How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? Ailey was made in fits and starts over a period of four years. We’d raise a sum of money to cover one portion of the process, spend the money, stop down, raise more money. Rinse repeat. Stopping down and starting is always tough. You lose momentum or you risk losing key collaborators. By 2019, we’d completed the bulk of production and we were trying to figure out whether to start up our edit when, […]
As someone who came of age at a time when looking for a potential partner(s), be it for a lifetime or one night, was less a neat calculated exercise and more a messy spontaneous surprise, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of online dating. Seeking love and/or sex via swipe just always seemed creepily clinical and controlled, cold and robotic — about as sexy as in vitro fertilization to my mind. And yet watching Pacho Velez’s Searchers, an exploration of online connecting through the eyes (literally, as Velez’s Interrotron-style setup allows his characters to look directly at us as they […]
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I imagine that many directors are writing about COVID or the BLM protests, and both of those events shaped Searchers, but I also experienced a more personal milestone—my fortieth birthday. I usually avoid celebrating birthdays, but it felt important to embrace this one. Then came the pandemic, and I spent the day like every other lockdown day, reading the news, listening to podcasts, and experimenting in the kitchen. Besides the symbolic weight of forty, […]
Alex Camilleri’s Luzzu touts itself as one of the first 100% Maltese films. Starring fisherman Camilleri met during his time in Malta, the movie features non-actors in what could be mistaken for a documentary on Malta’s fishing industry and the ecological concerns therein. Acting as the film’s editor, Camilleri walks us through his path to his first feature and the solitary experience of editing your own film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Camilleri: I’m the writer and […]
Set in the countryside of O’Ahu, Hawai’i, Director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s second feature film I Was a Simple Man is a surreal portrait of an elderly man’s final days. Told in chapters, the film follows Masao (Steve Iwamoto) as he’s visited by ghosts of his past, including his wife Grace (Constance Wu). Acting as the editor for his film, Yogi discusses staying true to his initial emotion in writing the film, as well as the value of brutal honesty in your team. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and […]
Dash Shaw’s adult animated feature Cryptozoo is a surreal romp into the world of cryptids, mythic creatures whose existence are debated. After stumbling on the titular Cryptozoo, an eclectic team of individuals set out to capture a dream-eating creature called a Baku. Editor Lance Edmands tells us of the unique struggle of balancing dream logic and streamlined editing that went into the development of Cryptozoo. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Edmands: I became friends with Dash Shaw […]
Set in the countryside of O’Ahu, Hawai’i, Director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s second feature film I Was a Simple Man is a surreal portrait of an elderly man’s final days. Told in chapters, the film follows Masao (Steve Iwamoto) as he’s visited by ghosts of his past, including his wife Grace (Constance Wu). DP Eunsoo Cho clues us in on how to capture the majesty of Hawai’i’s landscape, as well as how to portray a movie that eschews time and space. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? Playing With Sharks is the story of a one-of-a-kind, passionate woman, Valerie Taylor, and her remarkable life’s relationship with the ocean’s most notorious predators, sharks. As both a contemporary and archival film, with gob-smacking real scenes of this fearless and glamorous, maverick conservationist, the events of 2020 had the potential to completely derail our production—but—fortunately, probably, ended up defining the movie, certainly, defining the way I feel now in thinking about the natural world […]
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? Even though many other things happened in 2020, the pandemic was without doubt the most significant event. However, at the moment it is difficult for me to say if it has changed my view on the film in some way. Like most films coming out now, it was written and shot before the pandemic. The post-production was affected by the restrictions, causing some notable delays, but I don’t think it changed the result of […]
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I finished the final cut of the documentary on Friday, March 13th, 2020. That was the deadline to lock the film in order to move on to color correction and sound mix. That night, I had watched the film one last time before leaving the editing room and as I was driving home, an enormous sadness seized me. At first I couldn’t explain what it was, but then I realized I wasn’t satisfied with […]