Alex Saks remembers the process of producing Thoroughbreds, the dark suburban teen thriller written and directed by Cory Finley, as a whirlwind. At the time, Finley was a hot up-and-coming playwright making his first foray into filmmaking, and he didn’t have an established team of collaborators. With a limited window of actor availability, production launched shortly after Finley delivered a script, which meant there was a tight window to hire key crew. Among the most important decisions the team had to make was who would edit the movie. “[An editor] really is the department head on the movie, other than […]
by Max Cea on Sep 18, 2024Early in music supervisor Lucy Bright’s career, she worked at Warner Classics and managed composer Michael Nyman. In 2020 she started Bright Notion Music, her own music publishing company, which has signed composers such as Hildur Guðnadóttir, Oliver Coates, and Anne Nikitin. She is known for critically acclaimed British films such as The Arbor and Slow West and more recently Tár, where her classical understanding and personal familiarity with the composers referenced in the script, helped create the movie that was named Best Picture by several major critics associations. Bright was also awarded the first ever prize for music supervision […]
by Arrow Peretz on Dec 19, 2023“User-generated content” is the future of the moving image, and the present as well. A less sentimental look back at 2022 in film would probably take the measure of TikTok trends, Instagram Reels, Twitch streams, YouTube reaction videos and OnlyFans porn. Before cinema dies, you see the Ring Video Doorbell surveillance footage repackaged, America’s Funniest Cops–style, in the syndicated Ring Nation, which premiered this year (coproduced by Ring and MGM Television, both subsidiaries of Amazon). The overwhelming proliferation of digital images, recorded by consumer-grade digital cameras with ever-greater resolution, storage capacity, and ubiquity, is the story of the century. Such […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 19, 2022Everything Everywhere All at Once was the top winner at the 2022 Gotham Awards, which took place at New York City’s Cipriani Wall Street on November 28. The film, written and directed by 25 New Face alums Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, took home awards for Best Feature and Outstanding Supporting Performer for Ke Huy Quan’s turn as struggling laundromat owner Waymond Wang. “This time last year, all I was hoping for was a job,” Quan said during his speech. Other notable winners include Todd Field’s TÁR for Best Screenplay and Charlotte Wells’s (another former 25 New Face) Aftersun in […]
by Natalia Keogan on Nov 29, 2022Charlotte Wells has been saying that her first feature, which she calls “emotionally autobiographical,” was inspired by leafing through a family album and realizing how young her father was when she was born. A bittersweet aura permeates Aftersun, in which Sophie, just turned 11, spends a week before the start of term with her father, 30-going-on-31 Calum, on vacation at a Turkish hotel, just across the road from the all-inclusive resort where they sneak food from the buffet. Like Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) in Sofia Coppola’s similarly liminal and hotel-set Somewhere, Calum’s arm is initially in a cast—the presumed vestige […]
by Mark Asch on Oct 11, 2022The trailer has arrived for Aftersun, the feature debut from Scottish writer/director (and former 25 New Faces of Film) Charlotte Wells. The film chronicles the relationship between a doting father and his pre-teen daughter, specifically through the lens of a formative vacation they took to a resort in Turkey. After premiering at this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week to much acclaim, Aftersun was selected for further festival programming at Telluride, TIFF and will now screen at the 60th New York Film Festival. The film’s official synopsis reads: At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures rare time together with her loving […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 27, 2022