“Did you make the day?” That’s the first question financiers and production execs will ask after a first day — or, really, any day — of shooting. “Making the day” means completing all the scenes on the call sheet so that the production isn’t falling behind, something that can led to dropped scenes, budget overruns and more. But beyond the “making the day” question lies a deeper one: how is a production making the day? Rushed scenes, abandoned coverage and quickly made decisions can result in an on-time shooting schedule but diminished artistic results. That’s why this behind-the-scenes video of […]
With White Rose, My God, a new album from Alan Sparhawk — his first since the passing of Mimi Parker, his partner in the band Low — scheduled to appear in September, the singer/songwriter has released its first single with a music video directed by independent filmmaker Rick Alverson (The Mountain). Alverson has pixellated Sparhawk’s face as the musician has digitally manipulated his voice in this eerie clip. Check it out above.
Y’lan Noel played Daniel in the HBO series Insecure starred in The First Purge, and now he plays Officer Platt in Lady in The Lake, Alma Har’el’s eagerly anticipated new series for Apple TV+ that drops on July 19th. On this episode, he discusses his unique approach to the work, which starts with, and centers on, daydreaming and the avoidance of aiming to do “the right thing.” He talks about allowing for “an energy that’s not me to make certain decisions;” the importance of solitude, space, stillness; how Har’el’s willingness to leave room for the mystical served his process; and […]
Screenwriters know the feeling all too well: you complete a draft of your screenplay (yay!), now you need someone to read it (boo!). It’s a rollercoaster. Because let’s face it, your friends are tired, and how objective are they going to be, really? You’re saving your industry contracts for a later draft, and how detailed can they be, with their schedule and fifty other scripts to read? There are loads of script readers and people you can pay for coverage and feedback, and, who knows, they may offer valuable advice, or they might give a sentence or two of vague, […]
What used to be known, literally, as “the cutting room floor,” now exists as a digital bin, an assortment of deleted scenes, unused (and in today’s mode of industrial documentary production, perhaps even unviewed) footage — material that, through its absence, haunts any finished audiovisual work. Often when this material is revealed, on a Blu-ray supplemental features disc, for example, the director’s elisions affirm the strength of their initial creative editorial decisions. Other times, particularly in biographical documentaries, the unused material becomes a kind of lacuna, suggesting not only paths unexplored but a failure to engage with all that’s messy, […]
After eight years—much of them spent developing projects that never came to fruition—Mud and Midnight Special filmmaker Jeff Nichols is thankfully back with a new movie. That means cinematographer Adam Stone is back with a new movie too. After meeting Nichols at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts, Stone has been behind the camera on all six of the director’s features. Every one of them has been shot on 35mm, including the pair’s latest collaboration, The Bikeriders. Lensed in and around Cincinnati, the movie takes its inspiration from the photographs and stories in Danny Lyon’s titular 1968 […]
One of the evergreen questions of filmmaking is: Can cinema make a difference? Usually, the issue is raised in connection with specific movies, such as those championing change, including SeaWorld-skewering doc Blackfish, or better husbandry of the planet. Take one step back, though, and there’s another, perhaps more vital way that cinema can make a difference — by bringing a community together in shared experience and cause. This latter force for good is firmly in evidence at Greece’s Evia Film Project, which has just wrapped its third edition on the island nestled near the mainland a couple of hours from […]
The rain started just as our plane took off from Porto Alegre, sealing our narrow escape. Forty-eight hours later, the airport was underwater, as Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul faced its worst flooding in nearly a century. How could this happen? We had just premiered my new film there a few nights before. Was it a dream? A quick glance at my arm confirms otherwise. Like many filmmakers who attend the so-called “coolest” of the Méliès Federation’s consortium of fantastic film festivals, I got inked by Laiss, a native tattoo artist who specializes in blackwork. Mine is a simple line drawing […]
The Greek nonprofit Oxbelly announced today the participants of its 2024 Oxbelly retreat, which was held June 22-30, 2024 in Costa Navarino, Greece. Thirty fellows broken into three strands — screenwriting, episodic writing and fiction writing — received mentorship from an illustrious list of advisors, who included Charlie Kaufman, Chigozie Obioma, Miguel Gomes, Marielle Heller, Barry Jenkins and Michael Almereyda. Leaders and program directors for the three programs were Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter Nicole Perman (Screenwriting); Jen Blake (executive producer, Joyland) and Deutschland 83 producer Jörg Winger (Episodic); and An Orchestra of Minorities author Chigozie Obioma (Fiction). As the […]
In 2012, Scottish composer Anna Meredith released her first non-classical-music recording, Black Prince Fury, a four-track EP opening with what immediately became her signature tune: “Nautilus,” a ferociously escalating blast of brass running arpeggios up and down at increasingly overwhelming volume. It’s at once visceral and programmatic, applying classical discipline to an earth-shaking instrumental in a mission statement that also opened Meredith’s first full-length album, 2016’s Varmints. In an interview with The Guardian’s Laura Snapes at the time, Meredith was insightful about the economics of choosing to move from the realm of classical music, where she wrote work paid for […]