It reminded me of trying to convince my parents to let me do things. —Lorene Scafaria on her first meetings in Hollywood The only virtue we had was being stupid enough to keep making movies when everything in the universe was telling us to just go home. —Jay Duplass on the ten years it took him to become on overnight sensation There’s no step-by-step guide to making a splash in the film business....
“I’ll probably get some texts along the way today saying it’s not going well… So this morning isn’t the best kind of day,” he said. And so began Chu’s brutally honest talk on his journey as a filmmaker. But the morning wasn’t all doom and gloom. The 2002 Project Involve Fellow made sure to point out some positives. “From the bottom of my heart and wounded soul, I am so lucky,” said Chu....
Dialect coach Jessica Drake has been working her magic behind the scenes for over 20 years. She’s done everything from helping craft Tom Hanks’ Alabaman drawl in 1994’s Forrest Gump to taming Andrew Lincoln’s Queen’s English into Rick Grimes’ American burr on the AMC mega-hit The Walking Dead. Her recent credits include work on TV’s Yellowstone and the features Honey Boy, Vice and Bohemian Rhapsody, among others. Good accent work can certainly be key to selling an onscreen performance....
Whether you’re a writer, director, producer, editor, composer—whatever the case may be—at some point in your filmmaking career you will inevitably need to answer what, for many creatives, is a daunting question: What’s my brand? It’s imperative to know. Not only to clarify your own work for yourself but also to establish yourself as, you guessed it, a business. On July 17, Film Independent welcomed Tom Nunan and Lisa Ebersole from The Writing Intensive to discuss all things branding....
EDITING ON THE CHEAP? In 1989, Avid announced its Media Composer at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. There were other nonlinear editing systems at the time, but they were all incredibly expensive and didn’t offer much more than a few minutes of video storage. At the time, Avid Media Composer offered up a collection of off-the-shelf and proprietary hardware and software, a Mac IIcx with two displays and 4GB of storage....
Recent advances in Computational Photography (eg, synthesizing a single photo from multiple images) and a machine learning technique called a “Generative Adversarial Network” (GAN) have set the stage for an entirely new kind of filmmaking—filmmaking that is equal parts photography and digital image creation, something I’d label “Computational Filmmaking”. In Computational Filmmaking, the line between what’s photographed and what’s digitally generated is blurred so much that the division ceases to be relevant....
After three years of bringing 46 filmmakers from the Arab world and Turkey to Los Angeles and organizing several follow-up workshops and masterclasses that have impacted more than 1000 participants in the region, it was time to cement the relationship that we’ve built and further our cross-cultural collaborations with… a GMM Summit! And Cairo, home to the largest film industry in the region, was the perfect choice for our first ever Global Media Makers Summit....
Twice nominated for Film Independent Spirit Awards for his documentary work (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World) Herzog seems never to stop working. This month, he has two films hitting theaters: the thriller Salt and Fire, starring Veronica Ferres and Gael Garcia Bernal, and the biopic Queen of the Desert, chronicling the life of early 20th-century cartographer and explorer Gertrude Bell, starring Nicole Kidman. We recently caught up with the director to get the rundown about his latest films, as well as his passion for bringing real-life events to the big screen....
Before Ponsoldt and his cast took the stage, the evening kicked off with the West Coast premiere of The Claw, a short film directed by Lael Rogers and recipient of the third Seattle Story Award, presented by Film Independent in partnership with Visit Seattle. The quirky, vividly shot eight-minute, 30-second film fittingly featured a Seattle punk band, Return Policy, and their dilemmas as they prepare to play their largest show....
As a composer, I desperately want to understand what a director wants music to do for her film. When working with a filmmaker, sometimes all of our references will be the same. Other times they’re different, and we have to invent a new shared language together. I’ll try anything, even dance or pantomime the rhythm and intensity that I imagine for the music (luckily there’s no video of this—that I know of....
Contained within each smartphone is a pre-production office, film crew, post house, advertising agency and multinational distributor. All this, in the hands of a generation that understands screens and the language visual digital expression as a rich and fully integrated part of daily life. Combine that intuition with a young person’s energy, imagination and earnest need for self-expression and you have the perfect alchemical formula for a natural-born filmmaker. Which, speaking of: we’re thrilled today to introduce our 2023 Film Independent Future Filmmakers....
In this edition of our “Meet the Filmmaker” blog series, we hear from some of the Los Angeles Film Festival’s female directors, whose films will be showing in various sections across the Festival. We’re proud to report that the women featured here are just a sampling of the many talented female directors whose work is screening at this year’s Festival. (To meet the narrative competition filmmakers, go to Part 2....
At 6:08 pm on August 4, 2020, time stopped in Beirut, Lebanon. It took only a few seconds to destroy the little hope the Lebanese had felt when they marched against sectarianism and corruption in October of 2019. These few seconds carried the weight of years of past corruption and the unbearable pain to come. Beirut was hit by one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history—a seismic explosion that left more than 200 dead, 6,500 injured and more than 300,000 homeless....
The independent film community that largely supported Hillary Clinton in the presidential election collectively mourned the upset victory of Donald Trump on Wednesday, with one distributor saying he was too depressed to even comment on the result, but members of this artistic family avoided expressing a defeatist sentiment, instead voicing their continued belief in the bright future of indie filmmaking. “It’s obviously dark times, but that’s where and when artists have a responsibility to keep us entertained and to tell really good stories that inspire us and keep the hope alive,” Joana Vicente, executive director of the Independent Filmmaker Project told IndieWire, adding that the cost of making independent films has never been more affordable than it is today....
But Müller’s career extended beyond the Reagan era, in both directions. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a primary figure in the New German Cinema movement—most notably as collaborator to Wim Wenders (he worked with the filmmaker on a total of nine features throughout his lifetime.) His career continued throughout the ‘90s, finally concluding in 2002 as ill health forced Müller into early retirement. He worked with Jim Jarmusch five times, and Lars von Trier twice....
Sara Colangelo is nominated for her work on Little Accidents, which she also directed. Set in an Appalachian coal-mining town, the film explores what happens when a mining disaster tears at the fabric of the community and the lives of three very different residents intersect to form a tangled web of secrets. Here, Colangelo tells us what compelled her to tell the story of a one-company town, and why her dad scolded her for her third grade poetry....
Actor/comedian/Live Read superstar Patton Oswalt will host our favorite day of Awards Season, the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 1, 2014. “Patton has been a long supporter of our organization, he has participated in several Film Independent Live Reads at LACMA and is also a card holding member of the organization. I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us at the Awards show in March,” said Josh Welsh, President of Film Independent....
Kicking off at the Spirit Awards this past February, Film Independent has been using 2023 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its Artist Development programs–incredible industry incubators like the Fi Producing Lag, Screenwriting Lab, Documentary Lab, Fast Track, Episodic Lab, Global Media Makers, Grants & Awards and many more, all of which are made possible by Film Independent’s Members and supporters. Which, hey: we’re smack-dab in the middle of our annual matching campaign, if you’re feeling generous–and want to double your impact!...
With the possible exception of security cam footage and live sports, pretty much every piece of filmed entertainment begins with somebody (or a couple of somebodies) sitting in a room trying to decide how that piece of entertainment should look and feel. Simply put, there is no movie or TV show without the screenwriter. And good screenwriting requires structure and discipline. Writing is a craft to be taken seriously, studied and learned—kind of like cooking....
SUCCESS: WHAT IS IT? I took the road less traveled that led me to here And I’m not sure it’s anywhere Now I’m reaching, I’m grabbing—still I have this fear That I won’t know it when I get there As I listened to my friend Ronnie Steadman sing this song he wrote, I had one of those haunting moments where you really click with what someone is talking about. Ronnie’s words have followed me around lately as I muse on the concept of success: What does it feel like?...
