With incredible performances in films like Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, Deliverance and Runaway Train, Jon Voight has earned himself a spot in the acting Pantheon. At 84, he has never stopped working. Seven seasons of Ray Donovan being a recent highlight. On this episode, he talks about how he “starts slow” when developing an approach to a character, letting “things drop into my psyche.” He pinpoints directorial characteristics of John Schlesinger (director of Midnight Cowboy) that worked well for him, details a scrappy fight scene with Jonathan Rhys Myers on his latest film Mercy, reminisces about working with Cassavetes on Love […]

The post “I Think That’s Why I’m an Actor—I’m a Daydreamer”: Jon Voight (Back To One, Episode 253) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

This year’s 30th anniversary edition of Hot Docs, North America’s largest doc fest, (which ran from April 27 to May 7) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, jam-packed with so many world-premiering films and one-of-a-kind industry events as to be a bit overwhelming. (Fortunately, Hot Docs also boasts one of the smoothest festival apps around to help alleviate all that scheduling stress.) That said, I did manage to make the most of my four days in Toronto, even popping in on the prestigious Hot Docs Forum (which was both impressive and tough to cover with three projects subject to a total media blackout, […]

The post Hot Docs 2023: Russian Films Depict the Brink of War at the Festival’s 30th Anniversary Edition first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The trailer arrives today for Reality, the feature debut of writer-director Tina Satter, who was profiled in our annual 25 New Faces of Film series last year. The film stars Sydney Sweeney as the titular Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who in 2017 was accused of and arrested for leaking classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections to The Intercept. All of the dialogue in Reality is mined from the real-life transcript of her interrogation over the course of a tense afternoon. In his interview with Satter ahead of the film’s premiere at the Berlin International Film […]

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The Mantle twins may be extraordinary gynecologists, but their world is descending into chaos. Beverly, the “baby,” can’t persuade an opioid billionaire to fund her revolutionary “birthing center” in Manhattan. Elliot has fallen so far into substance abuse that she may be hallucinating murders. Dead Ringers, streaming now on Amazon, builds a six-episode miniseries filled with clammy dread on the bones of David Cronenberg’s 1988 movie. Created for television by Alice Birch, and starring Rachel Weisz as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, the story explores identity and psychosis with bloody intimacy.  The series is also a marvel of technology. Playing two […]

The post Twinning: Cinematographer Laura M. Gonçalves on Capturing the Double Realities of TV’s Dead Ringers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After world premiering at Sundance earlier this year, a teaser trailer has dropped for director Ira Sachs’s Passages. Co-written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, the film will arrive in theaters later this summer. An official synopsis reads: After completing his latest project, filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) impulsively begins a heated love affair with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). For Tomas, the novelty of being with a woman is an exciting experience that he is eager to explore despite his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw). But when Martin begins his own affair, the mercurial Tomas refocuses his attentions on his […]

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Featuring LA Times head of audio Jazmín Aguilera and CBC Podcasts director Arif Noorani (and moderated by Lindsay Michael, Senior Podcast Manager for Amazon Music in Canada), “Non-Fiction Without Borders: A Co-Production Case Study with The LA Times and CBC Podcasts” covered an impressive amount of ground for an hour-long panel. Part of the Hot Docs Podcast Festival Showcase (a mini audio-storytelling fest nestled within this year’s 30th anniversary edition, April 27-May 7), the discussion began, ironically enough, with a high-adrenaline video teaser for Outlaw Oceans, the case study at hand. It starred both Somali pirates and Ian Urbina, the […]

The post Hot Docs Podcast Festival Showcase 2023: Non-Fiction Without Borders: A Co-Production Case Study with The LA Times and CBC Podcasts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Yesterday, The Wrap presented a virtual panel comprised of “legends” (as the panelists laughingly preferred to “veterans”) in the independent film industry to discuss the current financing, production and distribution landscape—and what it might mean for rising writers, directors and producers. Moderated by producer and former agent Cassian Elwes of Elevated Films, guests on the panel include iconic indie producer and co-founder of Killer Films Christine Vachon, Blacklist founder Franklin Leonard, 30West co-president and CEO Micah Green (a company which Green describes as an “investment business focused on the independent arena”) and Rena Ronson, Partner & Head of Independent Film, […]

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An auspicious start to what turned out to be an insightful, audio-focused sidebar to the main cinematic event, “Podcasts and Op-Docs at The New York Times: Meet the Decision Makers” was the very first panel I caught during this year’s Hot Docs Podcast Festival Showcase, which spanned a whole two days across the “largest nonfiction fest in North America’s” 30th anniversary edition, April 27-May 7. It featured the Times’s Deputy Audience Director for Audio Renan Borelli and Op-Docs Senior Commissioning Editor Christine Kecher, in conversation with Media Girlfriends co-founder (and deft moderator) Hannah Sung. (Just the fact that it managed […]

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Filmmaker presents the exclusive trailer premiere of German filmmaker Natalia Sinelnikova’s directorial debut We Might As Well Be Dead. The film was the opening night title at the 2022 Berlinale in the festival’s German Perspective category and winner of Best Cinematography at last year’s Tribeca Festival. Hope Runs High will release We Might As Well Be Dead in New York City this month before expanding to more U.S. and Canadian cities over the summer. Originally, We Might As Well Be Dead was conceived by Sinelnikova as a thesis film to win comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos‘s  The Lobster. The film’s official synopsis […]

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Five years after The Favourite, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos returns to collaborate with Emma Stone and a slew of other actors in Poor Things. Based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name, the film is scripted by Tony McNamara (who co-wrote The Favourite with Deborah Davis). Also starring are Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley, and Kathryn Hunter. Watch a short teaser trailer above, which arrives ahead of an early fall release date. Here’s the official synopsis of Poor Things: “From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale […]

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