Though Wes Anderson’s films can be seen as the product of the director’s sharp imagination, the finished work is nothing without those who turn his thoughts into spreadsheet-enabled reality. Most of the physical things on screen—the punctilious graphic design on signs and cards, the actual locations, the trimmed sets and the giant buildings in the distance that exist just to fill up white space—exist thanks to production designer Adam Stockhausen, who has been Anderson’s go-to since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Stockhausen has noted his fondness for planning productions in an old-fashioned, tactile way which likely appeals not only to the very […]

The post “The Hard Way Every Single Time”: Production Designer Adam Stockhausen on Asteroid City first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]

The post “How Do You Evoke the History of Violence in a Space Without Showing It?”: Hannah Peterson on The Graduates first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Less than a year after Luca Guadagnino‘s cannibal love story Bones and All, the Italian director returns with Challengers. Written by playwright Justin Kuritzkes, the film stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist as participants in a ménage à trois that eventually develops into a monogamous marriage between two of them. Years later, the trio unexpectedly reunite, stirring feelings of jealousy, lust and betrayal anew. Per the film’s official synopsis: Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married […]

The post Trailer Watch: Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Few television show characters are more iconic than Mad Men’s Don Draper. Jon Hamm played him for 7 seasons and just might have changed television forever. Since then Hamm has ventured into film and exercised his funny muscles. Last year’s Confess, Fletch was a wonderful example of what Hamm can do with good material, and so is his latest, Maggie Moore(s), directed by his friend (and Mad Men co-star) John Slattery.  In this episode, he talks about how Slattery worked with him to establish the very specific tone of that film, and what he needs from a director in general. He details how his previous television […]

The post “Part of What We Do as Actors Is Give It Up”: Jon Hamm (Back To One, Episode 258) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Tribeca Festival announced competition winners for its 22nd annual edition during an awards ceremony yesterday at Racket NYC. Awards were presented in the following categories: Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Human / Nature, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. So Young Shelly Yo’s Smoking Tigers and Guto Parente’s A Strange Path swept U.S. and International Narrative categories, while Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira’s Between the Rains won two out of four awards in the Documentary Competition. Several of this year’s award winners have been covered on the Filmmaker site, including The Gullspång Miracle (Best Editing […]

The post Tribeca Festival Announces 2023 Competition Winners first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

World premiering tomorrow at the Provincetown Film Festival is Summer Solstice, the debut feature of writer/director Noah Schamus, which previously was included in the 2022 US in Progress work-in-progress coproduction forum. The filmmakers have just released a teaser trailer — watch it above. And here’s the description from the Provincetown program book. Leo, a trans man, and his cis and straight friend, Eleanor, go away for an impromptu weekend trip, during which they uncover old secrets, new challenges, and find the answer to the age-old question: can bad sex and good friends mix? Writer-director Noah Schamus’s funny, melancholic feature debut […]

The post Trailer Watch: Noah Schamus’s Summer Solstice first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Post-WWII national anxieties offer a glimpse into our current tolerance for totalitarianism in Brooklyn 45, writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s latest horror effort. Presented as a real-time film in a bottle setting, the film takes place during the immediate aftermath of the war as a group of veterans meet at one of their Brooklyn (by way of Chicago) abodes to reconnect and (attempt to) mend fresh wounds. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) hosts the group, who assemble in part to support their old friend after his wife’s recent suicide. Rounding out the guest list is Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who worked as […]

The post “I Absolutely Cannot Stand the Present”: Ted Geoghegan on Period Horror Film Brooklyn 45 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Janus Films has released a trailer for the 4K restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 opus The Mother and the Whore, which will open at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center on June 23. An official synopsis of the restoration reads: After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a […]

The post Trailer Watch: 4K Restoration of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Winner of the NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the Audience Award in the Berlinale’s Panorama Documentary section, a new trailer for Kokomo City arrives ahead of its theatrical release later this summer. Directed by D. Smith (best known as a producer, singer and songwriter before pivoting to filmmaking), Kokomo City is her debut feature. The doc centers on four Black trans sex workers living in New York City and Atlanta—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, and Dominique Silver—who detail the nature of their livelihood with humor and honesty. Tragically, […]

The post Trailer Watch: D. Smith’s Kokomo City first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The haunted halls of a defunct Catskills hotel wreak psychological violence on a group of young, queer city slickers in Bad Things, the long-awaited sophomore feature from writer-director Stewart Thorndike. Arriving nearly a decade after Lyle, Thorndike’s sapphic take on Rosemary’s Baby starring Gabby Hoffmann, Bad Things similarly tackles plot points and thematic fixations of another scary movie staple—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—through a thoroughly queer and feminist perspective. Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is debating whether or not to sell the now-derelict hotel her mother used to run years prior. With a decisive real estate meeting only days away, Ruthie assembles a […]

The post Let Me Be Your Shelley Duvall: Stewart Thorndike on Bad Things first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.