On a film screen, a single edit flies by in the blink of an eye — usually, in 1/24th of a second. In the edit room, though, a cut is teased, strategized, finessed and obsessed over. We asked six editors from six of the fall’s best films to give us the frames on both sides of one particularly noteworthy cut — and to explain why these edits are so important. Call Me By Your Name Director: Luca Guadagnino Editor: Walter Fasano Fasano: Sensual. That’s the way I’d like to define our approach to the editing of Call Me By Your […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 14, 2017Colorist 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 […]
by Michael Murie on Oct 26, 2017For 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 […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 13, 2017Larry Gross first appeared in Filmmaker with the Todd Haynes/Safe cover story of our Summer 1995 issue. A screenwriter (48 Hours, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Porto), producer and director, he has contribued many interviews and essays since, but, in our Winter 2015 “Super 8” column, we took note of another element of the Gross oeuvre: his seductive and compelling use of Twitter, in which carefully honed critical arguments on myriad topics cascade onto screens in the form of tweetstorms. For this 25th anniversary issue, we asked Gross to commit one of these tweet storms to dead-tree media before he […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 14, 2017At 69, and with more than 90 movies on his CV, cinematographer Ed Lachman is on something of a roll this fall. He received recently the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and will see his latest stunning collaboration with director Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck, released in theaters from Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Shot on Super 35mm color and black-and-white stock, Wonderstruck follows Lachman’s ravishing work on Haynes’s Carol with another film in which the image carries a seductive charge and an analytic weight. An avid historian of visual history, Lachman dives deep into a story’s period […]
by Shevaun Mizrahi on Sep 14, 2017It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2017