IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit

"DIG!" and "We Live in Public" director Ondi Timoner joins Toolkit to discuss the unintentional road to "Last Flight Home" and the work of making the cameras that documented her father's last days as invisible as possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In James Gray's new film "Armageddon Time," he returns to the kind of intimate, precise character study with which he made his name. Gray speaks about visual style, memory, and why he loves movies to begin with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Director Margaret Brown discusses the cinematic and narrative choices that helped shape the story of "Descendant" – from building the sounds of the South to collaborating with the film's subjects to resurfacing the filmmaking of Zora Neale Hurston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charlotte Wells joins the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to talk about the evolution of her first feature: creating anchor points for memory within the story of the film, the joys of working with DV camcoder footage and the liminal place it sits between objective and subjective points of view, refining perspective and the sense of memory in editing "Aftersun" together, finding immediacy within a specif...

Series creator Armando Iannucci discusses the benefits of satire while working in genre, building a future out of our ridiculous present, and how the pandemic influenced the HBO comedy's second season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you were an action fan in the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s, one of the great pleasures of filmgoing was the experience, every year or two, of a new Walter Hill movie. No one else was really making movies like him, and no one had before; Hill created a body of work that spoke to American culture both past and present where the jokes are funny but the bullets are real. On this episode of the Filmmaker To...

Director Nicholas Stoller, of "Neighbors" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" fame, joins Filmmaker Toolkit to discuss his process developed on some of the best comedy films of the last couple decades and how he applied it to his latest film, 'Bros.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer-director Andrew Dominik wrote his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel "Blonde" in about four weeks — and then waited 12 years for the opportunity to bring it to the screen. The "Killing Them Softly" director joins Filmmaker Toolkit to talk about his decade-plus-long journey to bring Joyce Carol Oates' fictionalized portrait of Marilyn Monroe to the screen, and the epic study of trauma an...

Ti West, director of "X" and "Pearl," stops by Toolkit to discuss how he landed on the golden age of Hollywood aesthetic he captured for his horror prequel, how he achieved the film's singular look, and how he tapped into a more formal style of filmmaking where blocking and framing can tell the entire story of a family and lead us to understand Pearl herself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

On this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, creator and star of 'Mo', Mo Amer discusses how he and his team built a series that juggles a tone that can fuse comedy and drama, how they built the show's hip and absurd sense of humor, and how they made filmmaking choices that spotlight the city (Houston) and the culture (the Palestinian diaspora) at the show's heart. Learn more about your ad ch...

Director George Miller joins this week’s episode of Toolkit to talk about the making of his latest film, “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” Miller discusses the film’s place in his career as a “palate cleanser” after the high-octane “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the philosophical underpinnings of the script, and why working with actors who are also filmmakers - in this case Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba -...

Executive producer and director Jamie Babbit discusses how the new Amazon Prime Video series "A League of Their Own" uses its camera to turn the show's large cast into a team and breaks down the cinematic language she found to highlight both the joys of playing baseball and of falling in love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jerrod Carmichael joins this week to talk about the creation of "Rothaniel," the ways in which it's changed his approach to telling stories for an audience, and some of the filmmaking choices that helped make the special as natural and also as elegant as possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Succession" executive producer and director Mark Mylod joins this episode of Toolkit to discuss putting together the show's third season and discusses the extra charge the series got from shooting in Italy, how "Succession" organizes scenes in order to capture the most impactful performances, the ways in which the show uses its opulent backup to keep the characters in perspective, and even more....

As a young screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan saw the special effects magicians at Industrial Light & Magic bring his most spectacular acts of imagination to life. Over 40 years after his work on “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Kasdan returned to the world of ILM for “Light & Magic,” a six-part documentary series chronicling the biggest effects developments of the 20th century...

Peele knows you'll have questions after seeing 'Nope,' but to what degree did he figure out the the life and history of his new film's alien life form? Peele answers that question, as he breaks down the process of making his UFO cinematically real, and what he learned from filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. 'Nope' is a masterpiece of sound, and in second half of the podcas...

On this episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, showrunner Peter Gould and executive producer Vince Gilligan join to talk about the ending of "Better Call Saul." No Season 6 spoilers here, but they discuss the show's writing process, the personnel decisions that have helped elevate the series, how the camerawork has evolved over the course of the show, and some of the storytelling philosophy that has stood...

On this episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, creator Danny McBride discusses the latest season of "The Righteous Gemstones" and his philosophy for everything from where the humor needs to come from, shooting action comedy, and maximizing his resources on a television schedule and budget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, we speak with show creator David Jenkins and director/star Taika Waititi about their collaboration creating this ambitious comedy for HBO Max. The pair discuss everything from the visual influences that help "Our Flag Means Death" walk a tonal tightrope to the visual effects innovations that made shooting on television schedule possible. Learn more...

On this edition of IndieWire's Deep Dive: Station Eleven creator Patrick Somerville joins director Jeremy Podeswa, the crafts team, and cast to discuss how the show's timelines and themes come together in Episode 10, "Unbroken Circle" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcsat, Natasha Lyonne discusses the games that "Russian Doll" Season 2 is playing (of which time-travel via the 6 Train is only one), why this was a Pink Floyd season, how she refined her preparation as both a director and an actor over the pandemic, plus a little love for Sergio Leone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Bill Hader discusses the latest season of Barry and digs into his directing work on Episode 6, "710N". Hader talks about when and why he embraces generic conventions (and when he doesn't), what he likes about long takes, the benefits of eschewing coverage, and how he constructed a chase sequence in the spirit of Jacques Tati. Learn more about your...

On this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, we speak with Peter Jackson and his longtime collaborator, editor Jabez Olssen about their work distilling hundreds of hours of audio, dozens of hours of video, and 40 years of mythology about the Beatles' Get Back sessions into a documentary that tries, going day by day, to lay out the experience of the sessions that led to the Beatles' last live...

On this episode of the Filmmaker’s Toolkit podcast, showrunner Sterlin Harjo talks about why he could only make (this version) of "Reservation Dogs" in his native Oklahoma, and what opportunities open up to a series when rooting it in a specific place that TV hasn't really seen before – and certainly not from a Native perspective. That, plus the steps in teaching an audience how to laugh at surviv...

Kogonada discusses the cinematic components of "After Yang" from how memory relates to the processof filmmaking to the importance of a science fiction story with domestic stakes. All of that, plus: the importance of spaces that can tell their own stories, the differences between film and short story, how the quality of light impacts the film, and a little bit of love for Robert Bresson. Learn more...