Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? I have spent the last decade shooting all over Los Angeles, and wanted to use my first film as an opportunity to show different sides of the city—ones that don’t always get the spotlight in movies. In particular, we had a very important […]
Dig!, Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary on The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, remains an illuminating look at the turn-of-the-century indie rock scene in the United States. The film has been newly edited and restored and will play the 2024 Sundance Film Festival as Dig! XX to celebrate the festival’s 40th anniversary. Below, David Timoner, who shared cinematography duties with his sister Ondi and Vasco Tunes on the original Dig! walks down memory lane as he relates their ingenuity in capturing such intimate footage and how the quality of the cameras improved alongside the bands’ popularity. See all responses to our annual […]
Love Machina, the latest film by documentarian Peter Sillen (Benjamin Smoke) follows the couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt, who attempt to transfer Bina’s consciousness to a commissioned humanoid artificial intelligence to preserve their love for one another. The film is also the first feature film editor credit for Conor McBride who discusses the timeliness of the film and its subject matter, as well as how he balanced the need for the film to be simultaneously entertaining and touching. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Love Me takes place over Earth’s 10 billion year life, from its birth to its death when the sun becomes a red giant and consumes our solar system. From the beginning, we knew that we couldn’t rely on just VFX to show these […]
Martine Rothblatt and Bina Rothblatt are two futurists attempting to preserve their love forever with BINA48, a robotic face with chatbot capabilities to which the couple hopes to upload Bina’s consciousness. Their story is chronicled in director Peter Sillen’s Love Machina, a 2024 Sundance premiere. For this project, Sillen served as his own cinematographer. Below, he explains why he made that choice for the film and explains the film’s relationship to 1960s America. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Ninety percent of this film was shot in Downtown LA, specifically the Arts District. I love that part of town and think it’s singular and vibrant and beautiful. I also don’t think it’s photographed as much as some of the more “iconic” […]
Riffing on the eponymous stock trope recognizable in so many American films, The American Society of Magical Negroes tells the story of Aren, the latest recruit to a secret society of magical Black people who use their powers to make the lives of white people easier. The Sundance 2024 premiere is the debut film for director Kobi Libii. The film’s cinematographer Doug Emmett has a number of recognizable credits under his belt, including The Edge of Seventeen and Sorry to Bother You. Below, he humorously recounts difficulties mounting a set three floors underground and details the inspirations behind the film’s look. See all responses to […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? The answer is The Road. It was made on the road. My brother David and I shot Dig! in a rumble tumble of different locations, be they vans, tour buses, different cities and countries from Europe to Tokyo, all sorts of venues […]
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Our film, Agent of Happiness, is a road movie about a happiness agent who travels door to door to measure the happiness index of the society. It’s a physical journey through the meandering roads of the Bhutanese Himalayas where he meets people from […]