Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? We were on an extremely tight 19-day schedule with a large cast of children who had limited hours they could work. The cameras basically had to be constantly rolling to maximize every second. One day, there was a COVID scare that put a two-hour hole in our day. We spontaneously made up a scene where our characters are writing the […]
Among the changes Sundance filmmakers are encountering this year at the festival’s first in-person edition since 2020 is one playing out behind the scenes and before theater doors open. For the first time, Sundance is charging filmmakers for guaranteed tech checks before their screenings. Tech checks involve screening a DCP or print in a theater to check sound, picture, subtitling and other aspects of projection and audio before it is screened for an audience. The new policy was revealed in emails sent to film teams requesting tech checks and involves Sundance assigning “dedicated staff to facilitate.” Thirty-minute spot checks taking […]
The subject of a bidding war after its premiere before selling to Netflix for a reported $20 million, Chloe Domont’s twisty thriller Fair Play owes much to the work of editor Franklin Peterson in establishing the deliberate pace necessary to suck viewers in. Below, he offers (spoiler-free!) insights on his work on the film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Peterson: I was offered an interview with Chloe, the writer-director, for the position, as she responded to my […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? For weeks before production, the film’s cinematographer Josée Deshaies and I begin a long process of creating a storyboard for the film. At some point, after we’ve established our own rhythm, we invite an illustrator—in this case, our production manager Marianne Germain’s brother Gabriel—to join us to translate our conversations into images. The work of the three of us then […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? When we started production on Fancy Dance, we had originally planned to shoot our powwow scene at a community powwow, but as the shoot dates got closer, Oklahoma hit a spike in COVID cases and we were forced to rethink our plan. With COVID protocols in place, the only way to safely shoot the scene was to throw our own […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our film was almost entirely shot in the Italian Alps and we knew this would be demanding. Because of the hard logistics of getting to our locations, the height at which we would be filming and because of the weather. The crew needed to be up for an adventure, and so did the cast. We only realized how true this […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? As COVID took hold in March 2020, we knew we had to capture Ruth Reichl’s journey chronicling the food security story unfolding in real time. But, unable to travel, how would we solve the problem of distance: the miles and miles lying between her and her subjects, and the continent between her, in upstate New York, and our crew, in […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? On March 11, 2020, we shot and completed our first day of principal photography of Young. Wild. Free. On March 12…well, you know what happened that day. Our entire industry and the rest of the world shut down because of COVID. I, along with the rest of the producers who had worked so hard to get to the point of […]
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our film has a lot of rare, never-before-seen propaganda footage of apartheid that we were given, kind of in secret, by people who had access to it and wanted to share it with “the right people.” The footage itself was emotionally very challenging, as this was hours of footage of the planning and execution of apartheid by its masterminds. What […]
In visual artist Alison O’Daniel’s debut feature The Tuba Thieves, a local news story serves as the impetus for an abstract investigation into the cultural significance of sound, music, communication and the act of hearing itself. From 2011 through 2013, schools in Southern California experienced a common (and confounding) crime—tubas were stolen en masse, leaving marching bands without their lowest-pitched instrument. When O’Daniel—who is d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing—first listened to the developing news story via car radio, she was immediately intrigued. Yet she wasn’t interested in the conventional questions pertinent to such a crime (e.g. who is stealing these instruments and why?), […]