This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in […]

Peter Buck, the guitarist for R.E.M., is often quoted as saying, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” Now it seems, all those bands are the subjects of documentaries. Finally, even the Velvet Underground. The eponymous film is one that Todd Haynes appeared destined to make. Popular music, rock’n’roll mythology and the vagaries of self-invented personas are a core of the director’s filmography, going back to the Super-8 transgression of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a melodramatic biopic of the ‘70s pop singer cast with Barbie dolls. Velvet Goldmine (1998) […]

It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]

With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]

Starting with 2002’s Far from Heaven, cinematographer Ed Lachman worked with director Todd Haynes on four features before this year’s Dark Waters. Based on a true story, the movie follows corporate attorney Rob Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) as he investigates industrial pollution on a farm in Appalachia. The case widened to include the entire town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and led to a years-long lawsuit against DuPont. Lachman spoke with Filmmaker at Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, held this year in Toruń, Poland. Filmmaker: How did you and Todd approach this story? Lachman: In his storytelling Todd has always dealt with how our culture treats the outsider and insider. The difference is […]

When the first trailer for Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters dropped, reactions were unprecedentedly tepid: what was this anonymous-looking crusading lawyer thriller? Was this really a recognizable Todd Haynes movie or, for the first time, a feature-length paycheck gig? From the get-go of the now-released film, Haynes and longtime DP Ed Lachman are certainly operating in their distinctive visual language, shooting, as with Carol, in Cincinnati, playing itself this time rather than period NYC. In the 1975-set prologue, a group of night skinny-dippers dive into local waters adjacent to a DuPont plant only to be chased off by company patrol. The camera bobs […]

Colorist Joe Gawler of Harbor Pictures has worked on a number of films and television shows over the years, including A Most Violent Year, Midnight in Paris and Arrival. For Wonderstruck, Gawler had to work with multiple film stocks. The story takes place in two time periods—the 1920s and the 1970s—and black & white and color film were used to convey the different time periods, while digital material was also shot for both periods. In this interview he talks about working with film and digital and how to become a better colorist. Filmmaker: How did you become involved in this project? Gawler: There’s […]

For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]