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 […]

With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]

Not too long ago, I watched Kevin Smith talk about having a near-fatal heart attack. It was from his hospital bed, streamed on Facebook Live, the day after doctors put a stent in his left anterior descending artery—the so-called widowmaker that felled writer John Gregory Dunne in the opening pages of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Smith’s a great storyteller, so his recounting was hilarious, full of dick jokes and such—his quick mind had already assembled the events of the previous 24 hours into the funniest PSA for cardio health ever made. And indeed, by the time […]

Alvin Toffler in his prescient 1970 bestseller, Future Shock, predicted that in a post-industrial society the design of goods would turn over frequently as they became quickly outdated and triggered their own replacement. They would grow disposable too, with the cost of repair exceeding cost of replacement. His emblem of discardability was the disposable lighter. (He also foresaw the rise of the freelance economy in which people would change career and workplace frequently—a fact of life for most of us in this industry.) At NAB in April, Blackmagic Design advertised a new “Professional Ultra HD broadcast camera for less than […]

I don’t think I’d be out of line if I said the DP job market is heavily saturated. IATSE wouldn’t tell me the actual number of jobs available last year, but according to the internet there were 157 TV shows in production and roughly 250 features released (both union and non-union). Currently, there are more than 2,000 Local 600 members on the active DP roster, and while some of them are retiring this number doesn’t include the many operators stepping up and shooting on their way to re-rating. Add to that a small number of in-demand cinematographers who take up […]

“End the trip? I’ll take you to the police.” The driver, Saudi, early 20s, looked into the rear view mirror at me and the woman next to me in the back seat. I had asked him, “You always ask your riders their nationality?” Finally, he responded, “You’re in an Islamic state, and you must respect the laws of this country!”  Having lived in Sudan and Libya and grown up in largely conservative Chad just a couple countries over, I was not new to “Islamic states.” Despite Saudi Arabia’s massive economic and cultural overhaul in recent years, the legal system still […]

You’ve heard it before: “It’s better to fail than never to have tried.” While this may be true, if you’re a director there’s no reason why you should trip over your own feet like I did. After making a few features, I learned you could get pretty far by just believing your own narrative. However, the “fake it till you make it” approach has its limits. While I was making feature after feature, deep inside I was actually harboring a growing insecurity, an insecurity for which, ironically, I compensated with more drive. Thinking I could do no wrong, my ego […]

With most incoming film students being required to make shorts during their undergraduate or graduate studies, what exemplars of the form should they look to for inspiration? Filmmaker asked a number of friends—all filmmakers—who teach filmmaking at a cross-section of institutions to list the short films they think all incoming students should check out and be inspired by. Howard A. Rodman, professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts: I consistently recommend to my students—whose films often lead with cinematography, visual effects and sound mix—that they see Andrea Arnold’s Academy Award–winning 2003 short film Wasp. Adequate direct sound, wobbly cam, minimalist VFX, yet […]

In last summer’s issue, I looked at the development of new virtual and augmented reality programs on campuses throughout the United States, examining how they were funded and formed, what type of equipment they were using, which departments administered them and how they fostered cross-departmental collaboration, and what types of projects students were undertaking. I found that universities were using VR in a variety of ways unrelated to filmmaking, including advancing research in medicine, architecture and other fields. But the strongest programs that taught VR as a discipline were oriented toward gaming and narrative storytelling, in both fiction and nonfiction. […]

“The papers on the boardroom table were stained from corpses.” Those lyrics, from The Coup’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You, offer some idea of the ideological imperative propelling Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, Brazil-meets-Afrofuturism satire of the same name. Struggling to make ends meet in Oakland, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) takes a job with telemarketing firm RegalView, where he finds himself rocketing to the top of the corporate ladder after he uses his “white voice” to drum up sales. His activist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) disapproves, especially after Cassius comes to the attention of deranged tech bro Steve Lift (Armie […]