In making my Watergate historical fiction film 18½, I always knew that coming up with a consistent musical soundtrack was going to be essential for balancing the tone of a film that swings from comedy to thriller to drama at breakneck speed. One genre of music, and indeed one song, “Brasília Bella,” is the key to unlocking not only how our team navigated the tones and themes of the film, but also reflects the scale and scope of making an indie film at the high point of a global pandemic. Around 2018, I started working on the script for 18½ […]

At a time when big-budget Hollywood films have no guarantees of being seen by audiences at all, it’s gratifying that independent films can still find unique ways to connect with the public, largely by controlling their own destinies.  I’m happy to say that after playing 25 festivals on four continents, touring with a 60-city theatrical release this summer and releasing on VOD in four countries, my Watergate thriller/comedy 18½ will also start “airing” this September on JetBlue Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Air New Zealand, Qatar Airways, Emirates and Singapore Airlines, among others.  For the next several months, there’s a good chance […]

This is a very weird time for film festivals and filmmakers. During the first year of the pandemic, it was fairly simple:  Almost every festival around the world became online only. There were a few exceptions, of course: The Göteborg Film Festival in Sweden stranded one person on a tiny island for a week to watch every film. The Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany had living room premieres. And many festivals pivoted to drive-in and other outside venues (especially where the climate allowed for that). By summer of 2021, the feeling among festival organizers was that now that we have […]

If you’re going to get stuck shooting a film in a global pandemic, it helps if you’re already pretty much self-quarantined in a beach resort and living off product-placement steak, wine and coffee. That’s the situation I found myself in on my film, 18½, which we started shooting in early March, 2020. What could possibly go wrong? Foot Bumps and Elbow Knocks 18½ is a 70s-era Watergate conspiracy thriller/dark comedy we were filming in Greenport, New York, which is on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island (“Nawth Fawk,” as it’s known locally), about three hours from Manhattan, […]

“In a way, I see the festival as run like a punk rock label — a successful one!” says filmmaker and Slamdance “co-conspirator” Paul Rachman. With its award ceremony and final screenings, the Slamdance Film Festival concluded its 25th year last night (read the full list of winners here) — an astonishing fact of longevity that none of its founders could have predicted when they launched the outsider event in Park City back in 1995. “We were a wild bunch of filmmakers who got together to do something different,” says co-founder Peter Baxter. “And we’re realizing now how naive we […]

One of the great joys of directing a film is to work with actors, and when you make an ensemble film, you get to work with a lot of actors! But working with any big group of people — especially actors! — can come with a host of unique challenges. So, whether you’re making a blockbuster like the Russo Brother’s recent uber-ensemble Avengers: Infinity Wars or you’re making a web series in your back yard with all your high school drama class friends, many of the lessons are the same. My current film, Bernard and Huey may sound like a […]

There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]

Google Cardboard was a hot piece of Sundance sort-of-swag at Sundance this year. (“Can you get me Google Cardboard,” several friends emailed me during the fest.) I happened to check out one of the pieces designed for Cardboard, Chris Milk’s Evolution of Verse, a beautifully disorienting lakeside mountain-scape with an enveloping, 2001-ish finale. But, if you’re like Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish, and “the whole virtual reality thing gives you an aneurysm,” you can hack Google Cardboard into a rather arty-in-a-low-fi way 35mm lens. Check it out above.

Plenty of us independent filmmakers claim to be as environmentally friendly as can be, but beyond a few minor lifestyle tweaks (like claiming we just watched Gasland 2 while bemoaning Hollywood’s reliance on sequels), are we really as green as we’d like to think we are? Sadly, probably not. But one way we can help make a small difference to our planet is to take a page from the food movement and become locavore filmmakers — making movies close to home, in order to reduce our carbon footprints. I tried this strategy on my new film (Between Us, starring Julia […]