Blade Runner
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Judy Becker’s Top Ten Films (That Most Influenced Her Work as a Production Designer)
I came to production design as someone who has always loved movies. I also loved art, design, architecture and photography, so discovering that I could have a career that combined all my loves was one of the greatest moments of my life. I have a realism-based approach to filmmaking — most of the worlds I create are fictional, but within the context of the film my goal is to make them feel real, grounded, worn, authentic. If a director wants a stylized or surreal approach I would need to find a way to dirty it up and add imperfections to […]
by Judy Becker on Nov 21, 2022 -
When 2019 Was the Future
The artist David Levine once staged reenactments of memorable film scenes at their original locations in Central Park. A performer ran laps around the reservoir in a nod to the opening of Marathon Man, while stand-ins for Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis acted out the Cracker Jack scene in The Out-of-Towners by the Trefoil Arch. Scenes from The Royal Tenenbaums, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and Portrait of Jennie, among others, were underway elsewhere in the park. The performances were unmarked, and some were more discernibly theatrical than others. Period clothes or the spectacle of a confrontation played and replayed in intervals could tip […]
by Joanne McNeil on Mar 14, 2019 -
Storytelling, Memory and Alternate Worlds: Michael Almereyda on Marjorie Prime and Escapes
Michael Almereyda has two films this year, the curiously rhyming duo of Marjorie Prime and Escapes. The former, as I wrote from Sundance, is “a heavily modified adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s play, customized to fit the ever-adventurous Almereyda’s tastes and frames of reference. The premise is both simple and tricky: in the future, your deceased loved ones can be brought back as holograms for company. Marjorie (Lois Smith), aging and losing her memory, has her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), eternally in his 40s, for company, a development which makes her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) a little nervous. From this low-key sci-fi […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 26, 2017 -
Watch: Red Eyes in Blade Runner
Rob Ager’s video essay tackles a particular question: what role does the color red symbolically serve in Blade Runner, as manifest in the red-eye effect attached to the replicants? Connections are made to other sci-fi films with a fondness for the red-eye effect, like HAL 9000’s artificial eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 21, 2016 -
Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth on Gone Girl, Digital and Working with David Fincher
Gone Girl marks d.p. Jeff Cronenweth’s fourth feature film collaboration with David Fincher, a stretch that began with Fight Club in 1999 and has continued through The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (He also worked 2nd and 3rd unit on Se7en and The Game.) It’s a partnership that has transitioned the pair to digital cinematography, with Cronenweth creating cool, precisely visualized environments for stories plumbing the complexities of life in our globalized, media-saturated information age. To speak with Cronenweth, we asked Jamie Stuart, whose short films have frequently appeared on this site, and who has interviewed […]
by Jamie Stuart on Oct 27, 2014 -
“I’m Envisaging a New Kind of Movie:” SFX Legend Douglas Trumbull on Kubrick, Malick and the Future of Film
Douglas Trumbull has been behind some of cinemas most spectacular special effects. His impressive C.V. includes working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and most recently Tree of Life. He also directed Silent Running in 1972 and Brainstorm in 1983, most remembered as the final film appearance of Natalie Wood. He has also been one of cinema’s great pioneers, always pushing technology to its limit, whether that be designing films for World Fairs, making rides for Universal and Luxor Hotels, or simply backing new technologies such as IMAX. Never standing still, the self-proclaimed […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Aug 28, 2013 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #66
Second #3102, 51:42 The frame within the frame. Jeffrey, on his way out of Dorothy’s apartment, stops and retrieves from beneath the couch the framed black and white photo of Don and Donny that Dorothy had gazed at immediately after Frank’s call. A fury of angles and lines, rectangles within rectangles. The frozen image captures a moment in time, while what transpires on the screen (no matter how many years have passed since Blue Velvet was filmed) happens right now. Seymour Chatman, in Story and Discourse, writes about still time and moving time on the screen: The effect of pure […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jan 13, 2012 -
DRIVE TIME
This Thanksgiving, I, like many of you, will be on the road, driving to see family and hoping to arrive at a socially acceptable interval before the turkey is carved. SeeingJean Baudrillard’s imperious visage peering out from the Sunday Times Magazine this past weekend (“France is a byproduct of American culture,” he said. “We are all in this; we are globalized.”) and thinking about that long drive reminded me of an old essay of his in Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, which was kind of a po-mo bible during my college years. He writes about the automobile and the shift in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2005
