6583 Results for “production”
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Alphabet City, I Start Counting! and Captain Newman, M.D.: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Amos Poe had already directed one homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (his 1976 debut feature Unmade Beds) when he began production on the 1984 thriller Alphabet City, but the latter film is the one that really earns the comparisons it invites to Godard and the French New Wave as a whole. A member of the East Village “No Wave” movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s that also included Abel Ferrara, Bette Gordon, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Poe began his career with the seminal punk rock documentary The Blank Generation, and Alphabet City is a singular mash-up of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 8, 2021 -
“What Does It Mean When We’re Working in 360?”: Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber on Pieces of a Woman
While the arrival of a newborn child can strengthen a couple’s relationship, the loss of one can accentuate fissures that were already there. Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman is an emotionally high-pitched study of the PTSD that results from a home birth gone fatally wrong. Based on a stage play by Mundruczó’s partner, Kata Wéber, this film adaptation moves the action to Boston and casts as its two leads Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. Following its world premiere at last fall’s Venice International Film Festival (where Kirby was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress), press coverage for […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 5, 2021 -
“Backwards Continuity is Not a Category, Is It?”: Script Supervisor Steve Gehrke on Tenet
In the world of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, people from the future have figured out how to reverse the entropy of people and objects, making them “time inverted.” Effect precedes cause for inverted objects and people. Inverted bullets return from bullet holes and swirl back into the barrel of the guns that fired them, a fight between an inverted soldier and a soldier operating on regular time looks like a freak-puppet show, and reverse speech sounds like the dream speak from the Red Room in Twin Peaks. All someone has to do to swap their inversion status is enter a turnstile […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 5, 2021 -
“I Wanted to Explode the Will and Grace Stereotype about Idealized and Infantilized Gay Men and Women”: Writer/Director Jeremy Hersh Interviewed by Jeremy O. Harris About Hersh’s Powerful and Nuanced Drama, The Surrogate
Now streaming on STARZ and with a Gotham Awards nomination for its lead, Jasmine Batchelor, The Surrogate, Jeremy Hersh’s powerful and probing drama, begins with what might seem a familiar sort of indie film setup: a young, twentysomething Columbia grad, Jess (Batchelor) agrees to be the surrogate mother to the baby of her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband Aaron (Sullivan Jones). But very quickly writer/director Hersh establishes that The Surrogate will not be a bantery relationship comedy: a prenatal test reveals that the child will be born with Down syndrome, a development that destabilizes the progressive male […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2021 -
Artlist, The Best Source of Music for Filmmakers (Sponsored Post)
Creating the soundtrack of your film is often a complex task for any filmmaker, and finding music that you can legally use without being subject to copyright claims is not that obvious. With the boom in online video creation, and more creators adding music to videos, music licensing platforms emerged to bridge the gap between the high price of licensing popular songs and the low quality of free music. This development also coincided with the increase in independent musicians looking to make money from their work. Although royalty-free music platforms presented a way to simplify the process of acquiring music for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 4, 2021 -
“Box Within a Box Feeling”: DP Paul Ozgur on John and the Hole
In Pascual Sisto’s John and the Hole, John (Charlie Shotwell), seemingly unprovoked, drugs his family and tosses them into a bunker where he holds them captive. Written by Birdman co-writer Nicolás Giacobone, John and the Hole is a zoomed in look at the psychology of boyhood. DP Paul Ozgur shares his frustrations with the changing of the seasons complicating shooting and the team’s move away from romantic imagery. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Ozgur: When you get a script […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 1, 2021 -
Filmmaker‘s 20 Most Popular New Posts of 2020
To rhyme with the year, I’ve expanded this year’s roundup of our most popular posts, as determined by Google Analytics, from 10 to 20. It’s full of both expected entries — our 25 New Faces scores highly every year — as well as a few surprises. It also shows the dominance of TV and streaming, or perhaps the ’20 decline in theatrical exhibition. So many of the articles on this list — which aren’t “a best of the year,” although many are indeed that — are the ones that intersected best with search analytics, caught viral waves, or rode along […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2020 -
“We Don’t Find Shots, We Build Them”: DP Erik Messerschmidt on Mank, Lens Flare Painting and Native Black and White
In 1941, a 25-year-old Orson Welles made one of cinema’s most auspicious debuts by directing, co-writing, starring in and producing Citizen Kane. With Mank—David Fincher’s look at the evolution of Kane’s screenplay—cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt makes an impressive feature bow of his own. After working his way up through the ranks of grip and electric and earning DP credits on the shows Legion, Mindhunter and Fargo, Messerschmidt’s very first fiction feature has landed him in the midst of Oscar conversation. With Mank now streaming on Netflix, Messerschmidt spoke with Filmmaker about deep focus, high ISOs and painting in lens flares; and how even […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 22, 2020 -
“Nobody Knew About the Vinegar Syndrome at That Time”: Mike De Leon On His Newly Restored Kisapmata
Mike De Leon made his Cannes debut in ‘82 when he premiered two films at Directors’ Fortnight in the same year—Kisapmata and Batch 81—becoming only the second filmmaker to do so at the time. Wim Wenders asked De Leon and certain filmmakers present at the festival that year to answer pre-written questions about the future of cinema in the span of a 16mm reel (around 11 minutes) for his documentary Room 666. Godard and Antonioni filled the time and could probably go on; the others, like Spielberg, Siedelman and Fassbinder, talked for several minutes. But De Leon’s segment lasted under […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 17, 2020 -
“The Brightest Light of a Shot Doesn’t Always Have to Be on the Actor’s Face”: DP Matthew Libatique on The Prom
Matthew Libatique likes to say that sometimes lighting needs to be the lead guitarist and sometimes it needs to be the drummer. The Prom is definitely a lead guitarist kind of movie. An adaptation of the popular musical, The Prom follows four Broadway personalities (Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman and Andrew Rannells) hoping to boost their careers by descending on small town Indiana as “celebrity activists” in service of the cause of a gay student banned from attending the titular bash with her partner of choice. With the movie now streaming on Netflix, Libatique talked with Filmmaker about working with […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 16, 2020
