Spring 2025
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Out of the Ashes: Life after the Fires
The first few days of 2025, I had been asking myself if this would be the year that Sarah—a film I’ve been making for 12 years, about a girl I met when I was making my second feature, Rich Hill—would finally be finished and whether I should sell my set of vintage lenses to pay for it, an action that meant I would likely not be able to make any more independent films. Sarah would be my swan song, finished in 2025 and then over and out. But on January 8th, our entire block in the Palisades burned, along with […]
by Tracy Droz Tragos on Mar 18, 2025 -
The Gotham Pages: Three Filmmakers Reflect on the Short-to-Feature Pipeline
Farihah Zaman—a writer, director and producer with extensive experience working on both short and feature-length projects—has a story they like to share about “shorts prejudice.” After accepting the Nonfiction Short Film Jury Award for Ghosts of Sugar Land at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, they encountered another filmmaker backstage. “They said, ‘I bet you’ll be back here with a feature one day.’ And I was like, ‘I have already been here with a feature,’” they recount. “It was such an indication of this idea of a hierarchy, that there’s a straight line [from doing shorts to doing features]. I encourage […]
by Dan Schindel on Mar 18, 2025 -
Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production. Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 18, 2025 -
Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media
There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance in that area, the opposite could be said for Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD, all of which are currently active, disc-based, home video formats vying for consumer shelf space in the studio and the boutique marketplace. Physical media, in general, can feel nebulous; when speaking about it, both positively and negatively, it can be used to cover a swath of […]
by Justin LaLiberty on Mar 18, 2025 -
From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Mar 18, 2025 -
Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and […]
by Larry Gross on Mar 18, 2025 -
Deadly Outpost: Flying Lotus on Ash
With 2017’s Kuso, the first feature from polymath Steve Ellison (a.k.a. musician Flying Lotus, a.k.a. rapper Captain Murphy), a respectable claim is made to the title of history’s most disgusting commercially released film, with such amusements as vomit baths, sentient wart coitus and a large talking cockroach residing in the prolapsed anus of funk godhead George Clinton. Ellison’s comparatively dialed-back followup Ash restricts itself to a combustible head, giving Scanners a run for its money, faces that liquefy like so many crayons under a blowtorch and a malevolent amoeba extracted from a waking patient’s skull via robo-surgery—without anesthetic. Any maturation […]
by Charles Bramesco on Mar 18, 2025 -
Editor’s Letter
One of my earliest memories is visiting my grandmother in the small town of De Soto, Wis. I remember being fixated on the appliance providing the air that supported her emphysema, a shiny, alien-like oxygen tank squatting in her living room. The lingering vision of that corner of midwestern space—it’s not indirect enough to be what Freud called a screen memory, an anodyne remembrance obscuring something more traumatic. But the fact that I emotionally, viscerally reacted to the news last August that David Lynch was housebound with that disease and on supplemental oxygen, indicates that maybe it did function that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2025 -
An Interview with Director Jake Mahaffy About His New Book on Micro-budget Production
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the accompanying excerpt, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts micro-budget filmmakers should embrace. And below, we chatted about his impulse to write the book and his own personal path towards micro-budget production. Filmmaker: We selected you in 2005 for our 25 New Faces list after you premiered War at Sundance 2004. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2025 -
Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025
Carson Lund understood choosing rural New England for his directorial debut, Eephus, would be an unorthodox experience, but he couldn’t have predicted that securing a dream location would find him pitching an intimate town meeting on a Tuesday night. Eephus takes place over the course of the last amateur “Fall ball” baseball game on an old field before a new school is built on the site. Using Google Earth satellite view and following up in-person if a field looked promising, Lund estimates he visited upwards of 100 baseball fields across New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Often, he was disappointed to […]
by Caleb Hammond on Mar 18, 2025
