MovieMaker

Filmmaker Sharon "Rocky" Roggio is a lesbian filmmaker who hopes to someday change her Christian pastor father's mind about homosexuality. Like many Christians, he believes that the Bible condemns it. But her new documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture , argues that mistranslations at a 1946 gathering led to widespread misunderstandings used to justify bigotry and violence. It's...

John Carney and Gary Clark tell stories of scrappy amateurs trying to break into the music industry — because they've both been there. Flora and Son is about a working-class young Irish woman (Eve Hewson, magnetic) who picks up a guitar for her son, and ends up learning to play it herself with help from an American teaching lessons online (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Because Carney is also the writer-d...

Cinematographer Steven Holleran doesn't do anything the easy way. For A Boy. A Girl. A Dream: Love on Election Night , he shot one continuous 90-minute film while racing down Sunset Boulevard. For Missing , he handed off cameras to the actors. And for his latest project, Sympathy for the Devil , he found ways to make a car ride with Nicholas Cage and Joel Kinnaman freakishly compelling. Hosted on...

Extraction 2 director Sam Hargrave thought long and hard about how to top the 12-minute nonstop action sequence in the first Extraction , and thought of one way to do it when he saw a weather forecast calling for snow: "What if we light Chris Hemsworth on fire?" Here's our full talk with Hargrave about stunts, Oscars, the writer's strike, and yes, fire. And also the insane prison break sequence. I...

The new doc IT'S BASIC examines how the idea of Universal Basic Income – giving people money to do with as they please —plays out in the real world. The doc by Marc Levin explores how innovators like former Stockton, California mayor Michael Tubbs have helped introduce programs that get money directly into the hands of those who need it. What do they do with this money? It's not what cynics would...

Sav Rodgers was a 12-year-old queer kid in Kansas when he first found his mom's VHS copy of Chasing Amy , the Kevin Smith film he credits with saving his life. It also inspired Sav's triumphant TED Talk and now the documentary Chasing Chasing Amy , which premiered at Tribeca. In this episode we talk with Sav and Chasing Chasing Amy producer Alex Schmider about films that serve a perfect purpose de...

Nardeep Khurmi wrote, directed and stars in Land of Gold , a cross-country, cross-cultural road trip exploring the dynamic between a Punjabi American truck driver (Khurmi) and a Mexican-American girl named Elena (Caroline Valenicia) whom he finds hiding in his trailer. "Can you get more American," he asks, "than two communities of color, who have been marginalized by the country they want to call...

Ali Afshar has one of the most unique origin stories in Hollywood. His family moved to Petaluma, California after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and he sought peace against a backdrop of tragedy by wrestling and street racing. A stuntman older brother helped him make his way into acting, and he soon became a producer as well. His latest project is the bilingual upstairs-downstairs family drama Ca...

Alex Convery grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan was a superhero. He watched the Jordan doc THE LAST DANCE during pandemic lockdowns, like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he saw an amazing movie idea about the creation of Nike's trademark sneaker, Air Jordans. Two years later, Convery's script has been made into a movie directed by Ben Affleck, starring Afflec...

Two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple helped invent the modern-day documentary with her groundbreaking Harlan County, USA , which recounted a brutal coalminers' strike in dirt-poor Harlan County, Kentucky and won the 1976 Oscar for best documentary. She won her second Oscar in 1991 for American Dream , about a heartland strike against the Hormel Foods corporation. She returns to the grassroots stru...

Born into the film industry, William Sherak has a long family history with innovators like James Cameron and George Lucas. He tells us about running Hollywood's go-to 3D company at exactly the right moment, watching Jurassic Park with Steven Spielberg, connecting with directing duo Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett), and helping salvage the Scream franchise from the smoldering...

You know when you're watching a cop show, and a suspect says the cops planted a gun? Or drugs? It happened for years in Baltimore thanks to the crooked Gun Trace Task Force. The new documentary I Got a Monster , by Kevin Abrams, explains the disgraced officers' M.O. and how they finally went down. He also tells us how common he thinks the behavior is, and how to stop it. If you're interested, here...

In his directorial debut, Kyle Marvin guided not only four of the greatest actors of all time — Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field — but also the GOAT football player in NFL history, who had never really acted before. He also juggled the interests of Endeavor Content, Brady's 199 Productions, many producers, and the NFL. And yet he somehow managed an inspirational, feel-good mov...

MISSING producers Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian and Natalie Qasabian join us to talk about their addictive mystery thriller, which unfolds entirely on computer and phone screens. Yes, all the technology in their film actually works. No, it isn't easy. Also: Did you notice that alien invasion? MISSING is in theaters now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Making one movie is a miracle, and Adam Leipzig has worked on 36. Some of them might be among your favorites, from Honey I Shrunk the Kids to Dead Poets Society to March of the Penguins . In this episode, the former Disney and Nat Geo executive tells us what he's learned about producing, marketing, and instinct – and what he's learned about happiness. He's trying to share his insights with his new...

Nick Richey, director of 1-800-HOT-NITE , is as cooly understated as he is full of surprises. The new film is about a teenager in trouble (Cobra Kai star Dallas Dupree Young) who gets surprisingly good advice from a phone sex operator (Aly Richey) on a wild night with his friends. The film is inspired by Richey's own tumultuous early years, growing up on the edge of trouble in Vancouver, Washingto...

Matt Stawski grew up a Detroit punk fan, shooting his friends' bands with equipment from a local TV and radio station. So of course he was the ideal person to direct Blue's Big City Adventure , the new Blue's Clues movie. It's actually not as weird as it sounds. Blue's Big City Adventure is packed with light, color, and music. And Stawski found his way to it after directing videos for bands like A...

Follow Her director Sylvia Caminer knows all the potential pitfalls of making a psychosexual thriller: cheesy sex scenes, falling into tropes, and at worst, actors who feel exploited. She avoids them all in Follow Her , a film written by and starring Dani Barker, a former influencer herself whose script skillfully subverts cliche in favor of a meta exploration of the genre. In this episode, Camine...

In Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom , host and executive producer Rasool Berry travels to Galveston, Texas to learn about the real origins of Juneteenth, our newest national holiday. He talks with the descendants of the people who were emancipated on the first Juneteenth, June 19, 1865, to learn the true story of the day — and how the truth has been twisted to help people feel better about the past. He...

Peter Phok is having an amazing year — he executive produced both X , released in March, and its prequel Pearl, released in September. And he's planning ahead to MaXXXine , the third film in the horror trilogy directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, who co-wrote Pearl with West. Phok goes way back with West — they attended NYC's School of Visual Arts together —but he's also produced horror hits...

Kelci Parker, vice president of Animation at Hulu Originals, shared some perspective with students at the SCAD Animation Fest on the art of storytelling: "We're not curing cancer. But we may be bringing someone a laugh as they go through treatment." Parker, recipient of the 2022 SCAD Animation Fest Award of Excellence, spoke about her journey from writing her own screenplays to working at Comedy C...

Come on down! Director C.J. Wallis joins us to talk about his documentary 'Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much,' which tells the story of Ted Slauson, a math assessment test writer and “The Price Is Right” fanatic. From an early age, Slauson studied the prices of the show’s prizes, and even wrote software to help him memorize them. He eventually gets caught up in a controversy when one c...

We speak with Bianca Stigter, director of 'Three Minutes: A Lengthening.' The documentary is a beautiful and devastating tribute to a Jewish community in Poland that was captured on film in 1938 and wiped out by the Nazi regime a year later. We also talk about Nathan Fielder's unique (and hard to describe) docuseries 'The Rehearsal' and discuss fascinating artifacts uncovered in record stores, fle...

Welcome to Actual Facts, where we discuss documentary films and talk to the filmmakers behind them. In this first episode, we speak with Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, directors of 'Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.' Hosts: Eric Steuer and Jason Betrue Theme music: Yalls ( https://yalls.bandcamp.com ) Send us a note at actualfactspod@gmail.com Visit MovieMaker Magazine online: https://...

We should probably shut the podcast down, because somehow we scored an interview with the legendary SLASH. We talk about his work executive producing and scoring the gnarly soundtrack for Rodrigo Gudiño's The Breach, about a chief of police investigating the very strange appearance of a mutilated body on the Porcupine River. We talk about how Slash got involved in the project, as well as his work...