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Color in Black and White: DP Robert Elswit on Ripley
“It’s the light! Always the light!” exclaims a priest to the murderous Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) as they bask in the glory of a Caravaggio painting in Netflix’s new adaption of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. There are a multitude of exquisite facets to cinematographer Robert Elswit’s work on the series, including the formal compositions that embrace the Italian setting’s architecture. But, more than anything else, it’s the light as Elswit harkens back to classic noirs, 1960s Italian cinema and the canvasses of the great masters of chiaroscuro. Elswit earned an Oscar nomination for his black and […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 16, 2024 -
Movies with Sand Under Your Feet: Previewing The Seventh Annual Rockaway Film Festival
“It’s interesting, more filmmakers this year are asking for laurels,” says Sam Fleischner when we spoke just a few days before the opening of the seventh annual Rockaway Film Festival. Fleischner’s the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, Courtney Muller is co-founder and program director, and the two, along with their small team, have grown the festival to the point where the schedule boasts more premieres, U.S. and world, than ever and, with that growth, directors wanting to add the Rockaway selection to their posters and websites. “We never wanted to make a laurel,” admits Fleischner. “So it was like, alright, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 16, 2024 -
“America is Desperate for a Narrative”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention
Following a decade of work in experimental and documentary cinema, director Courtney Stephens steps into fiction for the first time with Invention, a remarkably resourceful microbudget drama that nonetheless resists strict categorization. Starring and co-conceived by Callie Hernandez, the film draws upon the actress’s real-life relationship with her late father, a medical doctor turned small-time huckster who made a name for himself on local television talk shows and public access programs in the ’90s and 2000s. In this fictionalized telling set in the Berkshires, VHS footage of those TV appearances weave through a story in which Hernandez, playing a version […]
by Jordan Cronk on Aug 15, 2024 -
Gotham Awards Adds Best Director & Breakthrough Performer Categories
The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker’s publisher, announced today the opening of its 2024 submissions plus the addition of two competitive categories. For the first time, there will be a Best Director award. Returning this year will be a Breakthrough Performer award, which was last presented in 2022. The other categories are: Best Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best International Feature, Breakthrough Director, Best Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance, Outstanding Supporting Performance. Missing this year are the various TV award categories, which will now be presented in a separate Gotham TV Awards ceremony on June 2, 2025. From the press […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 13, 2024 -
“That’s What Lights Me Up the Most, This ‘Dance’ with the Writer”: Marianne Rendón, Back To One, Episode 304
Marianne Rendón’s performance in Summer Solstice, Noah Schamus’ “modern twist on the buddy comedy from a queer and trans perspective,” is special in such a rare way that makes shinning a light on it actually detrimental to its effect on the new viewer. Its revelations are small and imbedded in the nuances of the character. It’s how they seem rooted and not created, “lived” and not “played,” that make them extraordinary. On this episode, Rendón takes us back to her training, and how being fed great experimental theater before the classics resulted in a kind of “reverse engineering” of her […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 13, 2024 -
“We Have Complete Creative Control”: Chuck Russell on Witchboard
The first film directed by Chuck Russell I can remember seeing was the special effects-driven Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask at a multiplex with my family thirty years ago (the summer comedy opened on July 29th, 1994 in over 2,300 North American theaters). However, it was his work in the horror genre with co-writer Frank Darabont that really hooked me. Both 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors—released when the filmmaker was only 28—and 1988’s remake of The Blob were gooey and gory, yes, but also competent adventure films, their charm derived from Russell’s nimble craftsmanship and the […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 12, 2024 -
TikTok, Building a Slate, and the Life of an Independent Producer: It Ends With Us Producer Alex Saks
If you’re a TikTok-using film producer, then the feed of Alex Saks has undoubtedly been delivered straight to your phone by that platform’s ruthless and unerring algorithm. Over the past year-and-a-half, and across nearly 200 clips, Saks, a former ICM financing agent and more recently a producer of such films as The Florida Project, Thoroughbreds, and Sometimes I Think About Dying, has been dispensing on the platform pithy, direct pieces of advice on topics such as securing book rights, defining the role of the line producer, imposter syndrome and the state of the industry. There’s the occasional stitch or commentary […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 9, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: David Gutnik’s Ukraine War Doc, Rule of Two Walls
David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls — the title referring to the recommended method of sheltering during a bombing raid — receives its theatrical premiere August 16 at New York’s DCTV Firehouse Cinema before rolling out to selected cities via Monument Releasing. The doc, which depicts the work of Ukrainian artists making defiant work during the current war in Ukraine, is executive produced by Liev Schreiber and is the director’s foll0w-up to his fiction debut, Materna, which, like Rule of Two Walls, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. In an interview with Lauren Wissot timed to that festival premiere, Gutnik […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2024 -
“You Don’t Have a Lot of Control Over a Head Exploding”: MaXXXine Cinematographer Eliot Rockett
After the 1970s grit of X and the Technicolor sheen of Pearl, Ti West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett turn to the 1980s with MaXXXine. Shot with the same combo of Sony Venice and Vantage MiniHawks, the L.A.-set story finds adult actress Maxine Minx’s big break into mainstream films curtailed by a series of giallo-esque murders. With the movie freshly out on VOD, Rockett spoke to Filmmaker about the concluding chapter in the trilogy. Filmmaker: Ti talked in an interview about how MaXXXine is his first film shot in L.A. despite living there for 20 years. X and Pearl were both […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 8, 2024 -
The Gotham Announces 2024 Project Market Slate
The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the projects and creators accepted into the 2024 Gotham Week Project Market, which takes place in Brooklyn and Manhattan September 30 – October 4. A long-running program of The Gotham, the Project Market introduces projects in development seeking financing or distribution to industry partners, including producers, sales agents and distributors. It returns this year following last year’s break due to the ongoing Writers Guild strikes with 112 projects spanning feature films, documentary and television. Among the projects are Buffalo Stone, which Lily Gladstone co-wrote and produced, with co-writer-directors Daniel Glick and Ivy Macdonald and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2024
