Besides providing much-needed visibility and prestige, film festivals are also marketplaces and training venues, in which first- or second-time filmmakers can gain valuable entrepreneurial guidance. This is of particular importance considering that a film’s heaviest production costs are incurred after it has been shot. Indeed, while shooting a film has arguably never been cheaper or easier, filmmakers still face numerous obstacles when it comes to actually getting their work viewed. Editing, color-correction, subtitling, grading and mixing — but also pitching, marketing, selling: these form the practical difference between a film acquiring some kind of shelf life and disappearing before it has […]
“Fassbinder died, so God gave us Ulrich Seidl,” wrote John Waters in Artforum in 2012. You can find obvious parallels between the directors; both are German-speaking iconoclasts (Seidl is Austrian; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was from Bavaria), whose precisely arranged and shot films cloak worlds of odd and over-the-top individuals with a patina of intense, self-conscious color, supplemented with frequently incongruous, unanticipated music. Before it became de rigueur, they explored in depth the intersection of the personal and the political in unique, ideologically loaded and often grotesque narratives. It’s not by chance that their bodies of work […]
We shot most of Channel B over a weekend, but it was only two weeks later, during an evening of pickups, that the aesthetic of the movie really started to come together. This probably happens a lot, especially on little rinky-dink shoots like ours. We were about to do a third take of one of our last setups, shooting in a public park, a few benches down from some drunks. I asked Cory Popp, our director of photography, to shift the first part of a camera movement just a little bit, and when I watched the playback on our one […]
When filmmaker Laura Poitras joined journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to form the online news site The Intercept, it didn’t seem a certainty that she’d bring film to the site’s reporting on domestic spying, national security and foreign policy issues. After all, even before her Academy Award for documentary CITIZENFOUR, Poitras had shared a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for print reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post. And, after the awards, Poitras continued covering these stories in print and online — not just for The Intercept, a site owned by […]
László Nemes’s debut feature Son of Saul was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. Taking place over a 36-hour-period at Auschwitz in 1944, the film tells the story of Saul, a member of the “Sonderkommandos,” the Jews forced to handle the dead bodies in the crematorium. When Saul sees the body of a boy he believes to be his son, he goes on an impossible mission to try to save the body from the flames and find a rabbi who can recite the Kaddish to give the boy a proper burial. Saul risks everything and stops at nothing, […]
Note (May 2018): the updated version of this article can be found here. Format. Codec. Audio. DCP. You’ve worked on your movie now for some time and have been eagerly waiting for acceptance emails from festivals. One lands in your inbox, and you excitedly read through the letter until, when you get to the festival’s technical requirements, you develop a sense of dread. The tersely worded communication from the technical director (glad we could finally meet) would put you to sleep if it didn’t terrify you. But don’t panic. Instead, phone your editor, and read this guide. Caveat emptor, though: […]
“Don’t you ever want an objective pair of eyes?” “Have you ever thought about working with an editor?” “Yes” and “yes” are the answers to questions asked of me and other filmmaker/editors over the years about this dual position, which, for either budgetary or artistic reasons, usually extends into self-music and postproduction supervision. Much like that against playwrights directing their own work, there is often a stigma against directors editing their own films, even as, in our ever-overcrowded filmmaking landscape, there are inevitably more filmmaker/editors, each with a mindset and motive different from the next. For some, it’s an easily […]
The response to a student’s query about any deeper meaning behind a simple cigar — for which his professor had a signature fondness — was Freud’s possibly apocryphal, and definitely overly quoted, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Right. At times, however, it isn’t. Anything can be either real or imaginary, or perhaps occupy a middle ground. That which lies in the in-between is often the most intriguing, revealing and nuanced of all. Working from a script by Chris Rossi that she significantly revised, Meadowland’s first-time director and very experienced cinematographer Reed Morano transports us and her female protagonist, […]
Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma is a fans-only interview session with the director. Straightforward, even staid in its construction, it consists almost entirely of two shots of a seated De Palma — one in medium close-up, the other presumably punched-in in post — and appositely illustrative clips and stills. The film currently only has two credits: the opening all-caps title “DE PALMA” scrolling left to right in lurid red, and a closing copyright credit (hard-working editors will, presumably, be thanked at a later date). Interlocutors Baumbach and Paltrow are never heard; according to this useful interview, they never even considered […]
For the first time in recent memory, it’s extremely difficult to select the top of the crop at this 53rd edition of the New York Film Festival (September 26-October 11), a question of too many contenders. I am not taking into consideration the tentpole films that anchor the festival, or any big studio movies, like Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. That’s another kettle of fish. Down below I list what I consider the crème de la crème (appropriate phrase, considering the usual Gallic slant) and review those titles briefly. Since they will all have commercial runs, I’ll be reviewing at length […]