Trailers
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A DIY Feature with a Crew of One: Jamie Stuart Trailers A Motion Selfie
Filmmaker readers have long known the work of Jamie Stuart, whose inventive, deadpan dissections of film festival customs and rituals as well as elegantly lensed interviews graced our (web) pages for years. If you haven’t seen his byline around here much recently, there’s a good reason for that: he’s been making a feature. And now you can see some of it. A Motion Selfie is Stuart’s long-form debut, and he wrote, directed, starred, shot, scored, edited, color corrected…. well, you get the idea. Yes, A Motion Selfie is as DIY as you can get, with Stuart literally being his own […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2017 -
Spoiler Alert! How to Tell the Story Without Telling the Story
(WARNING: There will be spoilers) When Charlie McDowell’s mysterious film The Discovery debuted at Sundance last January, its distributor, Netflix, premiered a teaser trailer along with it — a good strategy, considering the film’s intriguing premise (that science has proven the existence of an afterlife) and its abundance of plot twists. No spoilers, please! A beautiful piece of promotion for a dark sci-fi romance ostensibly about life after death but essentially about a person looking for his soul mate, the teaser uses Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” for an 88-second music-driven montage (a song not used in the film but well-suited for […]
by Stephen Garrett on Mar 23, 2017 -
When It Comes to Raw, Focus World Sees Red: On Red Band vs. Green Band Trailers
“Aberrant behavior, bloody and grisly images, strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug use/partying.” So reads the information box on the R rating for Raw, Julia Ducournau’s tasty little horror film about a vegan who becomes a cannibal. Explicit films (gross-out horror flicks, bawdy comedies, sexy dramas) always face the same marketing challenge: how do you show the best parts of a movie when those moments might be too graphic? In the case of Raw, Focus World gave the movie two trailers: a mainstream gothic green-band trailer and a frenetically disturbing red-band trailer. Ironically, the two share a lot of the […]
by Stephen Garrett on Feb 15, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night
When I interviewed Trey Edward Shults for our 25 New Faces list in 2015, he spoke of his new project: For his next film, Shults is again drawing on a family story — his father’s death. “It’s not a straight drama about a guy passing from cancer,” Shults says. “I’m trying to take those feelings and emotions and put them into something bigger. And, yeah, it’s like my version of a horror movie. People ask, ‘Wasn’t Krisha that?’ But it’ll be even more intense than Krisha.” I don’t know how much those intentions of Shults’s have shapeshifted since our interview, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper
No film has stayed and resonated with me from Cannes this past year as much as Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, an eerie ghost story/character study laced with dark forebodings entirely entwined with our current political moment. IFC has just dropped a new trailer which focuses aptly on Kristen Stewart’s riveting performance as a buyer and stylist to a Davos-set celebrity socialite. Intrigued with the paranormal in all its historical dimensions, Stewart’s character is grieving her recently deceased brother while exploring the possibilities of communication in an age in boundaries are increasingly blurred. IFC releases the film on March 10. (And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2017 -
Strategies for Sharing
“I’m the only one of these directors with a @twitter account. Am I doing it wrong?!” tweeted, tongue-in-cheek, Moonlight helmer Barry Jenkins last November. Good question: Jenkins had just been announced as one of the Best Director nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Awards (the others were Andrea Arnold, for American Honey; Pablo Larraín, for Jackie; Jeff Nichols, for Loving; and Kelly Reichardt, for Certain Women), and among such esteemed company he was the sole denizen of the Twittersphere. Was Jenkins boosting his chances during awards season by maintaining an active presence on Twitter? Or does a social media identity […]
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 18, 2017 -
How Do You Market a Madman? On the Trailers of Werner Herzog
“The sun dimmeth, the land sinketh, gusheth forth steam and gutting fire,” rasps Werner Herzog ominously, quoting Norse poetry from the Poetic Edda as bursts of lava erupt onto the screen in the trailer for his latest release, Into the Volcano (Netflix). The message is clear: the Underworld awaits. And your Teutonic guide is a veritable Stygian ferryman. So how do you market a madman? Or — more accurately — when? Herzog, the acclaimed septuagenarian director, first rose to prominence as part of the New German Cinema movement in the 1970s and quickly staked his claim in film’s firmament with […]
by Stephen Garrett on Dec 5, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Brent Green and Sam Green, Live Cinema
What looks to be a stellar high-profile collaboration between two Filmmaker favorites is Brent Green and Sam Green: Love Cinema, running for four nights, December 7 – 10, as part of BAM’s Next Wave series. The two filmmakers aren’t related other than sharing a skill for charismatically fronting live performances blending their movies with live performance and narration. Brent first appeared in Filmmaker way back in 2005, when he led our 25 New Face list that year. We’ve assiduously covered his work since, as we have with Sam Green, whose works include the documentary, The Weather Underground, and then live […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Pablo Larrain’s Jackie
Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is one of my favorite films of the year. You can read my interview with the director in the current print edition of Filmmaker, and you can see more of the film in this new trailer, just out from Fox Searchlight. It’s more revealing than the earlier teaser trailer Stephen Garrett wrote about here, and, in some ways, quite different in tone, foregrounding the political mythmaking element of the story. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2016 -
History in Under 90 Seconds: Critiquing the Barry and Jackie Trailers
Stephen Garrett’s “The Art of First Impressions” is one of Filmmaker‘s most widely read articles, an insightful and incisive guide to making a great movie trailer. We’re happy to have Garrett, who is not only a critic but also the founder of the trailer and marketing house Jump Cut, back writing for Filmmaker, beginning with a regular series on the creative direction of today’s most noteworthy trailers. This first installment begins with Garrett examining teasers for two films about political figures acquired by their distributors out of the Fall festivals: Barry and Jackie. — SM Despite a punishing election season […]
by Stephen Garrett on Nov 2, 2016
