“The Movie is Set 100% Outside”: DP Jo Willems on Shooting “The Long Walk” Completely in Sequence
Though 1974’s Carrie marked Stephen King’s first published novel, The Long Walks holds the distinction of being the earliest opus penned by the horror author. The story of a contest in which 100 teenagers march until only one is left alive, King began The Long Walk as a college freshman at the University of Maine in the late 1960s amid the Vietnam War and the looming threat of its televised draft. He submitted the story to a Random House contest for new novelists, but received only a form letter in response and The Long Walk went into a drawer. Following […]
With the 63rd edition of the New York Film Festival kicking off tomorrow (Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is the Opening Night Film), we at Filmmaker offer a list of 20 recommendations, the majority films we’ve seen and reviewed out of other festivals, a list augmented with a couple of strongly anticipated titles. Find below recommendations from Vadim Rizov, Blake Williams, Natalia Keogan, Leonardo Goi, Vikram Murthi, Nicolas Rapold and Sofia Bohdanowicz, with links to their coverage. For more information and tickets, visit the NYFF site. Gavagai There are two world premieres in NYFF’s Main Slate this year. The starry inclusion […]
“To tell you the truth, I was actually quite scared about making a documentary.” It’s a luminous morning in early September and Lucrecia Martel is chewing mate leaves in the restaurant room of a hotel a stone’s throw away from the Adriatic. Her latest, Landmarks, is her first nonfiction work, but to insist on the apparent break from the rest of her oeuvre feels misleading. A chronicle of the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar—a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former cops in Tucumán, Argentina—the film still speaks to her […]
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2020 off their improbably delightful pandemic-set 2 Lizards, a viral web series in which the filmmakers, week by week, transposed the time’s various masking and social distancing rituals into an animal-centric parallel NYC. In our profile, Bennani teased a new work, saying, “There’s something we spontaneously found together in terms of an animation technique and a certain tone that could be developed into another project.” So, in other words, don’t call the duo’s debut feature, Bouchra, any kind of specific follow-up, even though, again, there are animals (the […]
In 1971, Jean Eustache set a camera in front of his grandmother Odette and invited her to speak. The film that emerged, Numéro Zéro, is a vivid document of one woman’s life told without embellishment. The frame is almost fixed—broken only by a zoom or reframe—but Odette’s words animate it with a striking urgency as she chain-smokes, drinks whiskey, fields interruptions and insists on telling her story on her own terms. Domestic minutiae becomes monumental: Eustache reveals not only the power of a raconteur but also the radical act of listening and granting someone the time and space to summon […]
Hal Hartley’s Where to Land, his first feature in 11 years, presents a familiar, potent lattice of miscommunication within a small community. Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as “the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies,” decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe’s life, most of whom assume that he’s near death. His actress girlfriend Muriel (Kim Taff) and niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks) panic about […]
Josh Pais returns to the podcast (first time was Ep. 77). Aside from being one of the most respected actors in the game, with over 150 credits in film and TV, Pais is the founder of Committed Impulse, a groundbreaking training born from his own acting process that has since become a “secret weapon” for thousands of top entrepreneurs, artists, doctors, lawyers, public speakers, and creators of all kinds. His work helps people break free from the tyranny of overthinking and drop into a state of embodied, spontaneous brilliance. And now—he has written a book! In Lose Your Mind: The […]
Megalopolis’s reputation preceded the film itself long before its première iat last year’s Cannes Film Festival. As Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating opus about the folly of men and the collapse of the fictional city of New Rome edged closer to completion, it became embroiled in a flurry of speculation and controversy, kickstarted by a striking exposé in The Hollywood Reporter about rising tensions on set between director, cast and crew. Self-funded by Coppola, who funneled over $100 million of his vineyard profits into the film, the Adam Driver-starring film ultimately represents two things at once: a historic landmark of independent […]
In Predators, three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker David Osit’s new documentary, the titular descriptor applies to multiple people: the pedophiles who found themselves the target of popular NBC sting series To Catch A Predator (2004-07), but also the makers of a show which packaged disturbing subject matter into mass entertainment while feigning moral superiority, the slapdash copycat series that have sprung up in its wake and the undiscerning audience for all of these. Osit divides Predators into three chapters. The first uses To Catch A Predator clips, chat logs and phone calls to build an introduction to the show, in which men […]
Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […]