My origins as a filmmaker split the past 25 years in two. I’m now nearly as close in time to my debut efforts as I was to the early 1990s American New Wave when preparation for those efforts began. As an aspiring filmmaker with no formal film training, nothing was more inspiring to me during the mid-aughts than soaking up the narratives of DIY filmmakers who took it upon themselves to make something from nothing, way back in the grand ol’ 20th century. In reviewing the logistical and budgetary recaps presented in these pages by Peter Broderick more than two […]

I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]

In the infant years of this publication, Ted Hope wrote a piece musing on the death of 1990s off-Hollywood production models, and controversy arose! I was only 12 at the time, but I glean now that there was a sense then — at least in this tiny community of cultural producers and aspirants — that the debate within Hope’s “Indie Film is Dead,” (and then-partner James Schamus’s response “Long Live Indie Film”) mattered. But here we are, making magic together still. This 25-year-old magazine, and the tiny corner of the entertainment industry it covers with a level of detail and […]

For Abel Ferrara, now living and working in Rome, there’s no love lost between the renegade director and the New York of yesteryear, the New York of Bad Lieutenant. “Being in Europe, it’s very different,” Ferrara explains. “We thought we were free then, but it’s nothing compared to where we’re at now. We’re outside the system, working within the European financial community, which includes the socialist brand of government financing and various cultural ministries.” Continues Ferrara, “On Bad Lieutenant” — the cover of Filmmaker’s second issue — “we were totally free. The director has to have absolute freedom. Now, you […]

Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]