Winter 2023
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Beyond the Third Act: Everest Pipkin’s Cinema-Inspired Tabletop RPG World Ending Game
“Endings are very hard,” said Everest Pipkin. “It’s one of the most difficult things about making anything, and only gets harder when you are collaboratively telling a story with lots of people.” Speaking via video chat from their home in southern New Mexico, Pipkin, an artist and game designer, recently released World Ending Game, a tabletop “falling-action game” designed for players to bring existing campaigns to a close. Say you’re part of a weekly group playing Dungeons & Dragons and everyone is ready to move on. Your party can wrap things up and bring your existing characters — the druid, […]
by Joanne McNeil on Dec 15, 2022 -
Seeing Eye to Eye: Color Correction Styles Across Today’s Film Restorations
Going to the cinema to see a 4K restoration or buying a Blu-ray of a beloved classic from a boutique publisher, one is never quite sure what one will get, colorwise. Frequently, a distinctly tinted veil seems to have fallen over the screen from the first frame. Sometimes, this is a chilling greenish blue, one that bronzes flesh tones and adds a steely, Melvillean atmosphere to the proceedings. On other occasions, it is yellow, as if golden hour had found a way to fall day and night, indoors and out, then curdled from its newfound monotony into a stubborn, pissy […]
by Bingham Bryant on Dec 15, 2022 -
Outsmarting the Disruptors: Greg Mottola Interviews Rian Johnson on Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
In August, Rian Johnson was among the directors with Netflix projects invited to show works that inspired them at the company-owned Paris Theater in New York City. Among the movies Johnson selected were two whose influence is directly perceptible on Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the first of two sequels to his 2019 hit the writer-director is making for the streamer. From his 1973 favorite The Last of Sheila, Johnson borrows the opening set-up: A dangerously wealthy man invites a group of friends (or are they just parasites?) to join him for a week of elaborate games amidst beautiful […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2022 -
Daydreaming, Neuroscience and Screenwriting: The Imaginative Teaching of Mary Sweeney
“I have always had a hard time explaining my creative process to people,” says Mary Sweeney, a professor of screenwriting in the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Sweeney boasts a long list of filmmaking credits but may be best known for her collaborations as a producer, writer and editor with filmmaker David Lynch. In particular, Sweeney edited Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, two deliriously dreamy films that highlight a form of poetic cinema and a creative process that Sweeney hopes to share with students. […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2022 -
Houses in Motion: Production Designer Rick Carter on The Fabelmans
Production designer Rick Carter caught the eye of Steven Spielberg when he was art director on The Goonies and first worked with him directly on the pilot of Spielberg’s anthology series Amazing Stories. Spielberg told him the minimal amount of train he needed for the episode; Carter ended up giving him more without increasing the budget. “I think I have an ability to prioritize what’s important so that I can put the resources into [those] elements, whether it’s the set or visual effects or any other aspect of the movie,” says Carter. Starting with Jurassic Park, Carter has served as […]
by Vikram Murthi on Dec 15, 2022 -
An Interview With Glass Onion Producer Ram Bergman
In the early 1990s, the playbook for beginning independent producers used to be this: Find a budding auteur, make their first ultra-low-budget film, sell it at a festival, then partner with the director on larger, increasingly successful projects, allowing both careers to grow symbiotically. Independent film does contain such partnerships—Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes is a notable one and, more recently, the producing team of Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston and director David Lowery—but countless others fizzle out. Sometimes, the stress of a first feature generates behavior from either party that shuts down any thought of future collaboration. Other […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2022 -
The Carrier Bag Theory of Nonfiction Filmmaking: What Documentarians Can Learn from Ursula K. Le Guin
I teach documentary studies and production at the Skidmore College MDOCS program and run the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute. When non-tenure track faculty recently organized to form a union, MDOCS curated a series of labor-related films to add to the conversation around labor organizing on campus. What should have been a fun project became increasingly frustrating because all the documentaries we found centered strikes—the most conflict-oriented, high-stakes and visible side of unionization. What we wanted to feature were the less-visible processes of labor organizing: meetings, conversations, collaborations and negotiations. We ended up screening two excellent films about striking workers, and although the screening generated […]
by Sarah Ema Friedland on Dec 15, 2022 -
Kept in Sync: Paul Rogers on Editing Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once editor Paul Rogers first met co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, or the Daniels, at OMG CAMERAS EVERYWHERE, a free filmmaking summer camp pairing kids with established filmmakers to shoot videos for musicians like Daft Punk, Diplo and Benny Blanco. When I called Rogers via Zoom to interview him, Scheinert sat beside him with a guitar and occasionally chimed in: “The first thing we worked on together was a silly music video with kids—no rules, directions or studio notes. We just had to make something that would make the kids excited about what they did […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 15, 2022 -
Within the Silences: The Sound Team Behind TÁR
TÁR opens with its namesake, played by Cate Blanchett, being interviewed in front of a packed audience at The New Yorker Festival. The chat serves multiple functions. It delivers the character’s backstory as an EGOT-winning classical composer and conductor, establishes the film’s immersive, observational style and lets the viewer experience sound the way that Lydia Tár experiences it. During the interview, the festival’s audience is only heard as a communal mass. It laughs together. It applauds together. There is no ambient chatter, no whispered asides, no rustling clothes or shuffling feet. It’s only when the interviewer asks about the influence […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 15, 2022
