In the early 1980s, Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker pioneered a niche of slapstick- and wordplay-heavy spoof-comedies with films like Airplane! and Top Secret!, which displayed straight-faced silliness as a creative modus operandi. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (or ZAZ) also produced the short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad!, which parodied police procedurals and starred Leslie Nielsen as the inept, overconfident Detective Frank Drebin. After Police Squad!’s cancellation, ZAZ took Nielsen’s Drebin character and molded him for the big screen with The Naked Gun film franchise, where the trio’s patented mile-a-minute visual gags could flourish on a wider […]

The post “The Whole Movie is Doing an Impression of the Genre”: Akiva Schaffer on The Naked Gun first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks met his life partner of 17 years at what he calls the Aussie equivalent of spring break. “It probably sounds more glamorous than it actually is,” Shanks laughs. “A week after high school, you just go and get drunk with people in a park or something.” For the couple, it was love at first sight, a union that settled into a committed long-term relationship of nearly two decades. “We’ve been together for so long that when we started to live together, I was confronting the idea of sharing a life,” Shanks remembers. “We have all the […]

The post “This Film is a Celebration and Examination of My Fears and Anxieties about Fully Committing to Somebody”: Director Michael Shanks on NEON Body Horror Film, Together first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A film starring rocks should not be this thrilling. But in the meditative hands of master documentarian Victor Kossakovsky (2018’s Aquarela, 2020’s Oscar-shortlisted Gunda), Architecton, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, is an epic and hypnotic stone-centered quest to answer the existential question, “How do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?” And the original precursor to today’s concrete — the most-used substance in the world after water — seems to provide a surprisingly sensible answer. With Italian architect Michele De Lucchi as our bedrock, we’re swept into a visually striking, globetrotting excursion that takes us from the bombed-out buildings of […]

The post “We Put Ourselves in the Center of the Universe Without Thinking of the Other Creatures and Species Around Us”: Victor Kossakovsky on Architecton first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history. Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and […]

The post “Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For viewers watching Kelsey Taylor’s terrific debut feature, To Kill a Wolf, it’s easy to miss that its very loose source material is the 17th-century children’s fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Yes, there’s a girl lost in the woods, a woodsman, a grandma (arguably), and a wolf, although the latter is hardly an obvious figure. But the relationships between these characters and their backstories are newly invented, mapping onto contemporary anxieties and fears as much an archetypal narrative structures. Consider To Kill a Wolf something of a remix, the kind where the source material haunts rather than dictates, and […]

The post “Fairy Tales Are the Stories We Tell Our Children to Warn Them…”: Writer/Director Kelsey Taylor on Her Suspenseful Debut Feature, To Kill a Wolf first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Martin Harris has delivered stand-out work on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Young Sheldon, NCIS: Los Angeles, Stranger Things, and now he plays the Boravian General in Superman. On this episode he describes the surprisingly efficient production that James Gunn presided over, and how it felt like “shooting a party video.” He surmises why directors keep giving him more scenes on-set, how reading a book between set-ups not only gets you focused but is also a conversation-starter, why he credits Kobe Bryant with helping him get to the next level with his career, and much more. Back To One can be […]

The post “You Have to Commit Full-Time To It… You Will See How Good You Can Really Be”: Martin Harris, Back To One, Episode 352 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Since changing its official name from Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille to Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, FIDMarseille has become a significant premiere-driven industry festival dedicated to the expansive genre of “creative nonfiction” to include experimental, hybrid and essayistic works, often with a political ethos. For its 36th edition, FID reaffirmed its rare outspokenness on Palestine by screening To Gaza (2025) and hosting daily morning screenings of the collective work Some Strings. Through retrospectives of Radu Jude and Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, the festival also seemed intent on signaling that it is not only […]

The post FIDMarseille 2025: Fascist Equestrians and Others first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Duster, an impossibly cool wheelman (Josh Holloway) and a rookie FBI agent (Rachel Hilson) join forces to take down a crime boss (Keith David) in 1970s Phoenix. If any of the creative forces behind the HBO series ever wondered if they were properly capturing the vibe of 1970s pulp, all they had to do was turn to cinematographer Paul Elliott for confirmation. Though born and raised in London, Elliott arrived in the States at the end of the 1970s and began working at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures as a camera assistant. He crossed paths with cult B-movie figures […]

The post “You Go to L.A. and Then You Start Working with Roger Corman”: DP Paul Elliott on Duster, Ken Russell and Roger Deakins first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Jason Patel is an emerging actor and artist. He plays the lead role of “Aysha” in Unicorns, opposite Ben Hardy. It’s his feature film debut. The film is co-directed by Sally El-Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, who also wrote the screenplay. Unicorns also features Patel’s music, a true fusion of both art forms. On this episode, he talks about how he approaches everything in life with creativity and love, and why his life goal is to make people happy even when he’s not there. He describes the giant role music plays in his preparation, the importance of staying in the […]

The post “We Gave Space for Each Other to Breathe”: Unicorns Star Jason Patel, Back To One, Episode 351 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Origin of Image-Based Lighting The LED Volume is derived from the concept of Image-Based Lighting (IBL) invented by Paul Debevec in 1998, which refers to mapping an HDR image onto a photosphere enveloped around a subject to serve as primary light source in CGI. The Light Stage 3 (2002) was the first physical set to use an array of RGB LED lights surrounding an actor to create an omnidirectional source. Although its 156 LED bulbs did not have enough density for close-ups or reflective elements, Light Stage 3 laid the foundation for how an LED stage could become an omnidirectional […]

The post LED Walls: Working with the LED Volume for Cinematographers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.