Screenwriting

Every family that has ever made a film together has had the same argument at the same table, and Family Movie is the first one I know of to sell tickets to it. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick direct, with Dan Beers writing the concept they sparked to; their children Sosie and Travis Bacon act; and the conceit is a low-budget horror film about a family making a low-budget horror film, which is either the laziest idea in the world or the most honest, depending on whether you have ever had to cast your own cousin because the day rate was zero. It premiered at SXSW on a Friday the 13th, in the Narrative Spotlight, with Gersh selling and no distributor yet attached at the time Deadline wrote it up. Deadline loved it. AwardsWatch gave it a D+. I find both verdicts defensible and the gap between them more interesting than either, because the gap is exactly where micro-budget meta films live. ...

Christopher Smith may be the most useful case study in British genre cinema, precisely because he refuses to become a brand. SciFiNow’s FrightFest notice makes the point with his own filmography: the tube-tunnel debut Creep, the office-outing splatter comedy Severance, the looping seabound puzzle Triangle, the plague procession of Black Death, hauntings, possessions, a Christmas film, and now Spider Island, an eco-horror comedy that premiered at FrightFest on the 30th of August. Two decades inside genre without repeating an idea is a career strategy with a real cost, since every film must find its audience from scratch, and a real reward, which is that nobody can predict him. The new one returns him to the Severance register: a protected Pacific island, a greenwashed luxury hotel called the Pearlhaven, thirty imported influencers, and a population of pack-hunting spiders whose cave habitat has been plugged with smuggled concrete and who have relocated, sensibly, into the hotel’s air conditioning. ...

I rarely write about tools, and never with much pleasure. Software is the fastest-aging subject in this métier, the vendors redo their pricing pages the way the rest of us change socks, and no shoot I have ever stood on was saved by a subscription. The first stripboard I worked from was cardboard in a wooden holder, and it ran a feature perfectly well. Tant pis: the paperwork is part of the process whether I enjoy it or not, these four names keep arriving in my comments, and I have watched too many young producers choose their software the way they would never dare choose a lens, by reading the side of the box. The boxes will not help you here, since all four print the same list on them, and a feature list has never once predicted which tool survives contact with a shooting day. What predicts it is the shape of your production, because a one-day commercial and a twelve-day feature fall apart in entirely different places. So the shape is how I will compare them. ...

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. ...

I will restrict myself to one question, because it is the question this film lives or dies on: how do you photograph a man the whole world has already memorized, at the age before he was anyone? Anthony Bourdain has been mythologized without pause in the years since his death, and the field of posthumous product is exactly as lurid as you fear. Matt Johnson’s Tony, for A24, written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, answers the question with a scope decision so severe it amounts to a manifesto: one summer, 1975, Provincetown. A nineteen-year-old washes dishes badly, lies about everything, and gets, in the words of Kitchen Confidential that open the film, the good ass-kicking he badly needs. The show, the fame, the voice, none of it appears. The film ends before the man begins. ...

Take one snowed-in summer camp, a reclusive final girl, an experimental filmmaker with a franchise pitch due, a bucket of fried chicken with assorted dipping sauces, and a killer who wears a box fan for a face, and you have, precisely, Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature. The title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, does the work of a mission statement: it names the two engines of the slasher form and promises to take them seriously as subjects rather than as fuel. Schoenbrun arrives at this after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the low-budget debut that earned praise from Scorsese among others, and I Saw the TV Glow, and the trajectory matters, because this is what happens when a filmmaker who grew up inside genre stops quoting it and starts interrogating it under studio lights of their own design. ...

Bref, we all know the rule: independent filmmakers should not touch science fiction. The moment you introduce a spaceship into your script, the budget multiplies by ten, the production design swallows your schedule, and the visual effects supervise you into an early grave. Yet, here is Pavlo Ostrikov’s U Are The Universe, a film about a space trucker who becomes the last man alive after Earth is destroyed in 2070. He shot it in Ukraine, relying almost entirely on a single actor and a robot companion, and brought it across the finish line for $800,000. ...

Mon Dieu, the sequel. It is the lifeblood of the modern studio system, and Pixar, once the bastion of original ideas, is now fully tethered to this machine. When Inside Out 2 arrived, the skeptics were quick to sharpen their knives. As the critics noted, the film often feels less like a glimpse into a real person’s brain and more like a carefully calibrated corporate spreadsheet. Pixar’s obsession with “universal relatability” can sometimes suffocate the very artistry it claims to champion. ...

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. ...

The modern studio system spends hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring established intellectual property—comic books, video games, theme park rides—desperate for a pre-existing audience. For their $750,000 independent film, Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly bypassed the studios entirely. They sourced their intellectual property for free from an internet joke. The Meme as Foundation Safety Not Guaranteed is based on a bizarre, viral 1997 classified ad asking for a partner to travel back in time. On the internet, it was a disposable punchline. But Trevorrow and Connolly performed a masterclass in reverse-engineered screenwriting. They did not treat the meme as a joke. They treated it with profound narrative sincerity. ...