Screenwriting

The standard lifecycle of an independent film is a financial tragedy: a writer finishes a brilliant script, and then the director spends five years going bankrupt trying to find the locations to shoot it. For their $20,000 debut feature, Resolution, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead refused to play this game. They reversed the process. They secured a free location first—a cabin owned by Benson’s parents—and then reverse-engineered a script specifically designed to be shot within its walls. ...

When a director needs to show a character aging twenty years, the solution is always artificial. They cast a different actor, or they bury the lead under suffocating latex makeup, or worse, they rely on soulless digital de-aging. Richard Linklater rejected all of this. With Boyhood, he chose biology over technology. He simply waited. The 12-Year Schedule Linklater executed an unprecedented 12-year production schedule to film his actors in real-time as they biologically aged. However, they did not shoot continuously for a decade. The genius of the production lay in its scheduling. Linklater broke the timeline down into annual micro-shoots, gathering the core cast and crew for only 3 to 4 days each year. Over the course of 12 years, the total shooting time was only roughly 45 days. ...

The modern studio model is built on specialization. You have a director, a writer, a lead actor, and an army of visual effects artists working in a windowless room in London. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead looked at this model, realized they had no money, and simply decided to do everything themselves. The Economy of Consolidation To achieve the massive, cosmic-horror scale of The Endless on a micro-budget, Benson and Moorhead aggressively consolidated roles. They co-directed, produced, co-edited, and cast themselves as the lead actors. But the true masterstroke of their production model lies in the visual effects. ...

The modern internet is a sterile, corporate shopping mall. But those of us who grew up with dial-up remember it as a lawless, haunted landscape—a place where you could vanish entirely. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun captures this ephemeral terror not to frighten us, but to map the internal architecture of gender dysphoria. Anatomy of the Craft: A Digital Haunting Bref, Schoenbrun ignores the hyper-polished aesthetics of the contemporary internet. Instead, they root the visual language of the film in 2012-era amateur creepypasta YouTube videos and desolate message boards. ...