Making Films

"I think everyone has a particular summer when your life took a real shift," says Laura Colella to The Independent's David Pierotti within days of her third narrative feature debut. Colella calls Breakfast With Curtis a no-budget feature. It takes place in her real-life backyard starring her real-life neighbors... and marks at least one character's seminal summer.

The Independent shines a spotlight on 10 innovative filmmakers to keep your eye on this year, and coming years. We've got web series creators, animators, and filmmakers of all genres... and in the last month we've been releasing exclusive new extras on Facebook.

Her deception wreaked havoc with film festivals, exhibitors, and fancy LA restaurants. Marie Castaldo is the convicted criminal at the center of a documentary-in-progress by Dan Nuxoll and Martha Shane, whose sleuthing led them into their first feature project.

"Let’s just say we started out to shoot a low budget psychological thriller in rural northwestern Michigan and ended up shooting an ultra low budget neo noir thriller in New York City," says The Girl on the Train's producer, Rebecca Reynolds. Here she shares tips and trade-offs for shooting on location in the Big Apple.

Jason Rosette reports from Cambodia in another installment of his Filmmaker's Journal, four years after his last update. Here he chronicles the ups and downs of getting what he calls his most ambitious project yet, the feature narrative Freedom Deal, off the ground in Cambodia, including the unique ways he's approached casting and fundraising.

Ralph Arlyck's documentary, Following Sean, spanned four decades, several generations of technology, and earned Arlyck the Albert Maysles Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking Award at the 2012 Mendocino Film Festival, celebrated this June. In this essay, Arlyck revisits his days spent cutting Sean and other films on his now dismantled Steenbeck console.

Motherhood can't seem to escape controversy, even on the weekend meant to honor them. Yet three filmmaking moms are quietly figuring out what it means to parent, work a day job, and manage a passion project, and have generously shared their perspectives with The Independent.

Though he makes major motion pictures with traditional distribution, John Madden pushes against age bias with today's US release of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, starring only actors over 60.

As one of the first to embrace what Neil Kendricks calls the "immersive technology" of 3D, and with no fellow directors to consult, Wim Wenders morphs landscape into stage with his friend Pina Bausch's choreography as the centerpiece in Pina.

Editor Lindsay Utz accepts the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship at SXSW, just before her first feature documentary, Bully, opens in New York and Los Angeles. The Independent's Steven Abrams speaks with her about her approach to editing hundreds of hours of footage filled with the raw experience so prevalent among American kids.