After finishing three short films while a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film program–all, on the surface, quite different–Scottish-born writer/director Charlotte Wells only recently figured out the theme that unites them: denial. “They are all about characters denying or avoiding something,” she says. That said, the terms mean something different: “Denial is internal, and avoidance is recognizing something external but not dealing with it.” Indeed, the strength of Wells’s uncommonly assured, powerfully subtle films is their depiction of characters sliding between denial, avoidance and then, at least in her third short, Blue Christmas, a kind of […]
Over a sixty-year career, Lau Kar-leung wrote, directed, choreographed, and appeared in over 100 movies, including martial-arts classics like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. The Museum of Modern Art celebrates his work in a 10-movie series, “The Grandmaster: Lau Kar-leung,” running July 5–17. Born in 1937 in Guangdong, Lau entered the movie industry as an extra and stunt man in the 1950s. Trained in martial arts by his father, Lau began choreographing fight scenes, most notably with director Chang Cheh (The One-Armed Swordsman, Golden Swallow). He was the first action choreographer to be promoted to director at the Shaw Brothers […]
Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]
For over 15 years, Jesse V. Johnson has been a reliable craftsman of action movies for the wildly unreliable DTV market. Born in England, he moved to Hollywood to work as a stunt performer in the 1990s, working on everything from Total Recall (1990) to The Thin Red Line (1999). He has bounced back and forth between stunt work and DTV directing ever since — whatever it took to pay the bills in an unpredictable career. One predictable thing over the last year has been the presence of Scott Adkins as his leading man. Adkins may not have the name […]
As always, we’re breaking our annual “most read Filmmaker posts” into two lists — 10 posts published in 2017 and 10 archival posts that are still registering large readerships. Throughout the 20, and particularly in the archival posts, there’s a strong current of practical advice conveyed by working filmmakers — the hallmark of this magazine. Here are our most popular posts of 2017. Published in 2017 1. The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vaccum. Our top post in 2017 was filmmaker Nina Menkes’s preview of a presentation she’ll give at Sundance next month, one in which […]
After shipping the Fall 2006 issue of Filmmaker, where I had been the managing editor for nearly four years, I moved to Los Angeles to start my career as a movie director, the only thing I had ever wanted to do with myself. I had just turned 30, and I was behind schedule. At the time, my expectations didn’t seem so delusional. To begin with, I had found the story I needed to tell, something in a voice that was uniquely my own, and I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm. I had a top agency and management company behind me, […]
Although dance and virtual reality seemingly lay at polar ends of the creative spectrum, they can come together to make incredibly moving artistic experiences. That, at least, holds true for co-directors Lily Baldwin and Saschka Unseld in their new piece Through You, a VR film heavy on physical choreography that premiered at Sundance earlier this year and on August 1 was released on Samsung Gear VR via the Oculus Video app. The piece features a couple as their relationship evolves over the course of decades through discovery, fulfillment, loss and rejuvenation. It uses handheld camera movement to create a very visceral […]
This year at the Cannes Film Festival, Christopher Doyle became the most recent cinematographer to be graced with the Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens In Cinematography Award, a prize given for a DP’s impact on the history of world cinema. Sponsored by the renowned lens maker, this year’s “trophy” was an Angénieux Optimo 15-40 zoom lens specially engraved with Doyle’s name. Born in Sydney in 1952, Doyle left his homeland as a teenager to begin an odyssey in Asia, where he has predominantly worked. He had a number of jobs — from oil drilling to cow herding — before his photographs caught […]
With a name like Fortissimo Films, that could have been the company’s unofficial motto in its early years — fortissimo, of course, defined in music terms as an instruction to play notes with force. The 25-year-old international sales company boldly took on challenging arthouse cinema, from the likes of Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jim Jarmusch, and championed them in global markets with a deafening level of commitment. But earlier this year, the sales company went silent, declaring bankruptcy and signaling not just the end of the respected arthouse giant, but as former Focus Features CEO James Schamus says, “the […]
Screen luminaries from around the world are invited once a year to New Zealand for its annual industry gathering, the Big Screen Symposium. Last year, guest speaker Sebastiàn Silva (Nasty Baby, The Maid) shared his horror stories of working with Christopher Doyle, who (Silva claimed) exposed himself to everyone on the set of Magic Magic, refused to shoot close ups (“That’s HBO bullshit”) and generally caused chaos. When Doyle himself was announced as a guest speaker for this year’s event, it was clear the Symposium intended to take the announced theme of “Playing With Risk” quite literally. And so from […]