How They Did It
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How They Did It: Shooting a Flashlit Prison Horror Movie, Against the Night, on the Sony a7S
From conception, my feature Against the Night, about a group of friends who sneak into an abandoned prison, was always going to be a down-and-dirty...
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Distribute and Conquer: How the Director of "2500km" Landed Her $500 Short Film an HBO Premiere
My name is Daniela Arguello. I’m the director, writer, producer, camera operator and cinematographer of my short film “2500km.” “2500km” is about a Guatemalan mother...
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How They Did It: This Director Braved Wasps and Morning Sickness to Shoot Moko Jumbie in Trinidad While Pregnant
My first feature, Moko Jumbie, is a Gothic Caribbean love story set in rural Trinidad. Its protagonist is Asha, a young girl searching for her roots, who...
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How They Did It: I Set a Start Date for My $250,000 Film, September Morning, and Stuck to it No Matter What
“How did you find the money?” That’s the question I’ve gotten most from my fellow indie filmmakers the last couple of years. It’s usually asked...
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Family Affair: How the Director of Baby Steps Used the Making of the Film to Connect To His Mother
About six years ago, I was searching for a feature film topic. I’d already directed six short films. Making a feature was the logical next...
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On the Inside: To Make His Feature Shot Caller, Ric Roman Waugh Learned How to Shoot in a Real-Life Prison
Shot Caller was the most physically demanding film I ever shot: an authentic look at our prison gangs and the law enforcement professionals who guard...
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Knowing When to End It: Our Doc On a Knife Edge Took Seven Years to Make. Here’s What We Learned on the Way
For several years, our documentary On a Knife Edge had a great beginning and a wonderful middle, but no end in sight. On the face...
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How They Did It: This Small Indie Documentary Team Tackled NASCAR in New Series Road to Race Day
Imagine an expanse of asphalt over a mile long and half a mile wide, filled with 40 race cars and thousands of fans jostling for...
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How They Did It: Designing the Amputee Protagonist of Ana Lily Amirpour’s Dystopian Desert Trip, The Bad Batch
There were quite a few visual effects challenges I had to tackle in making my second feature, The Bad Batch: multiple matte paintings, a massive...
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How Far Would You Go for the Perfect Lenses? For the Director of Midnighters, These Were Worth the Effort
It’s five in the morning and I’m starting to shiver. The thermometer hovers at 10 degrees but it feels like it’s negative 20 with the...
Summer 2019
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Winter 2019
Guide 2019
Summer 2018
Year in MovieMaker
Inside the Issue: Acting
Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker: Richard Dreyfuss
American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus… even while reading like a what’s what of cinema, those titles are just a handful...
1Inside the Issue: Directing
Cold Piece of Work: Richard Linklater Braves Greenland Hurricanes for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette opens with the answer to its titular question. In an impressively executed overhead shot, the camera gazes down onto placid Antarctic waters as...
Inside the Issue: How To
How They Did It: The Farewell Writer-Director Lulu Wang Shares Secrets to Turning Your Life Story into a Memoir Movie
The week before production started on The Farewell—my sophomore feature about a young woman (Billi, played by Awkwafina) and her family’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s cancer diagnosis hidden...