Fall 2017
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Our Family
There’s a wealth of taboo subjects in our industry, but family life especially manages to stay pretty deep in the shadows, even more so than the rare public discourses on sexism, racism and ageism. It’s a topic most filmmakers don’t venture into for a variety of reasons, but maybe most of all because the success rate of keeping a family together in this industry is scarily low. Sometimes it seems like families and filmmaking are at direct odds with each other. Coming up on two years of this column, I thought maybe it was time to get other DPs to […]
by Sean Porter on Sep 14, 2017 -
Indie Film is Alive
“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
In the Realm of the Possible: Hal Hartley on Restoring His Early Films and Working in Television
I interviewed Hal Hartley for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue this past Fall and am posting this piece online today as Hartley is in the final days of a Kickstarter to fund the release of the very films discussed here. If you’re a fan of this paradigmatic indie director please consider supporting! — SM I catch Hal Hartley — whose third feature, Simple Men, was Filmmaker’s very first cover back in 1992 — as he’s spending the day creating bonus features for new DVD and Blu-ray box sets of the three films in his “Henry Fool Trilogy.” As international distribution licenses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
No New Waves
I love movements, manifestos, new waves and artistic revolutions. While studying film in New York City in the early 1990s, I was inspired by the French New Wave, enamored by Italian Neorealism and provoked by the New German Cinema. But something exciting was also happening in the United States at that time: There was the Black New Wave, the New Queer Cinema. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was about to open in theaters, ushering in, for better or for worse, a flurry of low-budget, testosterone-fueled crime dramas. A few years later, my mind was blown by Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 14, 2017 -
25 Sentences
1. Inspired by a small pantheon of icons — Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger — I sought rage and radiance together. 2. In the 19th century, the light on the far edges of the magnetic spectrum was dubbed “invisible light.” 3. But then I returned to her films —those of Chantal Akerman — hunched over the computer, watching frame-by-frame, excerpting image after image to create grids, comparisons, my own small compositions. 4. By rearranging the coordinates of space and time, he — media artist Daniel Crooks — creates a city in perpetual evolution, its times and spaces offering up new […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 14, 2017 -
Judy Becker’s Instagram: A Production Designer Catalogs Her Visual Inspirations
For Filmmaker‘s 25th Anniversary issue, we took note of production designer Judy Becker’s lovely Instagram, where she posts location scout photos and other inspirations that inevitably find their way into her design work. We asked her to write more about this convergence with social media and production design practice, and here’s what she wrote back. To: Filmmaker Magazine From: Judy Becker Subject: My Instagram Today at 11:34am I’m happy you guys liked my Instagram. I’ve taken photographs pretty much my whole life. I got my first camera when I was about seven, when my family spent the summer in Rotterdam, […]
by Judy Becker on Sep 14, 2017 -
What’s in a Word?
“Adele Romanski is an independent producer who, Academy Award– and Golden Globe–winning producer whose …” This is what my assistant, April Moore, sent back to me in March of this year when I asked her to please take a pass at revising my bio. (I needed to provide it as part of closing a loan against the tax credit for a television show I was producing.) It had been about a year since I had updated my bio. April made quite a few changes to the document, but striking out the word “independent” was the one I obsessed over. Why […]
by Adele Romanski on Sep 14, 2017 -
The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Rise of the Machines: Cathy O’Neil and James Schamus on How Algorithms are Changing Society — and Filmmaking
Amazon and Netflix are having a huge impact on the independent film business, and there are more players entering the subscription VOD space every day, both here in the United States and worldwide. I myself just had a great experience working with Netflix on Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which Green, Filmmaker’s own editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay and I produced. Opening day on Netflix was, though, a bit unsettling. The data driving the film’s marketing, and the measures for its success or failure, are closely held corporate secrets — even the sources and kinds of data the company uses to determine how […]
by James Schamus on Sep 14, 2017 -
The Color of the Future: Roger Deakins on Blade Runner 2049
There isn’t much left that legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins hasn’t done behind a camera. He’s shot science fiction, war movies, biopics and westerns. He’s dabbled in gorgeous black and white and lensed a Bond film. He’s forged rewarding collaborations with the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve and worked with Scorsese and Sayles. So, is there anything remaining on Deakins’s cinematic bucket list? “What I really like doing is small personal dramas,” said Deakins with a laugh. “I don’t really like action films. I like films about people. I would’ve loved to have done Ken Loach’s films or movies […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 14, 2017
