HBO
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“Our Work Was Bound to Cause Discomfort…”: P.A. Carter on his HBO-Premiering Doc Series, Behind Closed Doors
One of the most complicated (and epic, as it feels much larger than the sum of its two parts) documentaries I’ve seen in years, P.A. Carter’s Behind Closed Doors is this summer’s not-to-miss film for true crime devotees. Debuting on HBO July 16th and 17th, Carter’s meticulously-crafted picture begins with the double murder of 13-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family’s servant Hemraj Banjade in the Talwars’s upper-middle-class home — a mystery that immediately unleashed a media circus in the staid Indian town of Noida. But it was the whiplash machinations surrounding the subsequent investigations and interrogations, trials and appeals, that […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 15, 2019 -
“One of the Rules Was To Not Centralize Whiteness in Any Way”: On the Path Towards Terence Nance’s New HBO Show, Random Acts of Flyness
The following article appears in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2018 print edition and is being posted today to mark the premiere, this Friday, of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. When Brooklyn-based filmmaker and musician Terence Nance last appeared in this magazine’s print pages, it was in our 25 New Faces section — in 2012 — and he had been working on his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, since 2006. A loose-limbed autobiographical drama detailing Nance’s own near-romantic relationship with an attractive friend (Namik Minter, who played herself in the film), the film unspools, I wrote, “like some […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2018 -
“Agitating the Information”: Director Gus Van Sant on his Long-Take Columbine Drama, Elephant
The following interview was originally published in our Fall, 2003 print edition. When I first interviewed Gus Van Sant, he had just finished editing his feature Gerry and was preparing to launch it at the Sundance Film Festival. A radical left turn from the two studio films, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, that preceded it, Gerry mixed together movie stars (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), the “long-take” style of such filmmakers as Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman and a simple yet metaphorically rich scenario taken from the news headlines. Working without a formal script but with the remarkable director […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2018 -
“Every So Often a Train Would Come Rumbling By and the Set Would Shake”: DP Doug Emmett on Shooting HBO’s Room 104
An octogenarian couple returns to the hotel room where they spent their first night together — it’s a logline that would typically preface an elegiac rumination on love and mortality. But by the time that set-up arrives in the season finale of HBO’s new anthology series Rooms 104, it seems just as likely to give way to horror or violence…or interpretive dance. That’s the joy of the newest Duplass Brothers creation — each episode begins as a blank slate capable of unexpectedly evolving into any genre or tone. The 12-episode series — which debuted last Friday night — unfolds entirely […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Aug 1, 2017 -
“There Was Baby Powder in the VHS Tapes Themselves”: Erin Lee Carr on Mommy Dead and Dearest
Sometimes the only way to escape an overprotective household is to resort to extreme measures. Erin Lee Carr’s latest documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, about a young girl raised from birth by her mother to believe she was physically incapable of surviving on her own, is impressive in the way it caresses its true crime story into being a film about redemption through murder as the only means out. A victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Gypsy Rose Blanchard spent much of her adolescent life in hospitals as a walking test tube, a medical experiment shopped around by a possessive mother desperate […]
by Erik Luers on May 15, 2017 -
Alone Inside: Kristi Jacobson on Her Penetrating Documentary about Solitary Confinement, Solitary
Kristi Jacobson was nominated for the Truer than Fiction Spirit Award for her artful and incisive documentary on solitary confinement, Solitary. The film plays this month on HBO, and filmmaker Alix Lambert interviewed Jacobson for our Winter issue. With Solitary, filmmaker Kristi Jacobson offers her audience an experience both visceral and intimate inside the notorious Red Onion supermax prison in Wise County, Virginia. Jacobson, who spent a year filming at the prison, examines the devastating effects of solitary confinement by introducing us to the men who are incarcerated as well as to the guards and others who work at the […]
by Alix Lambert on Jan 18, 2017 -
Watch: Great TV is Cannibalizing the Indie Film Audience
“It’s harder and harder to get audiences to see independent films because I think there are other entities fighting for their entertainment hours,” said Michael Barker, co-president/co-founder, Sony Pictures Classics. “For my money, the best independent films being made today are things like The Night Of or Fargo on FX. It’s taking the audience to a certain extent.” In the above exclusive video from Sundance Institute’s Creative Producing Summit, Barker chats with Len Amato, President, HBO Films, about how The Wire lured indie film audiences to TV, what films work better on TV, and more.
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 18, 2016 -
The Wanted and the Ones Who Want: Financiers and Distributors Offer Advice at IFP Film Week
Before IFP Film Week fades too far in our rearview mirror, we’re elaborating upon several of our snaps from our Instagram feed with further comments by the filmmakers, speakers and panelists. View all of Meredith Alloway’s Instagram diaries here at the link. The financiers are the wanted. The people looking for financing are the ones who want. That’s always been the dynamic, the power play. And no matter how genius you are, how many people support you creatively, how many outstanding New York Times reviews you get, you still someone to believe in your next film and give you money […]
by Meredith Alloway on Oct 3, 2016 -
Darker Shades of Grey: The Night Of DP Igor Martinovic
The term “TV coverage” used to be a pejorative, a reference to the mechanical nature of the medium’s visual language. It was shorthand for artlessly cranking out master, two shot, and close-up in order to churn through the high page counts necessary to produce a new episode of television each week. To behold the degree to which the medium’s aesthetics have evolved, look no further than HBO’s The Night Of. Every set-up has purpose. Every composition is storytelling. The details of each frame – where the people are placed, the amount of negative space, the portion in shadow, the plane […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 8, 2016 -
Managing Anamorphics in 16:9 and the HBO Learning Curve: DP Rachel Morrison on Confirmation
During our talk about her work on HBO’s Confirmation, cinematographer Rachel Morrison lamented that “as a DP you wish you had total freedom to tell whatever story you want to tell, however you want to tell it.” Of course, that’s not the reality of production. Parameters are always imposed – whether they are budgetary restrictions or technological specifications. Morrison talked to Filmmaker about working within her given parameters – including a 16:9 aspect ratio, losing the hero location shortly before production, and dealing with the garish decor of the early 1990s – to craft HBO’s reconstruction of the acrimonious Clarence […]
by Matt Mulcahey on May 5, 2016
