Tag: Leslie Tai - Filmmaker MagazineFilmmaker Magazine
Necessary | Filmmaker Magazine
Necessary | Filmmaker Magazine
Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one…| Filmmaker Magazine
When Charli xcx walked into downtown New York bar Clandestino in May, 2024, she couldn’t have predicted that by the next day she would have committed to star in an independent film — especially one with no screenplay and scheduled to shoot just three months later, right before the start of her Brat tour. But that’s what happened when a chance encounter and free-flowing conversation led the pop star, actress and now writer and producer to say yes to the Toronto-premiering Erupcja, the la...| Filmmaker Magazine
Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), was a sprawling city symphony-like romantic fantasy; at 186 minutes, his third feature Dry Leaf runs a half-hour longer, but doesn’t extended the labyrinthine storytelling techniques of his breakthrough film so much as consolidate its strengths and streamline its magical-realist sensibility. Employing a hybrid approach familiar to his award-winning, similarly lengthy debut, Let the Summ...| Filmmaker Magazine
Her face obscured in shadow, a woman, the poet, Eva HD, takes a photograph. Cut to words on the screen, a quote from another poet, Toni Morrison: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” The paradox created by the juxtaposition of those words and that image animates How to Shoot a Ghost, Charlie Kaufman’s new Venice-premiering short film, written by HD, that sensuously and melancholically tangle...| Filmmaker Magazine
In Nobody, a government assassin turned middle-aged family man (Bob Odenkirk) breaks out of his humdrum suburban existence by instigating an escalating feud with the Russian mob. In the film’s sequel, out in theaters, a burnt-out Odenkirk now needs a break from his return to espionage. So, he packs up the family and heads to Plummerville, a run-down water park where he spent one of his happiest childhood summers. Action maestro Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us) takes the directorial r...| Filmmaker Magazine
It’s well known that George Lucas approached David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), and that Lynch (thankfully) demurred, instead pursuing Blue Velvet (1985). Less well-known is the fact that the two films share an editor—Duwayne Dunham, an unlikely hyperspace lane between two otherwise distant cinematic galaxies. As a director himself, Dunham has a body of work that poses yet another wrinkle in space-time: since making his feature debut with Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journ...| Filmmaker Magazine
The Gotham Film and Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the programming for the 2025 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week Monday, September 29th – Friday, October 3, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Declares the organization in a press release, “The fourth-annual Expo, featuring enhanced design-thinking sessions, will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to ...| Filmmaker Magazine
A new friend came up to me after a screening and Q&A recently for my first short as a director, Side Hustle. “I realized that you’re completely honest, in a way that must be deeply painful to you.” My brain immediately went to an answer I had just given to an audience question. A young woman asked, “Did you always want to direct or did casting work inspire you to direct?” My response was immediate: “I always knew I wanted to direct but my self-worth was in the gutter. So, I had to...| Filmmaker Magazine
John Carroll Lynch has delivered so many performances, on so many sets, for both the big and small screen, that it is almost ridiculous. Just a few highlights of his hundreds of credits include: The Drew Carey Show, Fargo, Zodiac, Big Sky, American Horror Story, The Trial of The Chicago 7, and his latest, Sorry Baby. On this episode, he gives us a deep dive into his approach to the work, and how it has evolved over the years. He explains the benefits of highlighting the text based on lexical ...| Filmmaker Magazine
The first time we see retail worker Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), it’s through the eyes of his new friend Oliver (Archie Madekwe), as the up-and-coming popstar films him with a camcorder. It’s an arresting opening image, given how much the rest of Lurker finds Matthew gazing at Oliver in adoration instead. “I need a real person,” the fickle musician says, soon after their chance encounter. He’s talking about seeking the honest opinion of a regular person on his music, not the blind ...| Filmmaker Magazine
Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would i...| Filmmaker Magazine
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Su...| Filmmaker Magazine
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no...| Filmmaker Magazine
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously f...| Filmmaker Magazine
When cinematographer Larkin Seiple finished the Apple+ feature Wolfs, he was set on taking a well-deserved break. It was going to take a special project to coax him back behind the camera before he’d decompressed, especially for a project outside his home base in L.A. Then the script for Weapons arrived the day after wrap. “I read the script in like an hour and I was like, ‘Shit. It’s really good. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to shoot something like this again,’” s...| Filmmaker Magazine
You know the multitalented Sunita Mani from Glow, Spirited, Mr. Robot, or Save Yourselves! And now, just this year, she has roles in so many projects (like The Wild, Death of a Unicorn, A Nice Indian Boy, Government Cheese, His and Hers,The Roses) that one wonders how she has to time to do it all. On this episode, she takes us back to where it all started, improv comedy, and explains how being willing to fall down and get back up has served her work. She details the “emptying out” process...| Filmmaker Magazine
After 15 years working in series television, writing shows including Longmire, Damnation, The Terror, and most recently, Pokerface, Tony Tost moves into the world of feature filmmaking with his road-trip western caper flick Americana, whose cast boasts Zahn McClarnon, Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney. Tost spoke with Filmmaker about his upbringing, his journey from academic and published poet to screenwriter, showrunner, and sage of the narrative craft — his Substack, Practical Screenw...| Filmmaker Magazine
U.S. in Progress is now through September 5 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event, November 4 – 8, in Warsaw and Wroclaw under the framework of Poland’s American Film Festival, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. The pro...| Filmmaker Magazine
Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release.| Filmmaker Magazine
Throughout his career, documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has excelled at portraits of complicated artists and individuals whose work is both highly idiosyncratic as well as, at least seen in retrospect, emergent from specific cultural, social and political milieus. Early work include two films — a short, Smalltown Boys, and his feature debut, Wild Combination — about, respectively, two seminal downtown New York figures of the ’70s and ’80s, artist David Wojnarowicz and composer Arthur R...| Filmmaker Magazine
Dispatches, a feature-length vérité documentary I’m currently co-directing alongside Kira Boden-Gologorsky, follows protesters and student journalists covering the fight for free speech on Columbia University’s campus at protests which made international headlines and faced mammoth political backlash. But more than just chronicling those events, Dispatches explores what it means to report from within an institution while it’s in crisis and to film the story when you are already inside...| 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…| Filmmaker Magazine
Publication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources.| Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a focus on independent film, offering a...
Publication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources.| Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a focus on independent film, offering a...
Publication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources.| Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a focus on independent film, offering a...
