A strange late-night TV show entrances teen loners, played by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine, in I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature. The program depicts a supernatural world existing underneath the duo’s suburban sprawl, hinting at the horror that lurks just under the surface of white picket fence aspirations. First-time producer Sam Intili shares how they came on board the project and their pride in the finished film never compromising on “the queerness or explicit transness” of the material. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here.  Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path […]

The post “Trying To Fit Someone’s Dream Into a Confined Budget Is Not Easy”: Producer Sam Intili on I Saw the TV Glow first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

With its 2024 edition kicking off today, Sundance turns 40. In the words of festival director Eugene Hernandez and director of programming Kim Yutani, this anniversary edition will be a mixture of the old and new—with the heaviest emphasis, of course, on the new. “We sincerely thought it would best honor and celebrate the history and the legacy of the festival by nodding to it and certainly digging into it in a few key spots, but really it’s the looking ahead and discovery that is what Sundance is all about,” said Sundance Festival Director Eugene Hernandez to Filmmaker in an […]

The post Eugene Hernandez and Kim Yutani Talk Sundance 2024 Along with 20 Films We’re Anticipating at the Festival 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?  Just past the far end zone of the high school football field in my hometown of Ardsley, NY there’s a short but steep fenced-off decline down a hill towards a second, smaller field: a baseball diamond with a big outfield of grass […]

The post “This Field Beneath the Field Kept Showing Up in My Dreams” | Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Suburban teen loner Owen (Justice Smith) is introduced to a late-night TV show shrouded in mystery by a fellow classmate (Brigette Lundy-Paine) in I Saw the TV Glow, the latest genre offering from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Dubbed an “emo horror” flick by Sundance programmers, Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature is having its world premiere in Park City this year, where the filmmaker’s buzzy feature debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, similarly premiered in 2021. Editor Sofi Marshall discusses how she became involved in Schoenbrun’s latest project, how the “independent” section of her local Blockbuster catalyzed her filmic career path and […]

The post “We Realized During the Edit That There Were Several Options for the Ending”: Editor Sofi Marshall on I Saw the TV Glow first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaking team Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine follow-up their 2020 documentary Boys State, naturally, with Girls State, making its Sundance debut in the festival’s Premieres category. Much like their previous film, Girls State follows a diverse group of teenage girls across the state of Missouri who engage in a week-long immersive project that requires them to collectively construct a government from the ground up, which this time includes building a judicial branch on both local and state levels. With the project unfolding as Roe v. Wade threatens to be overturned, the girls also ruminate on how real-world legislature could infringe […]

The post “Crafting Stories With My Head and My Heart”: Editor Amy Foote on Girls State first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Never have the words “in collaboration with” carried such a potent charge as they do in Scott Cummings’s Sundance-bound documentary, Realm of Satan. Working with members of the Church of Satan, Cummings hypnotizes viewers into the landscapes, physical spaces and ultimately mindsets of this misunderstood group as they, in the words of the Sundance programmers, “fight to preserve their lifestyle: magic, mystery, and misanthropy.” Writing about his previous film, Buffalo Juggalos, Cummings, a Filmmaker 25 New Face, said, “The Juggalos were not my subjects, they were participants, and every choice I made honored that participation.” There’s a similar ethos at […]

The post Exclusive Clip: Scott Cummings’s Sundance-Bound Realm of Satan first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Over 500 members of Sundance’s filmmaking community took part in a poll that named Damien Chazelle’s jazz drummer drama Whiplash as their favorite film of the festival’s 40 years. World premiering at the 2014 festival, the film won Sundance’s Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic and Grand Jury Prize; U.S. Dramatic. Of note is that the film was based on a proof-of-concept short that itself won the top prize at Sundance only the year before. The other nine selections are similarly well-known pictures by directors who have gone on to stellar careers. It’s a list that includes the first features by the […]

The post Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash Named Favorite All-Time Sundance Film first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A feminine coming-of-age film by way of Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gorgeously designed Poor Things follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an unhappy and suicidal woman brought back to life by the enigmatic scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and then embarking on a feminist journey of equality and sexual liberation. Bella’s voracious appetite for all the colors of life and sex (as well as Lanthimos’ signature maximalist touches) infuses Poor Things with boundless exuberance, matched by costume designer Holly Waddington’s extraordinary work—both late-19th-century, and fiercely modern and rule-breaking. “I realized that I would need the clothes to really move with her, not just […]

The post “We’d Have These Practical Conversations About How Sex Would Be Achieved in These Costumes”: Costume Designer Holly Waddington On the Historical Rule-Breaking of Her Work in Poor Things first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audience in voiceover: stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. Forbid empathy. Fassbender proceeds to miss his shot and spends the rest of the film breaking each and every one of those tenets in the chaotic aftermath. Many of the pieces written about the film have pointed out perceived similarities between the film’s methodical, detail-oriented titular character and the perfectionist reputation of its director, David Fincher. However, […]

The post “David Initially Said, ‘What if We Do the Whole Movie Handheld?’”: DP Erik Messerschmidt on The Killer first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Make space to think about that which has died,” begins Lydia Lunch at the start of DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), a new multi-media installation by filmmaker and artist Michelle Handelman up through January 20 at New York’s signs and symbols gallery. Comprising three projections spanning the viewer’s peripheral vision, performances by Lunch as well as the choreographic duo FlucT and dancers, and an electronic score by Jack Dangers and Pharmakon that blends drones, pulses and rhythmic stabs with breath and guttural sounds — “the cacophony of grief,” says Lunch — the work is both a departure for Handelman […]

The post “I Think of My Work as Functioning Like a Virus in the Sense That It Gets Inside Your System”: Michelle Handelman on Her New Installation, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.