When writer-director Nora Fingscheidt first encountered Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, The Outrun, and read the story of Liptrot’s journey through alcoholism and her eventual healing on a remote Scottish island, she was living in Los Angeles and feeling somewhat disoriented. “I was a bit lost in this gargantuan city,” she tells Filmmaker recently in Park City, where her film, The Outrun, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “I missed Europe a lot. Reading this brutally honest story taking place at the edge of the world, on this tiny remote island, created a big longing in me to go and film […]

It was 2016, the day after the presidential election, when filmmaker Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, After Tiller, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields) was filming an omnibus film about the election night in Atlantic City, NJ. To her, the night was like living in a horror movie. It was when she was waiting for her ride back to New York that she noticed a sign that said, $5 Psychic Readings. “I was feeling depressed, sad, confused and really frightened of the future,” Wilson tells Filmmaker recently, before the Sundance premiere of her latest film, Look Into My Eyes. “Without even thinking, I […]

India Donaldson has been ready to make her narrative feature debut for a while now, with three short films under her belt already. But it was only after the pandemic hit and she moved in with her family for a few months that she found her story around family dynamics in isolation. So she poured that inspiration into Good One, a terrific slow-burn at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (US Dramatic Competition) that follows the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) on a Catskills camping trip with her dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). As the […]

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 […]

“I wanted to make something about a desire so intense that it destroys everything around it,” says Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell of Saltburn, her opulent sophomore psychodrama about class, obsession and longing set in an English countryside estate. “That locust cannibal obsession that I think we’ve all felt about someone that makes you completely lose your fucking mind.” In Saltburn, it’s Barry Keoghan’s humble and unknowable Oxford novice Oliver Quick who feels that fixation. His object of desire and fascination is Jacob Elordi’s dreamboat Felix Catton, an upper-class cool guy who welcomes Oliver into his inner circle, and later, to […]

Immersive and poetically expressive, Raven Jackson’s confident debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt chronicles the life of Mack, a Black Mississippi woman portrayed at different ages by four different performers, with a lived-in attentiveness and affection. Throughout Jackson’s non-linear ecosystem of portraits, quiet sequences, dewy visuals and sensual soundscapes, the filmmaker breaks the conventions of storytelling so naturally that you instantly recognize the confidence of someone well-versed enough in her art and craft to make her own set of rules.  The seeds of Jackson’s approach and exactness of imagination were already planted in her short film, Nettles (2018), […]

“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.”  Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  In a […]

Neither Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood nor set decorator Katie Spencer had Barbie dolls growing up. “Or a DreamHouse, or anything,” recalls Greenwood, who joined Filmmaker on Zoom alongside Spencer following the record-breaking opening of Greta Gerwig’s feminist smash hit. “I was probably a little judgmental about Barbie until this film — I fell into that camp. But I kind of readdressed my thoughts after meeting this Barbie, and [its creator] Ruth Handler.” Spencer adds, “And [after] meeting Greta. We were a part of the backlash generation. Even if we wanted a Barbie, I don’t know that our parents would have […]

A lived-in, swooning memory piece on the intersection of roads taken and missed, Celine Song’s Past Lives is as confident as filmmaking debuts come. “I needed to invent the way that this movie should be made. I wanted it to be the first movie of its kind to be made,” Song tells me recently during an interview at the Madison Square Park—one of the locations of her film—over a picnic of petits fours and sparkling lemonade. “I think that every filmmaker pursues this when they approach a new project,” she continues. “I needed this to be something that stands on […]

It’s no surprise that Nicole Holofcener prides herself in thinking that she can always tell when people are lying to her about her work. After all, she’s as observant as writer-directors come, able to portray even the slightest nuances in idiosyncratic human behavior across the likes of Please Give, Friends with Money, and Enough Said. “There are certainly some tells,” she says, during a recent Zoom interview with Filmmaker on her latest feature You Hurt My Feelings, centered on the white lies we tell loved ones about their work in order to, well…not hurt their feelings. “The bad ones are […]

“We were trying to break the rules of a musical genre that’s been around since the beginning of Hollywood,” director Jon M. Chu says about the making of In The Heights, his sensational adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-award-winning stage musical featuring a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, who also wrote the screenplay. And the rules, he does break confidently, with a boisterous movie dedicated to the mostly Hispanic and Latin-centric communities of New York City’s Washington Heights. When he first came on board to direct In The Heights, a massively-scaled screen musical that renews the Busby Berkeley spirit and brings […]

A repeat David Fincher collaborator after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014), multi-award winning costume designer Trish Summerville has been signing her name onto numerous challenging film and TV projects throughout her storied, genre-spanning career, including the likes of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Red Sparrow. But Mank—Fincher’s meticulous creation of the Golden Age of Hollywood through the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane—and working in black-and-white presented a new challenge for the artisan, who had only done small projects in monochrome previously. “We were lucky; we were able to do […]

Hawaiian shirts. Leather jackets. Go-go boots. These are just a few of the costume staples that leave a defining visual mark on Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film in which real history is viewed through a fictionalized lens. We are in 1969, a year of change — both in Hollywood and the U.S. Think the start of the Nixon presidency, the eroding of the studio system before the artistically adventurous New Hollywood came to the rescue and yes, the Manson Family murders that claimed five lives, including that of a very pregnant Sharon Tate, actress […]

As headlines blare possible peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, and with its intersection of politics and filmmaking, Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in World Documentary Competition, is bound to be one of the festival circuit’s most discussed pictures this year. (It travels next month to the Berlin Film Festival.) Midnight Traveler charts the Fazili family’s escape from the Taliban after Fazili became the group’s target due to his controversial documentary Peace. Fazili, with the help of his filmmaker wife Fatima and daughters Nargis and Zahra, filmed the story of […]