Sundance Film Festival 2018
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“Making a Film Is Always a Chaotic Experience”: Director Craig William Macneill | Lizzie
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Making a film is always a chaotic experience; chaos is inherently just part of process. The key is to always think positively, staying focused on the finish line and receptive to change. Our film takes place in New England, but for financial reasons we had to shoot the film in Savannah, GA – which does not […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“The Art of Silently Weeping While Pulling Focus at the Same Time”: DP Nick Higgins on Shooting Robin Williams: Come Inside My Head?
Following Water & Power: A California Heist in 2017 and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired in 2008, Marina Zenovich returns to Sundance for a third time with Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, her documentary on the late comedic maestro. Documentary DP Nick Higgins served as one of four cinematographers on the project. Higgins was the sole DP on O.J.: Made in America and has more than 50 cinematography credits to his name. Below, he shares his thoughts on lighting documentary subjects and why he prefers to shoot interviews with a single camera. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind screens four times at Sundance 2018. Filmmaker: […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“I Was Watching Russian TV More than My Entire Family in Russia”: Maxim Pozdorovkin and Matvey Kulakov on Editing Our New President
Maxim Pozdorovkin entered the documentary film world in 2013 with Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a film that earned him top prizes at Sundance, Cinema Eye Honors and the British Independent Film Awards. He returned to Sundance in 2014 with The Notorious Mr. Bout. Now, he returns to the World Cinema Documentary Competition once again with Our New President, a doc on Russia’s propagandistic state-run news networks. Below, Pozdorovkin and co-editor Matvey Kulakov discuss how they crafted a feature film from such surreal archival footage. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“How the Hell Do We Make this Watchable for 78 Minutes?” Director Maxim Pozdorovkin | Our New President
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Our New President tells the story of Donald Trump entirely through Russian propaganda. As such, it is a film that was edited “live” as Trump’s first year in office unfolded. Unlike most films, this one could not be thought through in advance. We had to roll with the headlines. The storytelling adjusted to the events and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
The Sundance Question: What Roles did Chaos and Order Play in Your Films?
Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year, our question involves an issue that might be appropriate given the dramas of the previous year: chaos and order. This year’s question: As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? “We Used Chaos to Clarify Our Senses and Capture True […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“The Film of a Drunken Monkey”: Directors Nico Casavecchia and Martin Allais | BattleScar
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Nico Casavecchia: In Drunken Master (Jackie Chan, 1978) young Wong Fei-Hung meets Beggar So, an old drunkard picking a fight in a bar. Beggar turns out to be the famous drunken master who uses fighting techniques resembling those of an intoxicated monkey that stole wine and drank it all. Wong reluctantly enters training with Beggar and in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“We Went Where the Story Took Us”: Director Derek Doneen | Kailash
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Kailash is about a man who risks his life and the lives of his family and colleagues by breaking into factories to rescue children from slavery. Being that we chose to tell the story with vérité filmmaking — in realtime — the very nature of what we set out to shoot was inherently chaotic. We knew […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
“Documentaries Are Less an Act of Creation and More an Act of Discovery”: DP Bob Richman on The Price of Everything
Brooklyn-born DP Bob Richman began his career as a production assistant for Albert and David Maysles. He’s since gone on to shoot some of the most widely seen documentaries of the past 20 years: An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for ‘Superman’, the Paradise Lost trilogy and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, to name a few. His latest feature, The Price of Everything, is a vérité doc on the puzzlingly astronomical price of fine art. Richman spoke with Filmmaker ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere about his preferred camera for vérité filmmaking, reuniting with director Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect) and the essential importance of a good […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2018 -
25 Films We’re Excited about at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance starts tomorrow, and just before the curtain raises we’re squeaking in with a list of films our correspondents — Vadim Rizov, Meredith Alloway and myself — are excited to see. I’m about to start packing, and colleagues from other magazines and companies are Facebooking their SARS-mask covered faces on their way to the influenza petri-dish of Park City. I could spin this intro out longer — quote Sundance festival director John Cooper on how this year’s festival is full of “alternative voices” — or perhaps left-turn into some metaphor or another, but I’ll just do what we do here […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2018 -
Tamara Jenkins, Todd Haynes, Jonas Akerlund and More Added to 2018 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance always drops an announcement or two following their initial burst in early December, and today the Sundance Institute has done just that, releasing the titles of films and programs that cross the festival’s various programming categories. Honestly, when the first list came out without Tamara Jenkins’s latest, Private Life, I was expecting to see it slide into the schedule at a later date, which it has done today. The Slums of Beverly Hills/The Savages director’s new film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti in a tale of a couple exploring assisted reproduction and domestic adoption as they try to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 19, 2017
