Summer 2020
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“Lately It Has Been Difficult To Turn Away from Screens”: Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew on Violence, Racism and Complicity
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. Read all the responses here. — Editor Lately, it has been difficult to turn away from screens. Screens that show us the casual abuse of power. Screens that instill rage and dread. These screens are important in showing […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 8, 2020 -
Can You Finance an Independent Film During a Pandemic?
In the middle of the global pandemic and one of the worst economic downturns in a century, Maven Pictures’ Celine Rattray, a producer of Driveways, The Kindergarten Teacher and American Honey, had several projects interrupted. But in early April, a timely new project—in which the crew and cast could work remotely from their own homes—was suddenly greenlit. She spoke to a private equity investor who she believed would be a good fit for the film, budgeted at six figures, and the financier agreed to fully fund it during their phone call. “The deal closed in a couple days,” says Rattray. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 7, 2020 -
Quarantines and Future Dreams
Contact—yes, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis blockbuster—isn’t about a pandemic. It’s not celebrating an anniversary year or set for rerelease, nor is it a stone classic like Alien. But this moment of quarantines and uncertainty makes for an excellent time to revisit it. What feels rare about the movie is its depiction of solitude rather than loneliness. I suppose this is true of many astronauts on the screen, but this one is unique because Ellie Arroway—the main character—experiences solitude continuously; it is more than just her journey in the third act. Actor Jodie Foster is routinely alone in the film, in […]
by Joanne McNeil on Jul 7, 2020 -
Plan of Action: BIPOC Documentary Professionals Respond to the Pandemic and Protest Movement
As stay-at-home orders are lifted across the world and productions begin to resume, documentary filmmakers and organizations are assessing how to “reopen” their own practices amid urgent ethical and safety considerations. They do this as COVID-19’s first wave continues to make its way across the United States, and protests around Black Lives Matter, DACA and other causes fight to dismantle our society’s structural racism and inequity. Among these filmmakers are members of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, an organization formed in 2015 that advocates for women and nonbinary professionals of color in the nonfiction space. Below, directors, producers, crew members and […]
by Violeta Ayala, Claire Cao and Miasarah Lai on Jul 7, 2020 -
In My Room
The big question for film educators this summer is how to prepare for classes this fall. Some campuses will host all of their classes online; others, like mine, are figuring out a hybrid model, with some production classes held on the sound stages with careful social distancing, masks and lots of hand sanitizer. In the meantime, many of us have been figuring out ways to inspire our students to keep making film and videos, even within the confines of their bedrooms, apartments and family homes. Luckily, there’s an exciting history of projects that demonstrate the power of a small space. […]
by Holly Willis on Jul 7, 2020 -
“The Starting Point is Authenticity… Would This Happen in Real Life?”: The Sophisticated Location Work of HBO’s Succession
A show like HBO’s Succession risks being either tone-deaf or ineffectual, especially at a moment of heightened sensitivity toward income inequality and billionaires’ amoral business practices. Armstrong’s background in unsparing British cringe/political comedy, namely acclaimed sitcoms Peep Show and The Thick of It, helped him adopt an intimately satirical approach to the story of the dysfunctional Roy family, nouveau riche owners of the fictional media/hospitality empire Waystar Royco (a la the Murdochs and News Corp or the Redstones and ViacomCBS). Armstrong filters Shakespearean and Grecian tragedy into the series’ premise—patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) fights to preserve his empire from the […]
by Vikram Murthi on Jul 7, 2020 -
The Past in the Present: Garrett Bradley on Time, Her Documentary about Activism and the Carceral State
Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 cover story, Ashley Clark’s interview with Time director Garrett Bradley is being published online today for the first time to mark the film’s New York premiere this coming Sunday (with virtual screenings continuing until September 25th) at the New York Film Festival. For over half a decade, New York-born artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley has been steadily building an impressively diverse yet tonally and stylistically harmonious CV. Bradley’s work has encompassed film, television and the gallery space; short, longform and multi-channel ventures; and ambitious explorations of the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. It has often focused […]
by Ashley Clark on Jul 7, 2020 -
Different Ways of Learning
Across U.S. film schools this spring, a similar scene played out. The novel coronavirus went from faraway topic to urgent local threat. As rolling stay-at-home orders were issued, administrators shut down campuses, students scrambled for transport home and film departments quickly improvised online teaching methods that would allow instruction to continue even as students couldn’t attend classes and screenings in theaters or crew each other’s shoots in person. Three months later, we know much more about the coronavirus: its asymptomatic transmission, resistance to warm weather and ability to target multiple organ systems in the body. And with early, erratically applied […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 7, 2020 -
The Long Goodbye
As filmmakers who love the word “serendipity” and pursue situations that allow them the freedom to respond to it, Bill and Turner Ross finally found the window to make Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets—fittingly enough—thanks to a strike of serendipitous scheduling. A delay in the production of friend Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, for which the Ross brothers had planned a making-of documentary (the excellent, as-of-now unreleasable Second Star to the Right and Straight on ’Til Morning), finally gave them the chance to make Bloody Nose—a film full of images that had long gestated in their individual, albeit synergistic, brains. Such serendipity permeated […]
by Daniel Christian on Jul 7, 2020 -
Let the Future Tell the Truth: Tesla Writer/Director Michael Almereyda and Kelly Reichardt in Conversation
In Michael Almereyda’s pre-Katrina New Orleans–shot Happy Here and Now, David Arquette’s termite control specialist is preparing to shoot a film about Nikola Tesla in his off-hours. In a delirious rant, Arquette’s character muses about the Serbian-American scientist’s quest to slow the speed of light—enough so that you could go out for a coffee and return in time to see a beam complete its journey from one end of your apartment to another. In the climax of Happy Here and Now, one of Tesla’s signature inventions, the Tesla coil, is responsible for Arquette’s film-within-a-film experiencing the worst kind of production […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 7, 2020
