Anthony Mandler makes his directorial debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival after having spent a career directing music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Drake and many other artists. The film, Monster, is an adaptation of the hard-hitting young adult novel of the same name from Walter Dean Myers. Mandler tapped his longtime collaborator David Devlin to shoot his first feature. In addition to his music video work with Mandler, Devlin has worked as a 2nd unit cinematographer with Janusz Kaminski on 12 Steven Spielberg films. The Montana-based DP spoke with Filmmaker about using vintage anamorphic […]
Luke Dunkley began his career 20-some years ago as an editor on the short-lived BBC show This Life. He has since gone on to work for dozens of TV series and miniseries, including Netflix’s The Crown, Channel 4’s National Treasure and Canal Plus’s The Last Panther. Dunkley served as the editor on Ophelia, the fourth feature from Australian director Claire McCarthy. Ophelia is a retelling of Hamlet as told from the perspective of the young noblewoman of Denmark. Below, Dunkley discusses how he and McCarthy sought to “not compromise the young female perspective” in their spin on Shakespeare. Filmmaker: How and why did […]
Directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan hired two cinematographers to film The Oslo Diaries, their documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations in the early 1990s. They did so for a specific reason: One cameraman (Avner Shahaf) would serve as lead DP on interviews, while the other (Alex Margineau) would shoot the film’s reenactments. The latter footage – shot in the vein of such films as No and Stories We Tell – was shot to blend seamlessly with actual archival footage from the era. Below, both cinematographers discuss their experiences on the project, which screens in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How […]
In 2005, Filmmaker hailed Andrij Parekh as one of its 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Since then, the New York-based DP has gone on to shoot a number of major films and series: Blue Valentine, The Zookeeper’s Wife and HBO’s Show Me a Hero, to name a few. Parekh served as the DP on The Catcher Was a Spy, a period drama starring Paul Rudd as a professional baseball player (Moe Berg) who was tapped to become a spy during World War II. Ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, Parekh spoke with Filmmaker about the film’s […]
Twenty-some years ago, Sandi Tan and her friends shot a 16mm thriller called Shirkers. It was a guerilla-style production in her home country of Singapore. The film, however, was never finished because a member of the crew – the mysterious Georges – stole all the footage and disappeared. Tan’s new documentary, Shirkers, is an experimental dive into that footage and what it meant to her as a young filmmaker. Tan hired filmmaker Lucas Celler to edit and give shape to the film. Below, Celler discusses editing this “collage film, constructed with everything from video to film to photos to maps to […]
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? A Futile and Stupid Gesture was my first experience doing a biopic, which I learned is a daunting task. How do you give meaning and structure to decades of a person’s life, in the course of one movie? And Doug Kenney’s life was defined by chaos. So we knew that in shooting, it was important to […]
Danish filmmaker Olivia Neergaard-Holm was one of three directors on last year’s Criterion-anointed documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. Neergaard-Holm has edited a dozen shorts and features since 2010, including the single-take German thriller Victoria and the Danish horror drama Shelley. She most recently edited Holiday, the debut feature from director Isabella Eklöf, which appears in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Neergaard-Holm spoke with Filmmaker about Holiday‘s tricky gender politics and why it was important for the film to maintain a “cold, cynical and misogynistic vibe.” Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the […]
Few figures remain as adored among liberal Americans as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite this, and like all her fellow justices, the public has little access to Ginsburg as a human being. One isn’t likely to see photos of a Supreme Court justice at dinner or in a Starbucks line. Hence the enormous appeal of RBG, a new documentary on the life of Justice Ginsburg from directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West. The film makes its debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. RBG‘s cinematographer, Claudia Raschke, discusses the high-stakes shoot and the importance of all-woman team on this project below. Filmmaker: How and why […]
Writer/director Michael Walker returns to the Sundance Film Festival for the first time since Price Check, his 2012 comedy/drama starring Parker Posey and a pre-fame Amy Schumer. His new work, Paint, is an episodic series about three young artists living together in Brooklyn. Walker tapped Sam Chase to shoot and coproduce the series. Chase previously shot Price Check along with more than 25 shorts, features and series. Below, he discusses his love of the Black Magic Pocket Camera and why Hangover 2 is the work of a “coverage and lighting genius.” Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer […]
Brothers David and Nathan Zellner are a reliable presence at the Sundance Film Festival. Their films Baghead (2008), Goliath (2008), Kid-Thing (2012) and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014) have all premiered at Sundance. To that list they now add Damsel, their new comedy/western starring Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska. Damsel editor Melba Robichaux spoke with Filmmaker before the film’s premiere about some of the key questions one asks during the process of editing a feature 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 […]