MovieMaker

Eli Powers new short Skin & Bone is about a woman who draws troubled people to her farm... and looks deep into their souls. It stars Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried and her husband, The Newsroom star Thomas Sadoski. Powers alternates between working on films by great directors like Paul Schrader and David O. Russell and making his own films — a strategy that has worked well as he builds strong relat...

Todd Flaherty makes his feature directorial debut with Chrissy Judy , in which he also stars. It's the story of drag performers Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner) and Judy (Flaherty) who split up when Chrissy leaves New York City for a new relationship, leaving Judy alone to figure himself out. Chrissy Judy is a film that is very comfortable with the messiness of love, but makes everything look elegant. Despi...

Still Working 9 to 5 is a new documentary about two things: First, the 1980 workplace comedy 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as office workers who get revenge on their sexist idiot boss. And second, the serious issues that the film set out to address, that remain shockingly relevant today. Our guests today are Still Working 9 to 5 moviemakers Camille Hardman and Gary and...

Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson are here to talk about Severance , their Apple TV+ series about a group of office workers for a mysterious company called Lumen. As part of a bizarre security protocol, they agree to separate their work and home lives completely, so they can't remember home at work, or work at home. They keep things so separate that they can't even recognize co-workers outside of work....

Since I Been Down tells the story of Kimonti Carter, who was sent to prison for a drive-by shooting in 1997, when he was barely 18, for the killing of a college student named Corey Pittman. The film's director, Dr. Gilda Sheppard, also tells the story of Kimonti's decades-long search for redemption, and of a prison education program he founded in hopes of giving fellow inmates hope behind bars. Pe...

Fab 5 Freddy is an icon of art, music and film who has spent much of his life bridging those worlds. We talk with him about the stunning new documentary Hold Your Fire , which he produced. The film tells the story of a 1973 standoff that began when four young Black men tried to rob a sporting-goods store, and quickly spiraled into a 47-hour hostage situation that has drawn comparisons with the Att...

Eskil Vogt is the writer-director of The Innocents , and an Oscar nominee for co-writing The Worst Person in the World . His films transcend genre, but value both realism and surprise. In this episode, Vogt talks with MovieMaker 's Tim Molloy about good vs. evil and why neither really exists, why screenwriters sometimes have to harm children and animals (only cinematically, of course) and a 1977 S...

Bruce McCulloch and Vance Banzo are two guys from Edmonton, Alberta guys, united by comedy. McCulloch is a member of the legendary Kids in the Hall who has used his clout to boost Banzo's hilarious, multicultural comedy team, TallBoyz. The new Kids and the Hall is airing on Amazon Prime just as TallBoyz make its U.S. debut on Fuse TV and Fuse+. We talked with them about who gets to make what joke,...

The first time Justin Kawika Young met Maile Stant, she told him her brother Shane was her hero: a protector at a time when both were struggling to cope with their father's abuse. Then Maile mentioned something else about Shane: He was the guy who, in 1994, attacked figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Soon Young found himself meeting with both Maile and Shane Stant to tell the story of a man who made th...

Nadine Crocker made her film Continue in the hopes that people considering suicide will instead live long enough to overcome their pain. She knows that day will come, because she's lived to see it herself. Today she's the writer, director, producer and star of a feature film that's earning love on the festival circuit, building a passionate following and encouraging people to talk openly about the...

"I've been accused of being the hangout movie guy, and that's fine. Because cinema can do that really well," says Richard Linklater, whose latest film is the beautiful Apollo 10 1/2. Richard Linklater is one of our all-time favorite filmmakers, and Apollo 10 1/2 may be the most Richard Linklater of all Richard Linklater movies. He amicably fields our questions about how his beloved Austin has chan...

Kat Coiro went from acting to directing, becoming a very in-demand director of shows like Modern Family and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia , and directing the pilots of Girls5Eva and the upcoming Marvel series She-Hulk . She's also the director of four films, including the brand-new music-packed rom-com Marry Me, starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. We talk about how working on her own smal...

We had the honor of speaking with one of our greatest directors just days after his film Dune earned 10 Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Our favorite part is hearing him talk about the interconnected shots in Dune , "trying to create a melody" in the story, and watching Lawrence of Arabia in an empty theater when no one else showed up. He ends the interview with some excellent advice...

Therapy Dogs is one of the highlights of the latest Slamdance Film Festival, and Ethan Eng made it during his senior year of high school. He and his friend Justin Morrice enlisted their classmates in the class of 2019 to tell a stunning and beautiful story of teenagers who feel invincible, but aren't. They brilliantly combine real and staged moments — including strapping Morrice to the roof of a c...

Mija starts at a party store, to celebrate a birthday. It's one of many milestones in the life of Doris Muñoz that director Isabel Castro captures with charm and relatability as we see Muñoz suffer a huge career setback, then rebuild. Rejecting the tropes of depressing documentaries, she tells a story filled with incredible challenges, but also joy, hope and love. Mija has all the calling cards of...

The Nicholl Fellowship is one of the most important and prestigious screenwriting competitions. There are countless articles online about how to win — but we thought it would be best to just ask the 2021 Nicholl Fellows about their achievement. Here are their names and some details about their winning scripts: Haley Hope Bartels (Los Angeles), Pumping Black : After a desperate cyclist takes up a t...

Dasha Nekrasova is the director, co-writer and star of The Scary of Sixty-First, a horror story about two roommates (Madeline Quinn, Betsey Brown) who discover that their affordable new Manhattan apartment was previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein. She talks about Hollywood's "self-imposed code," why she kept the harsh language in, Epstein enabler Ghislaine Maxwell (played briefly in the film by Ann...

In Red Rocket , the latest from Sean Baker, a washed-up porn star named Mickey Saber (Simon Rex) returns to his Texas town and begs his wife (Bree Elrod) and her mother (first-time actor Brenda Deiss) to let him move in. They're skeptical, with good reason. He soon devises a secret plan to weasel his way back into the porn industry with help from a 17-year-old donut shop employee named Strawberry...

House of Gucci went through several writers before the project found one who could do justice to the surreally messy story of the feuding Guccis. Married producers Ridley Scott and Giannina Facio finally found the right writer for the job in Roberto Bentivegna, who said the key to cracking the story was not approaching it too seriously. In this episode, he talks about the role of comedy in the fil...

Robert Weide, perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning work on Curb Your Enthusiasm , first reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in 1982, asking if he could interview the Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five writer for a documentary. His new film, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, explains what has happened since, while chronicling Vonnegut's life of struggle and truth-telling. This is a short but...

In The Beta Test , PJ McCabe and Jim Cummings play struggling Hollywood agents trying to project a veneer of success. When Cummings' Jordan receives an interesting offer in the mail, his job and engagement are threatened. McCabe ( pictured, left ) and Cummings ( right ) tell us that interviews with real Hollywood agents — and their spouses — helped inform The Beta Test . They also talk about some...

Spencer director Pablo Larraín was drawn to Princess Diana — played by Kristen Stewart in the film — as both a mother and an unknowable cinematic figure. He didn't realize he was making a movie about motherhood at the beginning, but discovered it when he saw Stewart's interaction with the young actors who play princes Harry and William (Freddie Spry and Jack Nielen). Larraín also talks with us abo...

A lot of Krysty Wilson-Cairns' life makes its way into Last Night in Soho — she even used to work at the Toucan, the pub where lead character Eloise (Thomason McKenzie) pours pints. Maybe it's because her life is fascinating. She explains how she went from hanging around a film set in Scotland to fetching coffee for the crew to writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1917 with Sam Mendes. And h...

German-born Sandra Lipski was a teenager when she (somewhat accidentally!) landed her first acting job. From there, she moved to L.A. to become an actress and filmmaker, and decided to submit one of her films to to a film festival in Mallorca, the gorgeous Spanish island where she had spent much of her youth. The only problem? Mallorca didn't have a film festival. So she started one. A decade late...

Vanessa Block produced and co-wrote the simmering story of Pig , in which Nicholas Cage plays a man who goes into the big city of Portland in search of his beloved truffle pig. We talk about how her background in chemistry and pre-med led her to the Congo, and making the Oscar shortlisted documentary "The Testimony." We also talk about the misimpression that some audiences had about Pig , and what...