Comedy

Graham Broadbent has produced five films with Martin McDonagh, so when he puts the problem of Wild Horse Nine in one sentence I take him at his word: there are no food facilities on Rapa Nui, or really anything else for making a film. Everyone will write about the dialogue and about John Malkovich, who came home from Venice with the Volpi Cup. I want to write about the department nobody reviews. In France we call it la régie, and it has no clean English name: one chef, the régisseur général, carrying locations, permits, lodging, catering and transport in a single folder. On this film it was the film. ...

There is a particular pleasure in watching a director who has run two-hundred-million-dollar machinery choose to work small, because everything he does on the small picture tells you what he actually believes about the craft. Martin Campbell, the man who launched two Bonds with GoldenEye and Casino Royale, shot Just Play Dead in the Canary Islands as an independent production, and he names the terms himself without being asked twice: tight budget, tight schedule, delivered on schedule and on budget. Samuel L. Jackson plays a wealthy criminal faking his death to escape the feds; Eva Green plays the wife who prefers the death to be real and the insurance to be hers; everyone else circles the money. In Campbell’s summary of the character logic, nobody has any kind of redemption, they are all trying to knock each other off, and, of course, chaos happened. C’est le bordel, by design, and the design is the interesting part. ...

The arithmetic of The Wrong Girls is the kind that should be taught before anyone is allowed to say the word “passion project”: fourteen years from conception to camera, then twenty-nine days of photography. Fourteen years of what, exactly? Dylan Meyer, making her feature debut after a screenwriting career (An American Pickle, Moxie), describes the cycle without decoration: we had the money, we lost the money, we had the money, we lost the money. Her producer and best friend Maggie McLean remembers being broke at twenty-four in a back house, talking the movie into existence, and then spending a decade on the phone saying keep going. At the lowest point they were scouting New Jersey street corners, prepared to fake Los Angeles one restricted camera angle at a time, for a film whose entire reason to exist is Los Angeles. That is what a long raise actually looks like from inside: not a montage, but years of almost. ...

Strip away the pickleball and The Dink is a financing story, and a rather pure one. A comedy star and a comedy writer who play poker together have lunch. The star says he wants the kind of picture the studios stopped making; the writer says the word pickleball; they develop it together, pull in a producer through friendship rather than an agency package, finance the film independently, shoot it, finish it, screen it in Hollywood, and only then open the doors to buyers. Apple TV+ released it on July 24, and Jake Johnson’s own account of how that happened deserves to be pinned above the desk of everyone who still sends treatments into the streamer void: ...

Twelve million US dollars for domestic rights. That was the cheque A24 wrote at Sundance for Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party comedy The Invite, one of the biggest sales of the festival, and the number is worth holding in your head for the length of this piece, because everything intelligent about this release flows from what the buyer and the seller decided to do with it next. They did the old thing. They did the thing the trades had been writing obituaries for since the pandemic: a platform release, New York and Los Angeles first, a slow build, and a bet that word of mouth still exists as a market force. Three weekends into wide release the film sat at twenty million domestic and fifteen point seven international from 36 markets, on its way past forty million worldwide with Italy, France and Spain still to open. The consultant David A. Gross, who watches these curves for a living, told Variety he would not be surprised by a finish above sixty million. For a talking-heads comedy in a summer owned by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that is not counterprogramming. That is a heist. ...

Commercial cinema is terrified of aimlessness. It demands a rigid three-act structure and a clear protagonist to secure funding. Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut, Slacker, completely rejected this convention, opting instead for a non-linear, “baton-passing” narrative. The Drifting Observer The camera acts as a drifting observer across Austin, Texas. It picks up a conversation, follows it for a few minutes, and then seamlessly hands the narrative off to a new character who happens to cross their path. There is no central plot, only an endless relay race of philosophical ramblings, conspiracy theories, and existential ennui. ...

To finance the $27,575 budget for his debut film Clerks, Kevin Smith employed a famously reckless strategy. He did not secure grants or private equity. Instead, he maxed out eight to ten personal credit cards, sold his extensive comic book collection, and utilized insurance money from a destroyed car. But securing the money was only the first hurdle; he still had to shoot a feature film. The Night Shift Because he could not afford to rent a studio or a location, Smith chose to shoot the film inside the actual New Jersey convenience and video stores where he worked during the day. This created a massive logistical paradox. The film’s narrative takes place during a regular daytime shift, but Smith could only shoot at night when the stores were closed to customers. ...

Shooting a film on the streets of New York City is usually a logistical nightmare. You need permits, massive lighting trucks, and an army of production assistants screaming at pedestrians to stop walking. Noah Baumbach wanted the kinetic, authentic energy of New York, but he refused the nightmare. He chose a different weapon for Frances Ha: guerrilla filmmaking. The DSLR Advantage Baumbach shot the film using a compact Canon EOS 5D Mark II. By utilizing this unobtrusive DSLR camera, the production was able to shoot on active streets, in crowded subways, and inside cramped apartments with unprecedented agility. They captured real-world environments that larger setups could never access without fundamentally destroying the spontaneity of the location. ...

The camera is a tool of exclusion. A standard Panavision package costs more to rent for a week than most independent filmmakers will raise in a lifetime. When Sean Baker set out to make Tangerine with a restrictive $100,000 budget, he did not settle for a cheap prosumer camera. He made a radical, liberating choice: he shot a feature film on three iPhone 5s units. Engineering the Aesthetic Baker understood that shooting on a phone would be dismissed as a gimmick if it looked like a phone. To combat this, he engineered a highly specific workflow. He attached Moondog Labs anamorphic lens adapters directly to the iPhones. This instantly forced the clinical, square digital sensor into a classic, “cinemascope” widescreen geometry. ...

There is a plague of good taste in independent cinema. Too many directors are paralyzed by the fear of looking foolish, resulting in films that are perfectly competent and utterly forgettable. The directors known as Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) reject this fear entirely. They operate under a “bad idea” philosophy: if a concept is juvenile, embarrassing, or horrifying—say, a feature film built entirely around a farting corpse—they force themselves to execute it with absolute, rigorous sincerity. ...