Conbody VS Everybody sees Debra Granik (Stray Dog) returning to documentary after 2018’s Leave No Trace and also breaking into the world of episodic series. The film follows Coss Marte as he creates a gym inspired by his own prison work outs in hopes of breaking the cycle of recidivism. Two episodes of Conbody VS Everybody will premiere at Sundance 2024. Below, series cinematographers Sean Hanley, Kefentse Johnson and Eric Phillips-Horst share how they all got involved in the film, how their personal styles blended with Granik’s and the challenges of shooting a series over many years. See all responses to […]

The post “Debra is Incredibly Skilled at Recognizing What Will Remain Salient”: DPs Sean Hanley, Kefentse Johnson and Eric Phillips-Horst on Conbody VS Everybody first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Jack Huston has worked with Scorsese, Ridley Scott, David O’ Russell, The Coens, had meaty roles on series like Mayfair Witches, Fargo, and, maybe most notably, Boardwalk Empire, where he played Richard Harrow. His latest project is Lulu Wang’s Amazon series Expats. On this episode he talks about gaining 30 pounds for that part (which wasn’t as much fun as it sounds), why it all starts with the voice for him, writing and directing his passion project The Day of The Fight for Michael Pitt and Joe Pesci, and he reveals a common trait of all great directors he’s known. […]

The post “You Want It To Be So Familiar That You’re Not Thinking”: Jack Huston, Back To One, Episode 275 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s a story about a Soviet commissar who, upon seeing Solaris, proved that he both completely understood the movie and didn’t understand it at all by indignantly demanding to know what the point is of humanity going from one end of the universe to the other if they bring all their emotional shit with them. That’s not far from the moral of Aaron Schimberg’s third feature A Different Man, the story of a man who gets radical plastic surgery only to find out he still has to live with himself. Containing elements of Seconds (plastic surgery with unintended consequences) and […]

The post Sundance 2024: A Different Man, Realm of Satan first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Premiering in the NEXT section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Desire Lines presents the time-traveling journey of an Iranian-American trans man, utilizing a vast archive of queer images in order to transport him between time and space. Filmmaker and queer scholar Jules Rosskam also served as the film’s co-writer, producer and editor. Below, he describes why he always opts to edit his own work, the various artists that inspire him and a reoccurring motif the film contains that revealed itself during the edit. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you […]

The post “I ‘Write’ My Films in the Editing Room”: Editor Jules Rosskam on Desire Lines first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? The Philippines—in all its contradictions, its beauty, its spectacle, its heartache. I’ve made many films about where I was born, but I’ve always wanted to make a film about exuberance, even if it does not have a happy ending in conventional terms. […]

The post “The Spectacle of Elections” | Ramona S. Díaz, And So It Begins first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Born and raised in the Bronx, rapper Kemba guides viewers through some of the largest issues involving rap lyrics, freedom of speech and the First Amendment in As We Speak, the directorial debut of J.M. Harper. Looking at cases both in the U.S. and internationally, Harper’s documentary poses insightful questions about who is protected, or perhaps left vulnerable, by these legislative battles. Emma Backman, who previously collaborated with Harper on a series of commercials, discusses her experience cutting the film, which served as one of her first major feature-length projects as an editor. See all responses to our annual Sundance […]

The post “The Ending Was Always Clear for Us”: Editor Emma Backman on As We Speak first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Issues concerning freedom of speech and the First Amendment intersect with the world of rap music in As We Speak, the directorial debut from J.M. Harper. The documentary follows Bronx-based rapper Kemba as he unpacks how legal battles involving rap lyrics, both in the U.S. and abroad, might shape the the future of his craft. Married cinematographer duo Logan Triplett and Allison Anderson Triplett discuss the challenges and rewards of collaborating on this project as a unit—the first time they’ve done so on a feature film—with Logan penning answers for both parties. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer […]

The post “A Balance Between Look and Ergonomics”: Cinematographers Logan Triplett and Allison Anderson Triplett on As We Speak first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? The opportunity to be in this incredibly rich and stunning forest in the Eastern Himalayas and make a film here has been life-altering for us. How to share what we saw with our eyes, heard with our ears, and felt with our being? Could […]

The post “The Lush Forest, Throbbing With a Vast Diversity of Life, Emerges as a Character” | Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, Nocturnes first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. (Nor I’m guessing will the doc’s producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone be receiving any Amazon Studios Producers Awards from the Sundance Institute. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bezos behemoth did try to bid for Union to then bury it.) As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. […]

The post “The Good, Bad and Ugly of Organizing Against Amazon’”: Stephen Maing and Brett Story on their Sundance-debuting Union first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the operator’s resulting physical relationship to it. 1947’s Lady in the Lake tried nonstop subjectivity with a bulky 35mm camera; 2009’s Enter the Void eliminated the embodied camera in its second half of weightless drifting. More recently there’s Hardcore Henry, which strapped GoPros to its protagonist’s head for a bouncy embodiment of a stuntman’s hardest workday. In Presence, Soderbergh’s longtime practice of acting as his own cinematographer and operator takes on an […]

The post Sundance 2024: Presence, A Real Pain first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.