“One day, a group of us were driving to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting, talking about our unbearable jobs working for one of the big three automakers,” says filmmaker Nick Hayes, 21. “As we talked, we realized that I created the ads, Naomi [Burton] created the social media and another person developed the product. We were the means of production. The idea stuck, and so did the notion that we’re contributing far greater to these corporations than what they led us to believe.” Burton, 29, and Hayes, both Detroit-based, had met months earlier at a DSA meeting, where they […]
Director and film critic Neville Pierce, who we interviewed several months ago around the online premiere of his shorts, has a new film, Promise, up on the interwebs, and it’s tied to the announcement of an unusual short film contest that offers filmmakers $40,000 in production funds for their winning pitch. From the press release: The Pitch is an annual online pitching competition which invites filmmakers to submit a two-minute video pitching their idea for a short film inspired by The Bible. It can be in any genre, can emerge from any perspective, and can draw on any story, passage, […]
I’m a director with one feature film to my name, and I also work as an editor and colorist. About a year ago, I was doing some editing consultation on an early draft of a documentary. Before I gave the director notes, I asked, “What festivals are you looking to have this play in?” He was taken aback. For him, a film—at least this sort, conceptualized as an art film—should be a pure object of creation, and industry concerns should be taken into account only after post-production is completed. I’ve come to disagree. Considering the potential audience and distribution channels […]
At the moment, Harry Lennix is perhaps best known for his portrayal of FBI agent Harold Cooper on NBC’s The Blacklist. The breadth and depth of his work on the stage and screen go well beyond that hit show, however, with film roles spanning from Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats and Julie Taymor’s Titus, to General Swanwick in both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman, and on Broadway in August Wilson’s final play Radio Golf, and Cymbeline at The Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2014 Lennix created Exponent Media Group and began producing his own content, such as H4, a […]
Expanding on the subject of his first feature, the both-sides-of-the-border drug wars documentary Cartel Land, director Matthew Heineman’s latest project is a five-part documentary series for Showtime. The first two hours premiered at Sundance. Prior to the screening, DP Matt Porwoll explained the difficulties of working on a project following both drug cartels in Mexico and stories of addiction and counter-law enforcement in the States in multiple cities. 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? Porwoll: When Matthew Heineman first […]
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? As a documentary filmmaker, my favorite approach to storytelling is through the freshness and spontaneity of cinema vérité. With Studio 54, we were presented with the challenge of telling a story built on the unique and intimate friendship between the founding partners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, while grappling with the reality of Steve’s untimely death […]
Paul Thomas Anderson held a Reddit AMA today, where the subject of a video from 1992 came up. In the video, Anderson wanders the set of the Robert Conrad movie Sworn to Vengeance, asking various crew departments about their work and which one is the most important while generally being very snarky and making Clinton jokes. It’s a fun curio.
If you were a director or producer coming up in the New York independent film scene of the early 1990s, you wanted to work with Thérèse DePrez. Right out of the gate as a production designer, DePrez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away Tuesday in New York City, defined for herself an imaginative, boldly-colored and stylized approach that brought a high level of ambition and finesse to often meagerly-budgeted films. Not settling for generic indie naturalism — the gentle accenting of our everyday world that is the default approach on so many low-budget pictures — she cited […]
The following profile of production designer Thérèse DePrez was written by producer Ted Hope for Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1994 issue, and is being rerun on the sad occasion of DePrez’s passing this week in New York. After the standard art school stint, and the pay-your dues PA/grip/electric rigmarole, Thérèse DePrez nabbed her first designer gig on Tony Jacobs’s low-budget consumer/horror send-up, The Refrigerator, which sent her further down the blood-spewed path to art direct three straight-to-video horror pics. The creepy crawlers allowed DePrez to hone the “specialty prop” and set design skills she would later call on for Tom Kalin’s Swoon, […]
For Filmmaker‘s 25th Anniversary issue, we took note of production designer Judy Becker’s lovely Instagram, where she posts location scout photos and other inspirations that inevitably find their way into her design work. We asked her to write more about this convergence with social media and production design practice, and here’s what she wrote back. To: Filmmaker Magazine From: Judy Becker Subject: My Instagram Today at 11:34am I’m happy you guys liked my Instagram. I’ve taken photographs pretty much my whole life. I got my first camera when I was about seven, when my family spent the summer in Rotterdam, […]