Pre-Production
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Five Questions for Unmade in China Directors Gil Kofman and Tanner King Barklow
Screenwriter George Richards wrote Case Sensitive as “an American thriller with American actors for an American audience.” Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) brought the script to producer Seth Scher, who had connections to a Chinese investor who was making films for the Chinese market. The film was greenlit and Kofman, who does not speak Chinese, traveled to Xiamen, China, to direct his second narrative feature. Soon afterward his friend, documentary filmmaker Tanner King Barklow, joined him and began documenting Kofman’s travails as he tried to navigate a colossal language barrier, bureaucracy, corruption, and cultural differences. Early in the documentary […]
by David Licata on May 1, 2013 -
Why Filmmaking is Like Software Design
Before becoming a filmmaker I spent 15 years designing software. Started out as a Mac OS programmer and then moved to Microsoft Windows. My endeavors included all things visual—from icon design and screen layout, to the more abstract design patterns found in system architecture and coding. What I discovered along the way was that the most elegant solutions—the products that worked best, most reliably, and resonated strongly with their user base—were always the most simple and minimalist in design. And there was always room for improvement via testing, focus groups, and refactoring (a techie word for the iterative process of […]
by A.D. Calvo on Apr 15, 2013 -
Five Questions with Night Train to Lisbon director Bille August
Danish film director Bille August has consistently brought a strong vision to international stories. He is best known for Pelle the Conqueror, the 1987 film about Swedish immigrants in Denmark, which received the Palme d’Or, the Academy Award and the Golden Globe. He is one of the few directors who have won the Palme d’Or twice, putting him in the ranks of Francis Ford Coppola, Emir Kusturica, and the Dardenne brothers. His second came with the 1992 film The Best Intentions, a semi-autobiographical family story written by Ingmar Bergman. Twenty years ago August explored love and revolution in The House […]
by Ariston Anderson on Mar 29, 2013 -
Five Questions with Snap Directors Youssef Delara and Victor Teran
Quickly after premiering Filly Brown at Sundance in 2012, filmmakers Youssef Delara and Victor Teran moved into production on their newest feature, Snap. As close collaborators for many years on other films, Delara and Teran teamed up again to co-direct and produce Snap. Set in the explosive world of underground dubstep, the film explores the dangerous psyche of a young man as a social worker and her mentor try to uncover his secrets before his violent past erupts. Snap stars Jake Hoffman (Barney’s Version), Nikki Reed (Thirteen, Twilight), Scott Bakula (American Beauty, TV’s Quantum Leap), and Thomas Dekker (Kaboom), and makes its world premiere tomorrow at SXSW in […]
by Alexandra Byer on Mar 10, 2013 -
Saving Lincoln Director Salvador Litvak on CineCollage
The last nine months or so have seen the release of a number of films about Abraham Lincoln, the latest of which is the indie Saving Lincoln, currently in theaters. The movie is a unique visual experience as a result of its groundbreaking use of archival photographs and green screen. You can see in the video above how much of the movie’s world was created, while below Saving Lincoln‘s director, Salvador Litvak, shares how he came up with the film’s innovative process, CineCollage. My new film, Saving Lincoln, was made within photographs of the American Civil War. Combining elements of theater and […]
by Nick Dawson on Feb 26, 2013 -
Ruba Nadda on Inescapable
In Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda’s elegant and oddly topical thriller Inescapable, Adib Abdul-Kareem (Alexander Siddig) is a computer operations manager at a Toronto bank who fled Syria some 30 years ago. Married to a Canadian with whom he’s fathered two pretty teenage girls, he’s kept his checkered past a secret from his family the whole time, but after the disappearance of the older of his two daughters (Jay Anstey) during a clandestine visit to Syria in order to find out where her father is from, Adib heads to Damascus despite the possibility of repercussions for long ago sins. With combative ex-flame […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 20, 2013 -
Five Questions with Kill Your Darlings Director John Krokidas
After premiering his short film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, director John Krokidas vowed to be back two years later with his first feature film. Krokidas found that it took a bit longer than anticipated to get his film to Park City, but eleven long years later, Kill Your Darlings premieres in competition today at Sundance. The Beat generation has been a popular subject of films lately, but rather than adapt a Kerouac book or Ginsberg poem, Krokidas follows the nascent writers during their days at Columbia University and one particular event that shaped their future work and careers. In 1944, […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 18, 2013 -
Shooting the Short BART: an Interview with the Director and DP
When L.A.-based director Rich Landes was offered the chance to shoot a short narrative piece for Canon he jumped at the chance. Landes has extensive experience as a commercial director, but this was a chance to direct a narrative based on his own idea, and with few restrictions from the “client.” But first he had to come up with an idea and treatment in two days. Then he had to fly to New York and cast, find locations, and hire a DP in four days, and then shoot the whole thing over the course of two days. None of this […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 15, 2013 -
Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100, Part One
When manufacturers are preparing a new camera for release, they often loan pre-production units to filmmakers in the hope that they’ll make a video the company can use to promote the camera. Such is the case with the Canon C100. Canon loaned the filmmakers of StillMotion two C100 bodies and financed the making of a short video, Pulse. As StillMotion described in their blog post on the making of the video, the idea for the video came from a potential client: We’d recently been approached to make a Kickstarter film for a team who had created a pretty remarkable innovation […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 8, 2013 -
Second-Time Director: Craig Johnson and The Skeleton Twins
This is the second in a series of articles about the path towards a director’s second film. Read part one, with Tze Chun, here. It was in the middle of prepping for The Skeleton Twins that Craig Johnson realized something was missing. “That sickening feeling in my stomach that I had the first time around in prep,” Johnson said with a laugh. “I’m so much more at peace this time. Craig Johnson, 36, is currently in production on his second movie. It’s a project that contains a dream comedic cast (Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Ty Burrell) It’s a project that […]
by Kishori Rajan on Dec 19, 2012
