Winter 2023
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The Future is Unwritten: Mark Asch on 2023 in Film
For what, and for whom, do workers work? One way to conceptualize the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes is as a fight for the right to refuse the demands of shareholder capitalists maximizing return on investment and tech-world futurists devising new forms of extraction, notably via a disrupted exhibition environment that siphons away profits once reserved for residuals and AI that treats words and likenesses as royalty-free intellectual property. As I embark on this year-in-review exercise, I am also conscious of the past few months of policed speech—on campuses, within political parties, at newspapers and in the film world. At […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Real and the Poetic: DP Darius Khondji on Bardo
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has labeled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths the most difficult film of his career—a bold categorization, considering the intricate single-take illusion of Birdman and the famously frigid filming conditions of The Revenant, both of which earned Iñárritu Oscars as Best Director. But for Bardo cinematographer Darius Khondji, the lure of the project wasn’t the technical challenges, though they were plentiful (including shooting in Mexico City at the height of COVID with long takes, deep focus photography and surrealistic imagery), but the emotional pull of the material. “Almost every single scene in Bardo was a […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 15, 2022 -
A Collective Voice: Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Women Talking
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So, when she was approached to score Sarah Polley’s drama Women Talking, “after the Oscars were over and I had already given that speech,” the Icelandic composer and cellist remembers being taken aback by her own “knee-jerk reaction” to the project: “Who wants to sit through two hours of women talking?” “I stood up on that stage, urging women to talk, […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2022 -
A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin brings the writer-director’s signature caustic humor to the story of Colm (Brendan Gleeson, perfectly surly), who abruptly decides to stop talking to his longtime best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell, perfectly perplexed), with devastating results for them both. The film is set on a fictional Irish island in 1923, and the combination of wide-open spaces and unfussy but handsome costuming adds visual dynamism to a film whose appeal is largely rooted in whip-smart dialogue. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh’s filmography includes works by Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto) and Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship), which […]
by Abbey Bender on Dec 15, 2022 -
Two Questions: Producers on Net Profits and Sharing Their Personal Lives
In this new series of articles, Filmmaker poses two questions to producers, directors and other filmmakers. One question is directed toward the nuts and bolts of filmmaking—questions having to do with terms, practices, legal issues, technology and so on. The second question deals with topics that are softer or more amorphous—questions that necessarily can’t have right or wrong answers and whose replies are based on the personalities and practices of the individual participants. This issue, we directed our questions to producers, both fiction and doc, and asked them: What are points, or backend, and how do they work? What’s your […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the winter 2023 edition of Filmmaker, the second issue of our 30th anniversary year. It’s our annual awards season issue, in which we cover the Gotham Awards and devote a special section to considering our favorite below-the-line contributions of the year, profiles that reveal a lot about the new processes and technologies that inform filmmaking today. For example, in A. E. Hunt’s profile of Gotham Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Paul Rogers, the editor talks about the extensive VFX work in the film, including the use of time-remapping software as well as comping in pictorial elements to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
Artistic Outputs: Filmmakers and Production Designers on Using Generative AI
“An ominous slender figure in the foreground, a gay couple kissing in the distance, alleyway, two-point perspective, at night, a bar crowded, 8K, cinematic, cinematic composition, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, rendered in the Gaspar Noe engine.” Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
Hit & Misses: The 2022 Releases of Six Recent Sundance Features
In just three (admittedly, very momentous) years, the marketplace for independent films has completely changed. During previous turning points over the decades, executives would use words like “waves” or “cycles” to describe instances of upheaval, but what’s happening now is more like a comprehensive reset. In a recent online article titled “The Sky is Falling, Take Shelter,” producer Rebecca Green wrote, “This year is unlike anything I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve been working in this business.” If Sundance and its films are a barometer for the independent film industry, consider this comparison: The pre-pandemic class of Sundance 2019 […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 15, 2022 -
After the Tide Went Out: Isabel Sandoval Interviews Saint Omer Writer/Director Alice Diop
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is how the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his early work The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda) is a Senegalese immigrant to France on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, who she left on a beach to be washed out to sea by the outgoing tide. A student, Coly is writing her thesis on Wittgenstein, an academic detail she’s shamed for at the trial. (Why didn’t she write on the work of “someone closer to her own culture,” a professor wonders […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2022 -
Unimaginable Acts: Writer/Director Mark Jenkin and Actor Mary Woodvine on the 16mm-Shot “Folk Horror” Picture, Enys Men
Enys Men—British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight-premiering follow-up to his 2019 BAFTA-winning breakthrough, Bait, for which he hand-processed the film—is set in coastal Cornwall at the extreme southwestern tip of England, amid jagged cliffs and crashing waves. On a rocky and profoundly isolated island (the Cornish title means “stone island”) is its lone human occupant (Mary Woodvine, in a spellbinding performance), a woman of obscure purpose whose daily routine the camera dutifully catalogs—the monitoring of soil temperature at a specific site and the ritual drop of a pebble into an abandoned mine shaft, along with less cryptic activities—until semblances […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 15, 2022
