(It’s) strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” Suffering together connected director Guillermo del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen on the set of 1997’s Mimic. The Miramax-produced giant insect creature feature marked the first American effort for del Toro and just the second studio gig for the Danish Laustsen. The experience was not a pleasant one. As del Toro put it during an on-stage interview at the BFI London Film Festival last October: “Two horrible things happened in the late ’90s: my father […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 4, 2018 -
Top Ten Films Directed/Co-Directed by Women of 2017
Many might see 2017 as a tumultuous year for women in film, but it wasn’t. I see it as the year that women in the industry began the long journey towards ending the tumult, starting with the huge artistic risks they have taken in their work. Each film I chose for this list holds a purely individual voice, each voice starting a conversation about the future of not just women in film but the future of film as a whole. 2017 was only the beginning of hearing our stories, and we have a lot more to say. 10. Kiss and […]
by Donna K on Dec 29, 2017
