Orphan Black screenwriter Tony Elliott makes his feature debut with the time-twisting dystopian thriller ARQ, premiering today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Employing the now venerable time-loop trope, ARQ features a couple trying to figure out why their world is repeating, and what that has to do with the giant multi-national they were both involved with. Below, Elliott talks about his various cinematic inspirations, what he learned from writing Orphan Black, and how he made a futuristic science fiction film on a very low budget. Filmmaker: Your short film, Entangled, dealt, in part, with quantum physics. Tell me about […]

A Filmmaker cover in Winter 2014 for one of our favorite and underrated films of the last few years, Enemy, Denis Villeneuve has become that rare powerhouse director who inflects a cinematically exciting signature style across diverse material. Currently shooting the sequel to Blade Runner, the director follows up his moody drug-war drama Sicario with a science-fiction tale of alien visitation. Most excitingly for us at Filmmaker, this most visually compelling of directors has hooked up with one of our favorite DPs, Bradford Young, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list back in 2009. For now, check out the […]

Author Daniel H. Wilson, whose Roboapocalypse has been in the works for some time from Steven Spielberg, has the first adaptation of one his stories receive its online premiere today over at Wired. Embedded here, The Nostalgist is the adaptation of Wilson’s first published work of fiction, and it’s described thusly: In the futuristic city of Vanille, with properly tuned ImmerSyst Eyes & Ears the world can look and sound like a paradise. But the life of a father and his young son threatens to disintegrate when the father’s device begins to fail. Desperate to avoid facing his traumatic reality, […]

Screening in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca N.O.W. section (as in, “new online work”) is Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook’s Zero Point, a 45-minute independently-produced pilot for what the two Idaho-based creators hope will be full-on television series. Director, producer and screenwriter Bayne is well known to Filmmaker readers by virtue of his various documentaries (Jens Pulver Driven, Bloodsworth) and opinion pieces, and he’s been at the DIY distribution forefront long before it was in vogue. So, perhaps its appropriate, then, that he and producer and screenwriter Lybrook are now early adopters of a new indie model: rather than make […]

One of the most brilliantly out-there shorts of recent years, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke has finally made it online, and you’d be a fool not to check it out. It’s the film that put the pair on the map when it played at the festival circuit in 2012, and then later justified their inclusion our “25 New Faces” list last year. Calling the film “both very smart and gleefully nuts,” this is what Scott wrote on Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke in his profile of Mayer and Leyva for the […]

It’s been five years since Ari Folman came out with the Academy Award-nominated Waltz with Bashir, an animated personal combat story. He’s back with an incredibly ambitious project, The Congress, that blends real life with fantasy in an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s celebrated book. The movie opens with actress Robin Wright being scolded by her agent, played by Harvey Keitel, for all the poor choices she’s made throughout her career. Faced with a sick child and no job prospects, she meets with Jeff, the studio head of Miramount, a daunting figure played impeccably by Danny Huston. Jeff is sick of […]

Like the offspring of any revered icon, Brandon Cronenberg’s last name grabs hold of your attention. Indeed, the 33-year-old Canadian filmmaker is the son of David Cronenberg, genre cinema’s great auteur of psychodrama and body horror. And like his father, Brandon expresses a strong interest in the inextricable brain-body link, not to mention the dark crevices of society’s underbelly. Antiviral, Brandon’s feature debut as writer and director, is a sci-fi satire with a sharp conceit worthy of that unmistakable surname, and a stylistic strength that promises more compelling work from its maker. Uniquely skewering our ever-evolving (or devolving) obsessions with […]

Microbudget film doesn’t venture into the expensive world of science fiction too often, and certainly not the brand that features hordes of orcs and other fantasy creatures. But that’s exactly where Emmy-winning director Kohl Glass, whose short film Der Ostwind played at Sundance in 2007, wanted to go with his debut feature, Orc Wars. The film, which has wrapped and is currently gathering its finishing funds on Kickstarter, features ex-Marine John Norton (Rusty Joiner) who buys an isolated western ranch that turns out to contain a portal to another world; when orcs use it to threaten an elf princess (Masiela Lusha) […]

At the beginning of the year, Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay pointed out again — like many others have as well — that features are no longer the default format-of-choice for indie filmmakers. And as forms like the web series mature, we’re seeing more of the kinks getting worked out and more filmmakers and others finding innovative ways to release and promote new work. Take Netflix’s high-profile series House of Cards, which was just released all at once instead of in spaced-out (i.e. weekly) increments; we’ve yet to see the show’s long tail, but its initial viewer data (that is, its engagement […]

Imagining a future in which celebrity worship has become the new world order hardly strains the brain, but first-time filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral creates this scenario with such casual logic and vivid detail that very little imagination is required to make the leap from current reality to future absurdity. In this world, we no longer want to hear, as a society, that stars are just like us, we want them to be other, god-like. There is also a yearning to be close to them; the ritualistic collection of autographs or buying Kim Kardashian’s used hair dryer on eBay has morphed […]

Dan Ouellette has had a long career in the New York independent film community, starting with his work as a production designer for Hal Hartley in 1990 with Trust and then, in 1992, with Simple Men. He’s also an accomplished visual artist (examples of which can be seen at his Neurotica Divine site) and has directed stylish music videos for the bands Android Lust and The Birthday Massacre. Dan is also, full disclosure, an old friend who I’ve also worked with professionally many times. (Films he’s production designed that Robin O’Hara and I produced include What Happened Was…, Saving Face, […]

Telling the origin story of the creature that terrified us in Alien over three decades ago, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is one of this summer’s most hotly anticipated films. But somewhat surprisingly, the origins of the screenplay came as much from a screenwriter’s general meeting as the story material developed for that original movie. At a meeting in the offices of Scott’s production company, Scott Free, screenwriter Jon Spaihts was asked to riff on the possibilities of a film that would revisit the Alien universe. What resulted is Prometheus, with a script credited to Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. Below I ask […]

Although Sundance is predominantly known for indie dramas and social issue documentaries, the New Frontiers section provides a loving home for particularly odd ducks. Unlike many projects in New Frontiers, which are presented as installations or other new media formats, Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was screened in a conventional theater. However, the film’s text, 300 bits of voiceover, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 images are live-edited by an algorithmic computer dubbed the Serendipity Machine that creates a randomized sequence, meaning each screening is entirely unique. Not only does Sussman’s piece turn the idea of the mystery genre on its ear, […]

The trailer is both gorgeous and slightly perplexing — and after Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, seems to be continuing a trend of arthouse psychological planet movies. In truth, I can’t wait for this this new, presumably Cannes-bound pic from Lars Von Trier. Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.