BlacKkKlansman
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“Nothing is More Gorgeous than When Things Get Real in a Movie”: Editor Barry Alexander Brown on Three Decades Cutting for Spike Lee
As Barry Alexander Brown toiled on the editing of School Daze, he was convinced that, at any moment, he’d be found out. That someone would inform director Spike Lee he was no longer working in the indie trenches of She’s Gotta Have It. That he was now working under the auspices of Columbia Pictures and could no longer simply hire his buddies to cut his movies. Recalls Brown, “I was sure somebody was going to come into the editing room and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” That never happened and, three decades later, Barry Alexander Brown is still cutting movies […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Feb 20, 2019 -
2018 As a Year in Double Features
Every year, when looked back upon in its final days, reveals patterns. For the past four years, I’ve capped the holiday season with a list of 10 double features from the year in film here at Filmmaker. Each capsule review is, in essence, a mini-thinkpiece on a cinematic trend from the year. This past year gave us many such boomlets: the year of the horse movie, the year of the “white voice” movie, the year of the movie set entirely on digital screens. A delightful interplay emerges when you watch, or think about, films in pairs. One movie brings out […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 31, 2018 -
BlacKkKlansman DP Chayse Irvin on Shooting with Expired Ektachrome and the Spike Lee Dolly
Early in Spike Lee’s collaboration with Chayse Irvin, the venerable director asked his cinematographer if there was anything special he needed for BlacKkKlansman. Irvin answered, “a third camera”—an extravagance on a low budget movie, but one Irvin believed would allow him “to take massive risks on every scene, whether it be a unique angle or the freedom to use a lens that was flawed.” Irvin embraced that self-imposed mandate for boldness by employing imperfect vintage lenses, “flashing” the image with a contrast-reducing filter and dusting off long-expired film stock. Never one to wilt in the face of risky choices, Lee […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 21, 2018 -
Back to One Podcast: Ashlie Atkinson Talks Using the “Substitution Tool” to Play Evil and Treating Auditions as Work Sessions
Ashlie Atkinson is getting kudos for playing Connie Kendrickson, the motherly yet evil KKK wife, in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. We talk about the unique prep work that went into inhabiting her and the tools she used to stay present inside such a sick character. We also chat about her approach to comedy, particularly in the Ingrid Jungermann web series F to 7th, and working with Craig Zobel in both Compliance (a favorite of mine, as may listeners know) and now the brand new CBS All Access show One Dollar. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 4, 2018 -
“David Duke Called Us Out By Name”: BlacKkKlansman Screenwriters Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz
When I went to see BlacKkKlansman earlier this summer, I was startled to completely lose it two minutes in. The opening scene is a fire-breathing racist monologue by Alec Baldwin as a segregationist leader. I knew the premise of the film — the true story of how black police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrated a Colorado branch of the KKK with the help of a white partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), in the late ’70s — and figured a fair amount of racist invective would be involved. What I did not expect was to hear Baldwin spit out the words “fucking Jews” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 9, 2018 -
Back to One Podcast: BlacKkKlansman Actor Topher Grace Talks Playing Evil People, Working with Great Directors, and the Epidemic of the Hollywood Earpiece
Seven seasons on the sitcom That ’70s Show led Topher Grace to roles in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, In Good Company, a not entirely successful turn as “Venom” in Spider Man 3, and lighter projects like Win A Date With Tad Hamilton and Valentine’s Day. He then decided to change the trajectory of his career. He told his agents he wanted to work exclusively with great film artists in environments that inspired him. Worthy projects like Interstellar, Truth and War Machine followed. And this year, Grace’s next chapter continues with David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake and the challenging role […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 7, 2018 -
Cannes Dispatch #5: BlacKkKlansman, The House That Jack Built
Among the markers of a great film—of a great work of art in general—is its ability to conjure itself up unannounced, repeatedly, in the light of neighboring films and artworks; it becomes a lens through which other work is viewed, a standard by which everything else is held, a shadow enlightening the world we now walk through. This is one way of briefly reiterating something I attempted to articulate in my third dispatch: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Bookis great art, corroborated for me by its persistent presence in my consciousness during the last several days of movie watching—most notably (and […]
by Blake Williams on May 15, 2018
