The Independent Screenwriter: Jon Raymond

Portland-based Jon Raymond has four screenplay credits, all in the last decade, to his name, but his iMDB page only tells half the story. Raymond began his career and is still well known as a writer of novels and literary short fiction, and his film career has come not from the usual Black-Listed spec script but from adaptations of his work co-authored by a director/collaborator/friend, Kelly Reichardt. Two stories from his short story collection Livability, “Old Joy” and “Train Choir,” became Reichardt films (Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, respectively), with the two co-authoring their scripts. That work, and the […]

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Fassbinder and His Friends: Ira Sachs

Entering its final weekend, “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” is part one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s massive survey of the work of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a madly prolific, protean figure of the German New Wave. Marrying social commentary with emotional melodrama and, sometimes, genre entertainment, Fassbinder cranked out four and five movies a year, drawing from a repertory group of actors, exploring themes of love and obsession, and building a sustained critique of post-war capitalism that still penetrates today. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art programmed a Fassbinder retrospective, and we asked several directors […]

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Fassbinder and his Friends: Lynne Stopkewich

Entering its final weekend, “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” is part one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s massive survey of the work of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a madly prolific, protean figure of the German New Wave. Marrying social commentary with emotional melodrama and, sometimes, genre entertainment, Fassbinder cranked out four and five movies a year, drawing from a repertory group of actors, exploring themes of love and obsession, and building a sustained critique of post-war capitalism that still penetrates today. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art programmed a Fassbinder retrospective, and we asked several directors […]

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Maleficent and the Strange and Storied History of Fairy Tales

Trace back the history of Fairy Tales from their origins as European folk tales. Yet long before they were material for children’s movies, fairy tales have been drawn into debates on the nature of literature, cultural evolution and national identity. They’ve been subjected to Freudian analysis, Jungian interpretations, feminist readings, postmodern readings, poststructuralist readings, Marxist Read MoreRead More



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Trailer Watch: Walter Potter, The Man Who Married Kittens

Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens is a new short documentary by The Midnight Archive webseries creator Ronni Thomas scheduled to have its premiere June 6th at the new Morbid Anatomy Museum at 424A 3rd Avenue Brooklyn, New York. From the Walter Potter Taxidermy website: This surprisingly tender and heartfelt film features never before seen footage of the great tableaux of eccentric Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermist Walter Potter and the collectors around the world who treasure them. You will meet in the course of this film tiny kittens in gowns attending a wedding or having a tea party; toads playing […]

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Fassbinder and his Friends: Everett Lewis

Entering its final weekend, “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” is part one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s massive survey of the work of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a madly prolific, protean figure of the German New Wave. Marrying social commentary with emotional melodrama and, sometimes, genre entertainment, Fassbinder cranked out four and five movies a year, drawing from a repertory group of actors, exploring themes of love and obsession, and building a sustained critique of post-war capitalism that still penetrates today. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art programmed a Fassbinder retrospective, and we asked several directors […]

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From Static to Dynamic: Creating Photographs with Impact

Take your images from ordinary to extraordinary with what you’ll learn at this engaging and informative seminar with Brenda Tharp. Brenda will first explore the topic of creativity and how to break the ‘block’ to more creative expression. She’ll continue with a look at ways to interpret vs. record your scene, an in-depth discussion of Read MoreRead More



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Cannes 2014: Diary of a Party Crasher

(Aaron Hillis’ first two festival dispatches can be read here.) The past 11 days are mighty hazy. Double that number and you’ll not only know how many features I’ve seen at Cannes, but the quantity of cocktail mixers, dance-a-thons, karaoke get-togethers, and other costly promotional soirées littering the Croisette that I came into like a wrecking ball. Only two of them actually invited me, but I don’t get shut out of parties at Cannes. Sometimes cinema can wait. “You’re burning the candle at both ends,” chided one of my Cannes flatmates just now, an industrious journalist who sees more films […]

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“Why Don’t We All Go Blow Stuff Up?” Kelly Reichardt on Night Moves

In Night Moves, Jesse Eisenberg’s baleful, twitchy intensity finds another fitting incarnation. His Josh is an environmentalist visibly dissatisfied with perceived half-measures who plans to blow up a dam as an act of eco-terrorism-/-activism with the help of ex-Marine buddy Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) and Dena (Dakota Fanning). To do this, they’ll need to purchase suspicious quantities of ammonium nitrate and buy a boat to pack it into. The middle-aged suburban guy selling his fishing vessel couldn’t be more innocuous in his personal manner, but we see his neighborhood through Josh’s angry eyes: the backyard waterfall is a clear misallocation of […]

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Legally Speaking, It Depends: Copyright in Court

New York Transactional entertainment attorney Christopher Schiller discusses what may happen if you should be involved in a copyright case that sees the inside of a courtroom. Specifics being key to every case, this effort will only lay out the big-picture elements of what it might be like to take a copyright claim to the Read MoreRead More



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Hope for Film: Six Keys to the Current State of Indie Film

Ted Hope makes 6 observations about the state of the independent film market and what we can do to make the business sustainable. 1. Independent film needs a better infrastructure. More people can make movies than ever before, and yet it’s become harder than ever to get people to see them. 2. It’s more difficult Read MoreRead More



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“Cinema Needs Good Images”: An Interview with Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond

Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was given the “Pierre Angénieux Excellens in Cinematography” award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was a fitting tribute to the 83-year-old director of photography, who chronicled the events of the 1956 Hungarian revolution before leaving his country soon afterwards. In 1962 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, settling in Los Angeles. During the ’70s Zsigmond established himself as one of the world’s great cinematographers, working on Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, John Boorman’s Deliverance, and Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, […]

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Cannes 2014: Maps to the Stars, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Tribe, Adieu Au Langage

That’s Cannes, man. The red carpet’s rolled and stashed; you don’t have to go home but you can’t afford to stay here. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s three-hour-plus, mixed-reviewed Winter Sleep pocketed the Palme d’Or. Sorry, Naomi Kawase with your so-called “masterpiece” and Xavier Dolan, who said he “deserved” to win top honors, juries are subjective. The more burning issue is when undistributed landmarks like Adieu Au Langage and The Tribe will find their way to your eyes and ears. Until my final take on the 2014 edition of Cannes appears in the next issue of Filmmaker, here are my […]

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Without Frills

As a teenager going into a movie theater, I was looking for some true reflection of the absurd darkness that had come on seemingly overnight. I was looking for a place to rest my pimples from the light and to be told that others had survived similar such onslaughts. For some before me it was James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Molly Ringwald in all them John Hughes movies. Then it was Claire Danes on TV in My So Called Life. But for me, it was the actor Liza Weil in Whatever. I was 19, hadn’t graduated high school, […]

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