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Back to One, Episode 120: Paapa Essiedu
The brilliant young British actor Paapa Essiedu speaks about the work with wisdom that belies his years. He plays Kwame on Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking new HBO series I May Destroy You. In 2016, his Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company received great acclaim. In this episode he compares those two characters, who are each facing defining moments in their lives, and talks about the “conscious unconsciousness” necessary to embody them. He discusses the various ways curiosity is useful, and why it’s so important to immerse yourself in the world of the story. Plus lots more! Back To One can be […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 4, 2020 -
How to Shoot a Film in a Global Pandemic
If you’re going to get stuck shooting a film in a global pandemic, it helps if you’re already pretty much self-quarantined in a beach resort and living off product-placement steak, wine and coffee. That’s the situation I found myself in on my film, 18½, which we started shooting in early March, 2020. What could possibly go wrong? Foot Bumps and Elbow Knocks 18½ is a 70s-era Watergate conspiracy thriller/dark comedy we were filming in Greenport, New York, which is on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island (“Nawth Fawk,” as it’s known locally), about three hours from Manhattan, […]
by Dan Mirvish on Aug 3, 2020 -
TIFF Announces Its 50-Film 2020 Lineup, with Pictures from Chloé Zhao, Spike Lee and More
TIFF co-heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente have announced the 50 films that will comprise the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. Necessarily due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s TIFF is very different edition — the film count is down from 2019’s 300+, and most press and industry will attend virtually — but there are still many anticipated world premieres and diverse international offerings. “We began this year planning for a 45th Festival much like our previous editions,” said Bailey, Artistic Director and Co-Head of TIFF, in a press release, “but along the way we had to rethink just about […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2020 -
FFA + iGEMStv, + Sub-Genre Launch Industry-Wide Survey: The New Era of Film Exhibition
From Brian Newman, whose Sub-Genre newsletter I highly recommend subscribing to, comes this set of three surveys about the independent film and festival worlds in the age of COVID-19. The three organizing parties — Sub-Genre, Film Festival Alliance and iGEMStv, a movie and TV curation/recommendation platform — promise to aggregate the results with an eye towards helping the industry figure out a way forward amidst the current pandemic. From the organizers: One way to solve the problems… is by collecting data and using it to build better systems. To that end: With COVID having such a major impact on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2020 -
New Expressions in Horror: Relic’s Natalie Erika James and Deep Tissue’s Meredith Alloway on Career Beginnings and the Power of the Short Film
Launching a career with a strong short is a hallmark of the independent film scene. The best shorts of the year commonly attract attention from festival programmers, managers, producers, agents. And in addition to generating recognition and industry interest, many shorts do more — they establish not only a voice but also subject matter their makers go on to explore with even more depth, nuance and subtlety in future works. Currently in release from IFC Midnight and attracting much-deserved attention is Natalie Erika James’s Relic, which artfully lodges an exploration of dementia and elder care within a genuinely scary haunted-house […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 31, 2020 -
“If There Ever Was a Time For a Film about How Everyday Heroes Can Fight Back”: Eli B. Despres and Elyse Steinberg on The Fight
If you remain unconvinced American civil liberties are under attack at an unprecedented degree, just wait until you see what the presidential administration cooks up next week (and the week after that). As every day brings a slew of new xenophobic tweets and attacks on the United States Constitution courtesy of Donald Trump, the public display of abuse of power has never been so transparent and, frighteningly, tolerated by constituents. As immigrant families seeking asylum continue to get thrown in cages, American protestors are thrown into unmarked vans) and reproductive and LGBTQ rights are challenged and erased, the need for […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 31, 2020 -
FIDMarseille 2020: Night Vision, Shady River, Pajeú
After Visions du Réel, FIDMarseille is the second festival this year I’ve never had a chance to physically attend that I can now at least virtually explore. Compared with VdR’s capacious slate and wide variety of nonfiction approaches, FIDMarseille (now no longer a strictly nonfiction festival) has a reputation for defaulting on the side of formal severity, with zero time for crowd-pleasing softer fare to balance it out. That reputation is in line with what I’ve sampled so far. (Note, too, that there was a physical, in-person edition of FIDMarseille. The United States could never.) I started with Chilean director […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 31, 2020 -
The Sin of Nora Moran, True Colors, The Carole Lombard Collection: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Shifting points of view, complicated flashbacks, elaborate optical effects and a fluid approach to objective reality are not typically characteristic of American movies released in the early sound era, which makes Phil Goldstone’s 1933 picture The Sin of Nora Moran a real discovery. Goldstone was a producer and director who worked on Hollywood’s “poverty row,” the section of studios located around Sunset and Gower that cranked out extremely low budget features designed to fill out the bottom halves of double bills; like Frank Capra, Edgar G. Ulmer, and several other filmmakers who spent all or part of their careers on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 31, 2020 -
“Documentaries Need Stars Just Like Feature Films Do”: Tiller Russell on his Amazon Docuseries The Last Narc
To say that documentarian Tiller Russell has a knack for discovering unconventional characters is an understatement. From NYPD cops running a cocaine ring (2015’s The Seven Five), to a Russian mobster, a Cuban spy and a Miami playboy conspiring to sell a Soviet sub to the Cali cartel (2018’s Operation Odessa), the filmmaker has more than earned his gonzo doc bona fides. And the weird winning streak continues with the director’s four-part docuseries The Last Narc, premiering on Amazon Prime Video today. The story catalyzing Russell’s latest is one familiar to any viewer of the first season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico — the 1985 kidnapping […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 31, 2020 -
Past Imperfect: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan on Memory, Metaphysics and Memento
The following interview with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan was originally published as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2001 issue. As French film critic Andre Bazin might have once said: “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” Bazin, as some of you may remember from your Cinema Studies courses, was one of the progenitors of the auteur theory, the line of thinking in which directors are considered the kings of filmdom, and the aggregation of their personal style is seen as a map of their royal terrain. Bazin also liked to talk about film, philosophy, photography and death, […]
by Chuck Stephens on Jul 30, 2020
