production | Filmmaker Magazine

PORTERFIELD’S PUTTY HILL PREMIERES IN BERLIN

Baltimore director Matt Porterfield’s (Hamilton) latest film Putty Hill premieres this month at the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum. On the film’s nicely-done website, Porterfield describes coming up with a five-page treatment that would use 15 locations when financing for a larger project, Metal Gods, fell through. About the result, he writes: Putty Hill is not quite like anything I’ve ever seen. On a most basic level, it is an amalgam of traditional forms of documentary and narrative realism. But it is an approach to realism in opposition to the anthropological, lyrical, and romantic currents present in most of the genre. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2010

JONATHAN GOODMAN LEVITT ON BIG ART, LITTLE DEBT

In the new issue of Filmmaker, Esther Robinson penned “The Big Art/Little Debt Plan,” which discusses the relation of filmmakers to risk, their films, and their money. She reached out to several filmmakers by email, and their responses helped shape her article. We are running several of the responses Esther received here on the blog. Here is Jonathan Goodman Levitt’s. What strategies did you employ to stay no/low debt during your production? I’ve had to take on a lot of more roles myself than would be ideal for the film, or for me personally. Life has been pretty much on-hold […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2010

2010 SXSW LINEUP ANNOUNCED

The South by Southwest Film Festival unveiled its lineup for this year’s fest, which will take place in Austin, Texas March 12-20. Out of the 119 titles shown this year some of the highlights will be the opening night film, fanboy fav Kick-Ass, as well as Mark and Jay Duplass’s Cyrus, Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice (pictured). The full list of films are below. HEADLINERS CyrusDirectors and Screenwriters: Jay and Mark DuplassWith John’s social life at a standstill and his ex-wife about to get remarried, a […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Feb 4, 2010

Martina Egi, Barefoot to Timbuktu

Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi’s keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn’t shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi’s portrait of the subjects very […]

by Brandon Harris on Feb 3, 2010

Paul Devlin on the Afterlife of Blast!

‘Theatrical Launch,” Paul Devlin’s account of self-distributing his documentary Blast!, ends with his post-mortem on that release, a self-examination that takes into account not only box office but the press and further bookings the film received. I asked Devlin if he could update us on what’s happened since the article, specifically how he approached the educational market. (He had received offers from non-theatrical distributors.) Here is his response. And, if you haven’t read the article, you can pick it up on the stands or receive it immediately as a PDF when you subscribe to Filmmaker. We turned down the distribution […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2010

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY OUR PRINT ISSUE

An apology for this brief plug, but now that Sundance is over I wanted to write this short blog post on the difference between Filmmaker in print and Filmmaker online. As most of you know from reading this site, we make about 50% of each issue available online. (We also put up a lot of stuff — this blog, the Director Interviews, our Videos, our Web Exclusives — which is not in the magazine.) Here’s a breakdown of articles in the current issue that aren’t available online: 1. The longest article we’ve ever published — almost 10,000 words — is […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2010

“DADDY LONGLEGS”‘ JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE | By Scott Macaulay

When I was asked by The Huffington Post to comment on New York movies premiering in Sundance, the first film that popped into my mind was Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of the Safdie brothers, selecting Josh for our 25 New Faces for the film he directed, The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008. That picture is a delightfully freewheeling romance of sorts involving a young woman, played with depth and originality by Eleonore Hendricks, who casually steals, not out of maliciousness or for greed but simply because of a […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2010

Judith Ehrlich And Rick Goldsmith, The Most Dangerous Man In America

As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a […]

by Damon Smith on Jan 27, 2010

“THE ROMANTICS”‘ GALT NIEDERHOFFER | By Alicia Van Couvering

Galt Niederhoffer is no stranger to Sundance, having produced films that won awards there beginning in 1997, when Morgan J. Freeman’s Hurricane Streets won the Audience Award. As a founding member of Plum Pictures, one of New York’s most active independent film production companies, she has produced over a dozen films, including Grace is Gone, Dedication, Prozac Nation, Lonesome Jim, The Winning Season, The Baxter and After.Life. Niederhoffer grew up in New York, one of six daughters of a squash champion-turned-hedge fund maverick, in a rambling, eccentrically decorated house. In her first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, Niederhoffer may have […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2010

“TWELVE” | director, Joel Schumacher

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 29, 6:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] With our budget, we could only afford a 23-day shoot schedule on a complicated ensemble movie. At that time, my decision was, “Should we cancel the film or did I think we could do it in the days allotted?” I’m happy that we went ahead with production and, in the long run, our limitations and the pressures they added kept us on our toes and made for a better movie. I am very proud of our cast and crew, who worked under very difficult conditions to produce such […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010

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