MovieMaker

David Shields has given hundreds of interviews to promote his 22 books on everything from race to sports to sex to J.D. Salinger to Donald Trump. He's kept a record of every question, and uses those questions in the literary collage of his 23rd book, The Very Last Interview . Director Nick Toti and screenwriter Rachel Kempf (who are married) set out to turn the book into a movie, and succeeded. "T...

Amanda Idoko's first two screenplays made The Black List, the highly esteemed annual survey of best unproduced scripts. Her first screenplay was made into the new film Breaking News in Yuba County , which features an ensemble cast that includes Allison Janney, Mila Kunis, Regina Hall, Awkwafina, Wanda Sykes and others. Amanda is also known for starting the #showusyourroom social media campaign, wh...

Portland Film Festival co-founder Joshua Leake went from accepting an award from Hugh Jackman while on the phone with his mom to co-founding the Portland Film Festival — one of MovieMaker's 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. We talk about the joys of Portland, how to get into the lovingly curated festival, and some of the great ideas he's borrowed from other festivals to make sure Portland is...

Andre Gower's documentary Wolfman's Got Nards looks at another movie—1987's Goonies-esque kids horror/comedy The Monster Squad—and the vibrant fan community that has developed around it over the years. The Monster Squad (co-written by a young Shane Black) was a bomb upon release, but thanks to video rentals and cable TV, it slowly built a massive following. It eventually became the kind of cult cl...

Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby star in Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, about two pioneer women who fall in love. Casey Affleck, who produces and acts in the film, tells the story of how lunches at a "weird restaurant by the airport" helped lead to the creation of the Sundance and Venice film festival darling. Fastvold also talks about shooting on film in the mountains of Romania, and she...

Slamdance is a film festival for filmmakers, by filmmakers. In this episode, festival president and co-founder Peter Baxter and festival manager Adele Han Li share some intel on how it chooses films, what it values, and how it's changing. Rather than retreat in the face of the pandemic, Slamdance — like many other festivals — has seized on the opportunity to innovate. This year one of its biggest...

Gary Oldman, simply one of the best actors ever, stars in Mank as Herman J. Mankiewicz, the brilliant but alcoholic screenwriter whose achievements include Citizen Kane . In this interview, Oldman quickly shoots down the notion that he used to deliberately seek out wild roles, and explains how he utilized elements of his own past to play Mank. He also tells us where Citizen Kane ranks among his fa...

Wild Indian follows two young cousins on an Ojibwe reservation who suddenly become involved in something terrible. Thirty years later, one of them (Michael Greyeyes) is living what seems, on the surface, to be a perfect life on the West Coast. The other, Ted-O (Chaske Spencer), finds himself in a very different place. Wild Indian writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr. and producer Thomas Mahon...

Early in her career, Trina Wyatt launched the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal, and was the festival's Founding Director. She was a film producer and a studio executive before founding Conscious Good, a media company that produces and distributes entertainment aimed at raising people's consciousness. We spoke with Wyatt about CGOOD TV, which is a new streaming platform d...

The Reckoning , directed by Neil Marshall ( Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Game of Thrones ) follows a woman named Grace (Charlotte Kirk) who loses her husband during a plague, becomes the target of her landlord's advances, and is accused of witchcraft when she rejects him. Then things get worse. Marshall and Kirk talk about whether real-life events motivated them to make a story about a witch hunt, w...

Fisher Stevens' career in film has spanned four decades as an actor, writer, producer, and director. His latest movie as a director is Palmer , a very good indie drama in which ex-con Palmer (Justin Timberlake) returns to the small Louisiana town where he grew up and, through a series of events, ends up caring for 7-year-old Sam (Ryder Allen), a boy who is bullied for liking princesses, dresses, a...

Richard Kelly released his debut feature Donnie Darko in 2001 when he was just 25 years old. Five years later he brought an unfinished version of his follow-up, a sprawling sci-fi dark comedy called Southland Tales , to the Cannes Film Festival. It didn't go well. Roger Ebert called it one of the worst screenings in Cannes history. Sony eventually released the finished cut of Kelly's movie, but ba...

For the third consecutive year, Albuquerque is the No. 1 Big City on MovieMaker's list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker. Nearby Santa Fe is No. 2 on the list of smaller cities and towns. How is the Land of Enchantment drawing powerhouses like Netflix and NBCUniversal? Alicia J. Keyes, Cabinet Secretar of New Mexico's Economic Development Department, tells us why they love it — a...

Derek DelGaudio and Frank Oz stop by to talk about In & Of Itself , the film adaptation of their much beloved stage show. Frank Oz is a legendary director, an actor, and the puppeteer who brought to life characters like Yoda, Miss Piggy, and Grover. Derek DelGaudio is a storyteller, performance artist, and illusionist. He wrote In & Of Itself and has performed it onstage more than 700 times. Hoste...

Veteran editor, director, and producer Sam Pollard joins us to discuss his new documentary, MLK/FBI , which examines the FBI's relentless surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to discredit MLK by uncovering and revealing details of the civil rights icon's private life. The surveillance campaign became Hoover's obsessive pursuit. The movie utilizes a trove of ne...

Travon Free is an acclaimed standup comedian who has won Emmys for The Daily Show and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee . But his debut film, Two Distant Strangers , is anything but funny. In a horrific twist on time-loop films like Groundhog Day and Palm Springs , Joey Bada$$ plays a man who keeps being racially profiled and shot by the same police officer. Free wrote the film and co-directs with Ma...

Regina King's One Night in Miami imagines a historic night in 1964 when Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Cassius Clay (who will soon change his name to Muhammad Ali) gather together to celebrate one of Clay's biggest wins. But the gathering doesn't go as everyone expected. King takes us through her incredible career as an Oscar, Golden Globe, and four-time Emmy winner, with stories about watchi...

In Pieces of a Woman , Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber explore their own tragedy, in the hopes that it will make it easier for other couples to heal. The film stars Vanessa Kirby as a woman who suffers a terrible loss, and includes a 24-minute birth scene astonishing in both its empathy and virtuosity. Mundruczó's explanation of whose point of view we're seeing adds anoth...

Deon Taylor and Roxanne Avent are the husband and wife duo behind Hidden Empire Film Group. The “first generation” moviemaker pair have worked together for 15 years and are entirely self-taught in the directing and producing realms. Their latest is Fatale , a throwback to the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, which stars Hilary Swank as a femme fatale who snares a sports agent played by Micha...

A few years ago, filmmakers Charles Beale and Jess Jacklin felt like the film festival circuit wasn't working for them, so they thought about what their perfect festival would look like — and then started it. It's called StudioFest, and it's already released one award-winning film. As you'll gather, Jess and Charles are incredibly transparent about what they're doing — and they get into a lot of s...

We talk to Hannah Olson about her new documentary, Baby God , which looks at Dr. Quincy Fortier, a fertility specialist who used his own sperm to impregnate patients without their consent or knowledge. The movie is focused on the effects that discovering this information has had on his many biological children. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to Scott Barber, co-director of The Orange Years , a great documentary about the rise and enduring influence of Nickelodeon. What started as a local TV project in Columbus, Ohio became an international cultural phenomenon that forever changed the aesthetics and business of kids entertainment. The movie focuses on the story of Geraldine Laybourne, a former teacher who became the key executi...

We talked to the great Errol Morris about his latest documentary, My Psychedelic Love Story . The movie is built around two days' worth of interviews with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a Swiss woman who dated Timothy Leary in the early '70s and whose life's adventures seemed to include every single interesting person and crazy thing that happened during that era. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

Writer/director Tara Miele's new movie, Wander Darkly , stars Sienna Miller and Diego Luna as a couple with a new baby and a rocky relationship. A traumatic car accident sets off a story that ruminates on reality, memory, and how love changes over time. We talked to Miele about the events in her her own life that inspired the screenplay and how she's staying creative in challenging times. Hosted o...

The Glorias , the new Gloria Steinem biopic from Julie Taymor, features Alicia Vikander as the feminist hero in early life, and Julianne Moore in later life. We talked with Taymor about leaving home early, seeing (and learning) from people all over the world, and figuring out how to tell a story that spans decades, but remains urgent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.