If having your first feature premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is an accomplishment, being nominated for an Academy Award the same week is pretty much unheard of. Nonetheless, that’s what writer-director Sean Wang experienced last January when his coming-of-age narrative feature, Dìdi, premiered to glowing reviews (and a distribution deal with Focus Features) while his nonfiction portrait of his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Still in his 20s, Wang’s career has skyrocketed over the past year, and now Dìdi “younger brother” in Chinese) opens in theaters riding a […]

The post “Everybody Passed on It”: Sean Wang on Dìdi first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

At Filmmaker we’ve long been a fan of Zach Clark, director of such witty and genre (and genre-adjacent) work as Little Sister, Vacation! and White Reindeer. He always brings real style and subversive smarts to his pictures, which often apply ingenious tonal twists to familiar situations and set-ups. For his latest, The Becomers, Clark fuses an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type tale with a classic rom-com set up. Reviewing the film out of Fantasia, Erik Luers wrote: In depicting two shape-shifting entities who arrive separately on Earth searching for their misplaced mate, Clark’s film provides his Midwest cast the opportunity […]

The post Trailer Watch: Zach Clark’s The Becomers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Each Friday I send out a free email newsletter with an original Editor’s Letter along with viewing recommendations and festival deadlines. The Editor’s Letter is usually not reposted here on this site. As a way of encouraging sign-ups — you can join for free here — I’m posting here a slightly edited version of last week’s edition, in which I draw some production and distribution conclusions from the success of the Mike Cheslik’s independent hit Hundreds of Beavers, drawing info from linked interviews, now unpaywalled, from our current print edition. — Editor Because I edit Filmmaker and am supposed to […]

The post Ten Takeaways from Hundreds of Beavers‘ Success first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Jimmy Tatro is an actor, director, writer, and comedian best known for the popular YouTube channel he created over a decade ago, LifeAccordingToJimmy. His career expanded into the mainstream with roles in movies like 22 Jump Street and the Netflix series American Vandal, all while he continued to expand the content on his channel. His latest project is The Real Bros of Simi Valley: The Movie, a continuation of his popular mock-reality show web series. The film delves deeper into the absurd lives of friends navigating the quirks of suburban Southern California while preparing for their high school reunion. Tatro’s […]

The post “There’s Never Any Trust Until You Just Do It”: Jimmy Tatro, Back To One, Episode 301 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The first and best reason to see Sing Sing, the new feature from Transpecos director Greg Kwedar, is for the lead performance of Colman Domingo. One year after receiving an Academy Award nomination for his title role in Rustin, Domingo is even better as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a wrongfully incarcerated inmate of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. An accomplished author, Divine G was a member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a program founded at Sing Sing in 1996 that “helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on […]

The post Three Weeks in July: Greg Kwedar on Sing Sing first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Did you make the day?” That’s the first question financiers and production execs will ask after a first day — or, really, any day — of shooting. “Making the day” means completing all the scenes on the call sheet so that the production isn’t falling behind, something that can led to dropped scenes, budget overruns and more. But beyond the “making the day” question lies a deeper one: how is a production making the day? Rushed scenes, abandoned coverage and quickly made decisions can result in an on-time shooting schedule but diminished artistic results. That’s why this behind-the-scenes video of […]

The post David Lynch on (Just) Making the Day first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

With White Rose, My God, a new album from Alan Sparhawk — his first since the passing of Mimi Parker, his partner in the band Low — scheduled to appear in September, the singer/songwriter has released its first single with a music video directed by independent filmmaker Rick Alverson (The Mountain). Alverson has pixellated Sparhawk’s face as the musician has digitally manipulated his voice in this eerie clip. Check it out above.

The post Watch: Rick Alverson’s Video for Alan Sparhawk’s Can U Hear first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Y’lan Noel played Daniel in the HBO series Insecure starred in The First Purge, and now he plays Officer Platt in Lady in The Lake, Alma Har’el’s eagerly anticipated new series for Apple TV+ that drops on July 19th. On this episode, he discusses his unique approach to the work, which starts with, and centers on, daydreaming and the avoidance of aiming to do “the right thing.” He talks about allowing for “an energy that’s not me to make certain decisions;” the importance of solitude, space, stillness; how Har’el’s willingness to leave room for the mystical served his process; and […]

The post “The Hardest Thing Is To Get Out of Your Own Way”: Lady In The Lake‘s Y’lan Noel, Back To One, Episode 300 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Screenwriters know the feeling all too well: you complete a draft of your screenplay (yay!), now you need someone to read it (boo!). It’s a rollercoaster. Because let’s face it, your friends are tired, and how objective are they going to be, really? You’re saving your industry contracts for a later draft, and how detailed can they be, with their schedule and fifty other scripts to read? There are loads of script readers and people you can pay for coverage and feedback, and, who knows, they may offer valuable advice, or they might give a sentence or two of vague, […]

The post Navigating the Feedback Maze: How Greenlight Coverage Transformed My Screenwriting Journey (Sponsored Post) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

What used to be known, literally, as “the cutting room floor,” now exists as a digital bin, an assortment of deleted scenes, unused (and in today’s mode of industrial documentary production, perhaps even unviewed) footage — material that, through its absence, haunts any finished audiovisual work. Often when this material is revealed, on a Blu-ray supplemental features disc, for example, the director’s elisions affirm the strength of their initial creative editorial decisions. Other times, particularly in biographical documentaries, the unused material becomes a kind of lacuna, suggesting not only paths unexplored but a failure to engage with all that’s messy, […]

The post “I Could Do a Dynamite Directors Cut, Because I Know Where All the Best Stuff is, But That Would Defeat the Whole Purpose of the Project”: Gary Hustwit on ENO first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.