Joshua Leonard first came onto the scene with the lo-fi sensation The Blair Witch Project, then went on to receive rave reviews for his performance in Lynn Shelton’s Independent Spirit Award-winning Humpday. His narrative feature debut as director, The Lie, premiered at Sundance in 2011 and he just wrapped production on his sophomore feature Behold My Heart which stars Marisa Tomei. Currently he co-stars in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Unsane, which was famously shot on an iPhone. Leonard talks about how freeing that was and how he’s dismayed, now that he’s a dad, at all the bad guy parts he’s being […]
New York-based director and production designer Laura Moss landed on Filmmaker’s 25 New Face list this past year on the strength of Fry Day, her entirely exemplary short film about a teenage girl selling Polaroid photos on the eve of serial killer Ted Bundy’s execution. With this macabre event as a backdrop, Moss goes on to create, as I wrote in the profile, “a nail-bitingly tense, mournfully sad coming-of-age adventure.” I went on to write: That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to […]
If you don’t know Michael Muller‘s name, you do know his work. His posters for Deadpool 2 are the most creative bit of film advertising in the current market, and he’s also shot artwork for Marvel films like Captain America: Civil War, Dr. Strange, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 as well as dozens of other films, innumerable portraits, album covers and ad campaigns for brands like Nike and Sony. But in 2006 he began training his camera on a very different subject, wild sharks, and since then shark photography and marine environmental activism has become his primary cause. His still photos of great whites, hammerheads, and […]
So soon after Thessaloniki International Doc Fest I wasn’t expecting to be all that inspired to write about yet another festival, but an unexpected invitation saw me traveling to Nyon, Switzerland for the last few days of the 49th edition of Visions du Réel, an event I’ve been curious about for quite a while. But even after just a brief 72-hour visit, Visions inspired me greatly in the quietest, most refined of ways — the festival created a flawlessly professional but relaxed atmosphere to mingle and take in the beauty of the town, where every well-dressed denizen looks like they […]
Ariel Marx is a film composer to watch. It’s early in her career, but her credits already include an impressive variety of dramas and comedies on both film and television. She’s assisted on projects like Wonder and Amazon’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, and her own scores have been in the films West of Her, By Jingo, and The Tale, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and runs on HBO next month. She’s even worked in augmented reality with Armen Perian’s The Angry River, a piece about human traffickers that changes with the direction of the viewer’s gaze — an impressive challenge for a traditionally linear form […]
One of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s – a period in which great directors like Jonathan Demme, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante were making their first movies for the company – was Michael Pressman, whose 1976 action-comedy The Great Texas Dynamite Chase remains one of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic exploitation pictures of its era. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pressman directed one distinctive film after another, exhibiting astonishing range – the only thing his movies of the era have in common is that they have nothing […]
These days, making a good documentary is not good enough. Finding the right good distributor is as challenging a process as making a film, a reality of the business I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve directed and produced two documentary features, the latter of which, Dealt (about a world-renowned card magician who is blind), quickly sold to IFC/Sundance Selects. It has been a solid success. However, my first film took an entire year to find a buyer. It was a total uphill battle and very humbling. What was the problem? We were so focused on just making a good film […]
Feminist film journal Another Gaze heads to New York this week for two events surrounding the issue launch of their debut print edition. On Saturday at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation there will be a free day of discussions and panels, and, on Thursday at Union Docs a screening of shorts in which women filmmakers reframe onscreen sexual violence. From our own print issue, here’s our interview with editor Daniella Shreir about her decision to add an analog component to her already impressive web publication. “I didn’t want it to look too essentialist or zine-y,” says London-born writer, editor […]
In Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson’s Japan-set return to the world of stop motion animation, there is a character with a face full of freckles. This seemingly incidental attribute required the film’s lead puppet painter Angela Kiely to place 297 freckles on each of the puppet’s many interchangeable faces. All told, she painted over 22,000 freckles for the film. That is the painstaking diligence required for the art of stop motion animation, a form demanding an obsessive attention to minutia perfectly suited to Anderson’s fastidiousness. In a Wes Anderson film, no detail – not even a single freckle – is […]
“We’re looking for films that people want to see, rather than films people ‘should’ see,’” said Miami Film Festival director Jaie Laplante during our conversation at the 35th edition of the event put together by Miami Dade College (March 9-18). Indeed, the program is not short on sophisticated crowd-pleasers handpicked from recent international competitions or selected based on their wide appeal with the city’s demographics: documentaries about different facets of Cuban culture or comedies centered on passionate soccer fans. As a native Spanish speaker, Miami always feel like an enclave of Latin America to me; Spanish is a necessity and […]