Welcome to your first day on a film set. Perhaps you’ve gotten a new job as a production assistant. Perhaps you’re still in school and have been given an opportunity as an intern, or you’ve recently been asked to help out with a friend’s production. You probably have some questions. I’m writing this because I’d like to try to answer some of those questions in advance, and because I have hope. Hope that maybe the next time I ask someone to sweep up some glass that just broke, I won’t have to explain where to get a broom, how to […]

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams,” Federico Fellini once said. “Years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.” Cinema’s oneiric qualities have long been discussed by filmmakers and film theorists alike. Hollywood is even referred to as “the Dream Factory,” but that sobriquet refers as much to the industrial production and export model of the motion picture business as it does […]

My phone is ringing. The sound pulls me from a deep sleep. It’s 5:30 a.m., the room is dark, and for a moment I’m confused. As I push the phone into my ear I hear a female voice singing. Slowly it registers; this is the wakeup call that I requested. But I’m not staying in a hotel, and the woman calling me is a complete stranger. The singing stops and the voice on the other end of the line tells me to have a wonderful day. I express my gratitude and ask her name. “Sarah from Dublin,” she replies, and […]

Like the growing income gap in the United States, the indie film world has become increasingly divided between richer and poorer. While Sundance 2014 alumni such as Boyhood and A Most Wanted Man proved there’s still a spot for unique and well-crafted non-Hollywood crossovers in the popular culture (the films earned, respectively, more than $24 million and $17 million at the U.S. box office), the vast majority of last year’s festival titles had to scrappily pull together alternative distribution strategies in an ever-fragmenting entertainment universe, caught somewhere between the old and the new, ticket sales and downloads. As Roadside Attractions […]

Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell developed rich, resonant teenage characters in his independent sleeper, The Myth of the American Sleepover. With his sophomore feature, It Follows, he again essays the emotional lives of attractive, sexually adventurous suburban youth, this time within a high-concept genre framework. It Follows is eerie, Carpenter-esque horror, the tale of a slow-moving demon who shuffles steadily, invisibly and scarily toward a single victim. Here that’s mostly Jay, played with real “Final Girl” charisma by Maika Monroe, who has quickly emerged as a strong lead and supporting player in several notable films. She co-starred opposite Zac Efron in […]

As I noted online in my blog entry listing our top Web posts of the year, Filmmaker ended 2014 with an audience of 190,000 on our Facebook page — over 12 months, an increase of nearly 500%. That gain is reflected in our Web stats. Our overall traffic has doubled, and some days as much as 50% of our readers discover our content from Zuckerberg’s blue wall. (If you want to know how we did it, I have nothing for you — we did little more than post our articles, write original descriptions of them and answer people in the […]

Is there another contemporary documentary director who has so lovingly — and yet so quizzically — explored the work of his own artistic inspirations as Wim Wenders? With his patient, probing camera eye and, often, ruminative German-accented voiceover, Wenders has captured the work of filmmakers (Nicholas Ray, Yasujirō Ozu), choreographers (Pina Bausch), fashion designers (Yohji Yamamoto) and many, many musicians (Blind Willie Johnson, U2 and the players featured in Buena Vista Social Club, among others). Wenders approaches these talents humbly — in some cases as a colleague, but most often as a fan and admirer. And as much as Wenders’ […]

Although it’s too early to designate this a golden age of film editing, examples of unexpected, creative and sometimes flat-out radical cutting continue to suggest that the digital turn in cinema has always been, at its fundamental and structural level, about new possibilities for joining together images and sound. This column will explore the rhythms of editing in films that are exemplary — each in their own way — in the manipulation of time and space that is the foundation of editing. First up is the remarkable, wordless 13-minute-plus opening of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, which recalls René Clair’s […]

Speaking about the transgender movement and his leading role on the new Amazon Original series Transparent, actor Jeffrey Tambor exuberantly told Entertainment Weekly, “This is a brave new world.” From Emmy-nominated Laverne Cox’s Time Magazine cover to landmark federal policy laws, 2014 was an explosive year for transgender visibility and politics. Alongside these milestones, Jill Soloway’s groundbreaking new show mines the emotional landscape of trans-ness with a feeling-driven, multi-dimensional story of a family’s reckoning with a retired professor (Tambor, in a brilliantly nuanced performance) coming out as transgender. Funny, poignant and provocative, it’s been hailed as one of the best […]

I only faintly recall writing my last entry for Filmmaker Magazine. I was huddled over at some bar at a busy airport, in between jobs and cities I’ve only seen through the windows of a hotel: a cinematographer’s life. I do remember the article was a bit cheeky — I was pretty elated with the success of It Felt Like Love — so I thought this time that to commemorate Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter I’d get down to brass tacks. Here are five things cinematographers don’t talk about. 1. When to Say No Possibly one of the hardest parts of […]