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Gordon Ramsay can help you write screenplays

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Gordon Ramsay can help you write screenplays

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A great bit of reasoning on how Gordon Ramsay can help you udnerstand screenwriting. Worth a watch as long as you don't mind a bit of swearing

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Writing a Screenplay: The Gordon Ramsey Method

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2026’s best films (so far) from Letterboxd

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2026’s best films (so far) from Letterboxd

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Watchlist This!: our March 2026 picks of the best new bubbling-under films • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine

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Our picks of under-the-radar gems from this month’s new releases. This edition includes the latest by an Italian iconoclast, a gory grave-digging romance, Palestine’s official Oscar entry, and more.

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BBC Documentary on the Skinhead subculture’s origins

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BBC Documentary on the Skinhead subculture’s origins

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Open until Nov 2026- loads of amazing real models used in Aardman films, as well as stills and storyboards. A must for anyone who enjoyed the animation project!

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Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends - Exhibition at Young V&A · V&A

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Go behind the scenes of stop-motion animation and explore how Aardman’s iconic characters and worlds are brought to life

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Have a read - loads of useful information and context here.

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Release Year: 1958

Genre: Mystery, Romance, Thriller
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor; Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (novel)

Is it true... blondes have more fun?

Not in Vertigo, they don't.

In Alfred Hitchcock's classic story of erotic obsession, Hitch's famously cool and elegant blondes are degraded, abandoned, murdered, and driven to suicide.

Basically the opposite of fun.

Vertigo is a psychological thriller about love and loss, guilt and obsession, desire and deceit, memory and madness. Our hero-and believe us, we're using that term very, very loosely-is John "Scottie" Ferguson, retired from the San Francisco police force after nearly falling to his death during a rooftop chase and watching a fellow officer die trying to save him. Left with a crippling case of acrophobia (fear of heights) and vertigo (dizziness), he's crushed with guilt and struggling to put his life back together.

Scottie's asked, as a favor, to investigate a friend's beautiful but death-obsessed wife, possessed by the spirit of her suicidal great-grandmother and having an annoying tendency to disappear and go into trances. Scottie's going to follow her for a few days and see where she's been going. Alright, so this is gonna be a mystery movie, right, or a ghost story, maybe?

Nope.

Scottie falls passionately in lust with this gorgeous but troubled woman. However, under the spell of great-grandma, she throws herself from a bell tower in an old Spanish mission that she's seen during her trances. Scottie ends up in a mental hospital, tortured again by guilt because his acrophobia and vertigo kept him from following her up the bell tower stairs and saving her. His attempt to "resurrect" his dead lover by recreating her in another woman ends again in tragedy, as Scottie realizes he's been the victim of a devastating deception and an unwitting accomplice to a murder.

Oof.

At its 1958 release (premiering in San Francisco, fittingly), the film garnered a collective "meh" at best. It was "too slow and too long" ( Variety); The New Yorker called it "far-fetched nonsense ( source). It barely broke even at the box office. It wasn't what people expected from Hitchcock, master of the macabre. Audiences didn't quite know what to do with this plunge into the darkest recesses of sexual obsession and romantic delusion. They developed their own case of vertigo as they tried to make sense of the convoluted plot and sudden shifts in time and perspective.

The film grew in popularity and critical esteem over the years, though, climbing up the AFI's list of Greatest American Films (#61 in 1998, #9 in 2008), and getting a complete restoration in 1996, including surround sound and 70 mm format ( source). In 2012, Vertigo did the impossible: it knocked Citizen Kane from the top spot on BFI's list of Fifty Greatest Films of All Time, a slot it had held for fifty years. Fifty. Years.

One last thing: Vertigo is also a movie about the movies-about the relationship between the creator and the image created, and the voyeuristic nature of watching films. Leading lady Kim Novak, who played the character forced into submitting to a make-over by the obsessed Scottie, told an interviewer, "It was the opportunity to express what was going on between me and Hollywood" as she learned to take direction and become what Hitchcock wanted her to be ( source).

It's all very meta.

Welcome to Hitchcock.

Everyone knows that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense. The Birds-terrifying. Dial M for Murder-creepy. Psycho-we can't even. Trained during the silent film era, he created films using innovative camera and lighting techniques that kept his audiences on the edge of their seats. He could do chases, comedy, and slasher scenes with the best of 'em, but what Hitchcock really loved to do was to explore human psychology in all its weirdness and complexity. Voyeurism, fetishism, obsession, treachery-Hitchcock loved them all, and they all come together in Vertigo.

It's a neat trick: we think we're watching an eerie mystery movie, but we're really getting schooled in some ideas about what it means to fall in love with an illusion.

The film makes us 'fess up to all those fantasies we create and those stories we tell ourselves. We probably never fell in love with someone possessed by a ghost, but we may have fallen in love with someone we hardly knew. We've hopefully never made our new GF/BF dye their hair and dress exactly like our ex, but we've probably wished they could be a little more like someone else at times. We all know what it's like to want to be loved for ourselves and how hard it can be to try to be who we're not just to get someone to notice us. We all know guilt and loss, unfortunately.

Vertigo's plot may be, as the New Yorker said in 1958, far-fetched; hopefully we'll never find ourselves hanging between life and death as our hands slowly slip off a gutter ten stories about the street.

The psychological themes, though? We can relate.

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Vertigo Introduction Introduction | Shmoop

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Go behind the scenes of Vertigo. Plot summary, analysis, themes, quotes, trivia, and more, written by experts and film scholars.

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A good knowledge organiser for Bonnie and Clyde

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A good knowledge organiser for Bonnie and Clyde

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Have a read - loads of useful information and context here.

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Bonnie and Clyde Introduction Introduction | Shmoop

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Go behind the scenes of Bonnie and Clyde. Plot summary, analysis, themes, quotes, trivia, and more, written by experts and film scholars.

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Includes scene summaries, quotes, questions for analysis, and quizzes. A really rich resource!

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Memento Introduction Introduction | Shmoop

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Go behind the scenes of Memento. Plot summary, analysis, themes, quotes, trivia, and more, written by experts and film scholars.

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Stephen Graham talks about his heritage and film career after Adolescence success

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Stephen Graham talks about his heritage and film career after Adolescence success

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Stephen Graham: ‘I’m just a mixed-race kid from flats in Kirkby’

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Stephen Graham is emotional as he accepts an Emmy award for his role in the hit series Adolescence.

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A good blog article, incorporating Filmmakers' Theories, about Amy

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A good blog article, incorporating Filmmakers' Theories, about Amy

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Includes comparison to Michael Moore (though, not Nick Broomfield)

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Warfare to Sinners: 10 of the best films of 2025 so far

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BBC film critics Caryn James and Nicholas Barber pick their cinema highlights of the year so far, from a brutal war epic to an ambitious period vampire drama.

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A History of German Expressionism

To define this style, we need to understand where it comes from and why it looks like nothing else from that era. Once we lay out the definition and a brief history, we'll jump into some examples.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM DEFINITION

What is German Expressionism in film?

German Expressionism is a particular artistic style that first appeared in poetry and theatre around 1910. It became popular in film 10 years later after WWI. It comes partly from German Romanticism and gives a subjective view of the world. It visualizes the country's collective anxiety through distorted and nightmarish imagery. Expressionists had little interest in their work being aesthetically pleasing. This style flourished after the horrors of WWI, and the inevitable economic devastation that followed. The first few films that can be described as pure German Expressionism include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis.

Characteristics of German Expressionism

High angles

Deep shadows/chiaroscuro lighting

Extreme camera tilting

Impossible sets

When you consider the real-life situation in Germany after the war, it's no wonder that art and cinema got as dark as it did.

Lotte Eisner, a German film critic, labeled it "helldunkel," which she defined as "a sort of twilight of the German soul, expressing itself in shadowy, enigmatic interiors, or in misty, insubstantial landscapes."

German Expressionism in film is associated with high contrasts of darks and lights to convey nightmarish sets, often using the chiaroscuro lighting technique. Let's look at some of the classic examples that cemented this aesthetic steeped in shadows.

Examples of GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

Icons of German Expressionism

Now that we have somewhat of an understanding, let's look at some examples. German Expressionism isn't the easiest style to define, but seeing is believing, right?

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was based on the writers' experiences as WWI soldiers and their distrust of authoritarian leadership. The filmmakers chose to deliberately distort reality in order to disorient the audience to invoke a feeling of the time rather than a truthful or realistic depiction.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Nosferatu (1922)

The grandfather of all vampire movies that set the bar for every horror movie to come after. F.W. Murnau's film is a thinly veiled adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula." And it holds up today as one of the most visually effective horror films. We've got the entire film here, if you dare.

Nosferatu (1922)

Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang's silent film uses expressionist imagery to comment on technology consuming society. The film is deep in exaggerated imagery heightening the emotion that drives the plot.

The Haunted Screen (1998)

If you're looking for a super deep dive into German Expressionism, we've got a feature documentary called The Haunted Screen. It covers everything including the social circumstances that informed these artists and their rarely seen films.

The Haunted Screen, feature length documentary

German Expressionism radically altered cinema. In particular, the love of chiaroscuro lighting survived and evolved into film noir and the horror film. There's no denying that it helped build the visual foundation on which the entire genre rests.

If you're looking for the perfect example of German Expressionism's legacy, consider the work of Tim Burton.

Tim Burton, a direct stylistic connection

Edward Scissorhands is a direct descendant of Dr. Caligari. You can see the angled and broken architecture of the set, the extreme light/shadow work, and the look of Edward himself. Now look at Burton's other work and you'll see that the haunted soul of German Expressionism lives on.

Up Next

What is chiaroscuro?

In this post we briefly discussed the criteria of German Expressionism in film. Deep shadows and high contrast lighting create a nightmarish feel and are the markings of the style. That technique is expanded upon as we define the term chiaroscuro.

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Watch Entire German Expressionist Films - Nosferatu, Metropolis, Dr. Caligari and more

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What is German Expressionism in film? Overview of the history and style with feature-length examples from Metropolis, Nosferatu, Dr. Caligari and more.

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The American Society of Cinematographers

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Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans — Lauding A Landmark

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The classic film, which earned ASC members Charles Rosher and Karl Struss the first Oscar for Best Cinematography, has inspired filmmakers around the…

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he first time I encountered Memento, at the 2000 Toronto film festival, it was one of those rare buzz magnets that nobody has on their schedule at the beginning of the festival, but everyone rushes to squeeze in towards the end. Christopher Nolan was still an unknown quantity, having only directed the little-seen DIY thriller Following, and the film was being screened at the Uptown, in one of the chilly dungeons underneath the gorgeous theater reserved for bigger premieres and Midnight Madness screenings.

This was long before Nolan was the obscure Creator-God of Hollywood, enhancing his mystique by retreating from press and public appearances. When the screening was over, he stood in front of the audience just like every other film-maker, and it was one of the most remarkable public Q&As I've ever witnessed. There were no grueling multi-part questions or embarrassing personal requests for advice Nolan might have for a young director. People were simply asking him, in granular detail, to explain what the hell they had just seen. There wasn't a note of hostility to the questioning, either, as there might have been for a film-maker who wasn't clear in his storytelling or who left behind a few loose plot threads or red herrings. Nolan's film was a mile ahead of the audience, and they were eager to catch up.

In retrospect, the gaggle of festivalgoers hanging on his every word felt like the beginning of the Nolan cult, which would grow right along his ambition to infuse spectacle with deeper insight into the human mind and the turbulence within our culture and within ourselves. It was also, of course, a fitting exercise in how we create narratives out of a patchwork of memories that aren't always easily accessed or ordered or even that reliable. In fact, it's possible that my memory of the Memento Q&A at Tiff isn't perfectly accurate: maybe it wasn't as epic a session as it seemed or maybe I'm mischaracterizing an audience that might have been more irritated with Nolan than productively confused.

Memento would go on an odd journey afterwards, picking up a screenwriting award at Sundance the following year (after a UK release months earlier) but falling to a small, now-defunct distributor, Newmarket Films, after others felt the film would frustrate audiences. Now 20 years later, Nolan's neo-noir puzzle box plays like one of the key artworks of the 21st century, predicting an era where reality is more a personal, selective construct of comforting biases than a widely agreed-upon set of facts. The hero of Memento is Leonard Shelby, a "freak" whose short-term memory loss had led him to piece together clues in a murder mystery out of Polaroids and tattoos, certain that his system will yield the truth about his wife's death. His certainty is a mistake. His system is being contaminated, not least by himself.

We are all Leonard Shelby. We are all freaks.

Once you get past all the questions about how Memento works, with its cross-stream of scenes going backwards (in color) and forward (in black and white) in time, there's the devastating revelation that awaits. And it would be an early lesson in how to watch Nolan's work, which can seem purposefully obscure or gimmicky on first viewing, but often yields a big emotional reaction on the second or third or fourth. He has more faith in audiences than the distributors who passed on Memento, and his stubbornness on this front has only calcified over time. (Tenet, his most recent film, may be his most difficult to crack.)

Memento sounds like a movie disease, but in fact it's a real one: Leonard (Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from storing recent memories while keeping long-term memories intact. He can remember everything that happened to him until his wife's rape and murder, but his mind has been a sieve every day after that. The film starts with an action Leonard takes to avenge his wife's death, then follows the breadcrumbs that led him to that place, including relationships with shady characters like Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who may be manipulating his condition to their own ends. At the same time, we follow Leonard forward in a black-and-white conversation he's having on a motel phone with ... someone, and we flash back to his time as an insurance investigator, when he met Sammy Jenkis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a client with the same affliction.

Photograph: Allstar/NEWMARKET

Working from the short story Memento Mori by his brother, Jonathan, who has lately been toying with the same themes on the HBO series Westworld, Nolan has written a noir so stripped-down it would be insultingly simple in straight chronology, but it's still a constant challenge, even in the umpteenth viewing, to keep up with the back-stepping in time. There's not much competition for the prize, but Memento is Nolan's funniest film, exploiting every opportunity to score jokes off Leonard's disorientation, like planting him in the middle of a shootout where he doesn't know whether he's the chaser or if he's being chased. Or a subtler gag where we learn in one scene why a barfly is laughing in another. At the same time, a startling pair of scenes where Natalie sadistically manipulates him draws suspense from the frantic, hapless search for a pen.

Memento takes, as a starting point, the idea that memories are the building blocks of what makes us human: they inform our sense of self, our relationships with other people, our basic grounding in time and space. And in a genre known for unreliable narrators, memory makes for a shifty central character, telling Leonard (and us) things that turn out not to be true. But the coldest splash of water in the face is learning that Leonard is manipulating himself as egregiously as the motel manager who's charging him for two rooms or the femme fatale who's using him like a blunt instrument. He chooses the story he wants to believe, and it inks his soul with a permanence of a tattoo or a Polaroid.

"So you lie to yourself to be happy," Teddy tells him. "We all do." That Leonard's lies circle around a hole in this life - or, more poignantly, the once-warm spot in his bed that's now vacated - doesn't bring him happiness, but they do ritualistically salve his grief and give him purpose. If he did not lie to himself, he would have to come to terms with the fact that he'll never know whether one day has passed or weeks or months, or that no system can bring him past the moment his wife was killed. He might not be the hero of his own story. That's too much for any of us to face.

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Memento at 20: Christopher Nolan's memory thriller is hard to forget

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he first time I encountered Memento, at the 2000 Toronto film festival, it was one of those rare buzz magnets that nobody has on their schedule at the beginning of the festival, but everyone rushes to squeeze in towards the end.

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Vertigo: From box-office flop to ‘greatest film of all time’

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Vertigo, re-released this week for its 60th anniversary, is now regarded as a masterpiece

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How Bonnie and Clyde’s final scene changed Hollywood

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Bonnie and Clyde’s violence, especially its final shootout, busted cinematic taboos – and set the stage for how we watch films now, writes Luke Buckmaster.

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Interview with Arthur Penn on Bonnie and Clyde

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Interview with Arthur Penn on Bonnie and Clyde

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Bonnie and Clyde: Director Arthur Penn interview (2000)

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A radio interview with Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo and The Wrong Man

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A radio interview with Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo and The Wrong Man

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Hitchcock-Truffaut Episode 21: 'The Wrong Man' & 'Vertigo'

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MoMA.org | Interactives | Exhibitions | 1999 | Alfred Hitchcock | Interview

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Knowledge organiser: Memento and Experimental Film

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Knowledge organiser: Memento and Experimental Film

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Introduction to Taxi Tehran | EDUQAS A Level Film Studies | Component 2 Section A: Global Film

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The Iranian film-maker turned taxi driver Jafar Panahi combats his persecutors with guerrilla tactics, sly humour and good grace – like an anti-Travis Bickle

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Interview with Guillermo Del Toro on Pan's Labyrinth

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Interview with Guillermo Del Toro on Pan's Labyrinth

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Exploring the vibrant darkness of his distinctive worldview, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro cites a phrase in The Skins of the Fathers, a short story by Clive Barker, the British writer turned filmmaker who helped to refresh and redefine the horror genre back in the 1980s.

"The line refers to a feeling which stirs 'deep in her, in a place touched only by monsters'," says del Toro. "Clive, of course, is talking about an existential piece of the soul, in a very Barker-esque fashion, because the woman in question has actually fornicated with monsters. But in my case, I really think that the most creative, most fragile part of the child that lives within me is a child that was literally transformed by monsters. Be they on the screen, or in myth, or in my own imagination."

For those with a weakness for the beautiful monsters of modem cinema, del Toro has earned himself a deserved reputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film. Gregarious and personable, with an almost photographic recall of faces and conversations, he has charmed both the hardcore horror fans who gave him a hero's welcome at London's Frightfest in August, and now the upmarket critical cognoscenti, who snapped to attention following his Palme d'Or nomination for his new film Pan's Labyrinth at Cannes in May.

In essence, he is a divided soul, a realist attuned to the strange vibrations of the supernatural, a lapsed Catholic ("not quite the same thing as an atheist") with an interest in sacrifice and redemption who turned down the chance to direct last year's blockbuster The Chronicles of Narnia because he "wasn't interested in the lion resurrecting."

Since the early 1990s del Toro has divided his filmmaking endeavours between personal European projects (the modern vampiric chiller Cronos, 1993; the ghostly Spanish Civil War fable The Devil's Backbone, 2001) and big-budget Hollywood hits (ongoing comic-book franchises Blade II, 2002, and Hellboy, 2004), though he stresses that "I have never made a film just for them - Hellboy represents me as much as The Devil's Backbone." And like the artistic refugees from Franco's Spain who first inspired him, the writer-director currently considers himself an exile from his own home country of Mexico, not least because of the 1997 kidnapping of his father, at the height of a vogue for such ransomed abductions.

"I was 33," remembers del Toro. "The perfect age to be crucified! I had lived my life believing two things: that pain should not be sought, but by the same token it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don't relish it, but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own dictionary."

This willingness to confront pain and to forge his own cinematic dictionary has informed the blend of innocence and brutality that is a trademark of del Toro's phantasmagorical cinema. From the crushing addiction of Cronos, whose ageing anti-hero is reduced to licking blood from the tiled floor of a public toilet, to the redemptive fantasy of Hellboy, whose titular demon takes an industrial grinder to the horns of his head in a bid to take control of his destiny, del Toro has returned compulsively to these twinned themes.

Now in Pan's Labyrinth, which he wrote, directed and produced, this latterday Welles has created a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema - a modem masterpiece made entirely on his own terms. Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, Pan's Labyrinth is a "dark fairytale about choice" that distils his distinctive mix of fact and fantasy, poetry and politics, pain and pleasure to form what is, for my money, the best film of the year.

Those familiar with the guilty ghosts of The Devil's Backbone will recognise key motifs in this new fable about a young girl's exploration of a labyrinthine underworld in Franco-era Spain. Indeed, del Toro describes Pan's Labyrinth as a "rhyming movie" for The Devil's Backbone, a "sister" to the more masculine energies of its celluloid "brother", whose narrative unfolded against the war-tom events of 1939.

Like its predecessor, Pan's Labyrinth balances political tensions with a feud between fantasy and reality, between the way the world seems and the way it is.

"The Devil's Backbone was set in a time that belongs only to Spain - because six months after Franco won, Hitler invaded Poland," del Toro explains. "But in Pan's Labyrinth we're dealing with the end of the Second World War, a moment when the Spanish resistance fully believed, for very good reason, that the Allies would tum around and help them take care of Franco - which, of course, they proved not to do. In conjunction with this historical reality, I was trying to uncover a common thread between the 'real world' and the 'imaginary world', which I found in one of the seminal bloodlines within fairytales: the bloodline of choice. It's something that has intrigued me since Cronos, through Hellboy, and now to Pan's Labyrinth: the way your choices define you. And I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose which the girl takes in this movie."

The young heroine of Pan's Labyrinth is Ofelia, whose widowed mother Carmen has recently married Vidal, a vicious captain of Spain's Civil Guard involved in policing anti-fascist maquis resistance in the mountainous wooded northern region. Vidal's housekeeper Mercedes befriends Ofelia, protecting her from her stepfather's wrath while maintaining secretive connections with the maquis. Meanwhile, Ofelia meets an alarmingly devious faun (not 'Pan', incidentally, whose name is absent from the original Spanish title El laberinto del fauna), who suggests that she may be the lost princess of a beautiful and terrifying netherworld. While Mercedes attempts to help the maquis and local villagers in their struggles, Ofelia embarks on a quest that will test her true nature.

Crucially, this quest involves a journey through a labyrinth, a word which has become synonymous with the Civil War (think of key historical accounts such as Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth), and which served as the "perfect metaphor" for del Toro's endeavours. "A maze is a place where you get lost," he explains, "but a labyrinth is essentially a place of transit: an ethical, moral transit to one inevitable centre. You think of the transit of Spanish society from the 1940s to the incredible explosion of the post-Franco period. The 1980s in Spain were like the 1960s in the rest of the world! In the movie, Ofelia is a 'princess who forgot who she was and where she came from', who progresses through the labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to know the name of their father - the fascist. It's a parable - just as The Devil's Backbone was a parable - of the Spanish Civil War.

"Putting aside the implications of the English-language title, which simply sounded better than The Faun's Labyrinth, I really needed this creature to be ambiguous. It's important that Ofelia chooses to enter this new world, despite the fact that her guide is unreliable and unattractive. So we made the faun a creaky, ancient creature who becomes more physically beautiful as he becomes more perverse. It's subliminal almost, but essentially the girl distrusts him the most the better he looks."

Del Toro's faun is just one of the film's menagerie of fantastical creatures and monsters, drawn from sources that range from Goya's paintings to Barker's Books of Blood. Amazingly for a film that features around 300 effects shots and boasts complex creature designs, Pan's Labyrinth was completed for a mere 15 million euros, a feat del Toro attributes to the lessons learned on Blade II and Hellboy ("I love to play with the big toys... and to learn from them").

As always, the director sketched each character in the notebooks that are his constant companions, an extraordinary document of his mind at work and obsessive attention to detail. Here we find the original drawings for the 'vegetable baby' which Ofelia places beneath her mother's bed, nurtured with milk and magic, and for the terrifying 'pale man' whose ire she arouses by stealing from his table.

"I wanted to represent political power within the creatures," del Toro says, "and that particular character somehow came to represent the church and the devouring of children. The original design was just an old man who seemed to have lost a lot of weight and was covered in loose skin. Then I removed the face, so it became part of the personality of the institution. But then, what to do about the eyes?

So I decided to place stigmata on the hands and shove the eyes into the stigmata. Then I remembered a Polish poster of a woman screaming, covering her eyes, in which the hands were translucent so you could still see the eyes. [A similar, derivative image was later used as the iconic poster for Don Coscarelli's eerie cheapie-hit Phantasm.] Having done that, I thought it would be great to make the fingers like peacock feathers that fluff and open. That's how that figure evolved."

"As for the faun, he proved more difficult. The idea was to make him very masculine, not aggressively so, just sinuous. I remember talking to Doug Jones [who plays both the faun and the pale man] when he first started working on the role, and saying: 'More Mick Jagger, less David Bowie!' I wanted the faun to have a rock-star quality. Everything about the faun and his personality needed to be masculine because you had to pit the female energy of the girl against something monolithic. She is surrounded by these Jungian archetypes."

Such talk inevitably evokes the work of Angela Carter, whose writings inspired Neil Jordan's unashamedly Freudian The Company of Wolves, or of Bruno Bettelheim, author of the seminal I970s text The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Yet the key inspiration for Pan's Labyrinth was a slim volume published in I891: Edwin Sidney Hartland's The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry into Fairy Mythology, which "classified fairytales, and their oral origins, and broke down the recurring myths - the myth of choice; the ritual of not eating or drinking while you're in the fairy world; facing very often a figure like the frog. I took all these things and came up with the story of Pan's Labyrinth.

The psychosexual interpretation is, of course, much more modem, but I find it very reductive. For me, Pan's Labyrinth is a dark fairytale in the classic sense. The settings of Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Oscar Wilde were incredibly brutal: Hansel and Gretel were two children abandoned in the woods in the middle of a famine to die of hunger and cold. But you need to know the brutality for the reality of the magic to happen. That's why the war made such a perfect backdrop."

Del Toro is, of course, working within the same tradition of cinematic horror that spawned A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's seminal reinvention of the "classic dark fairytale" in which Freddy Krueger emerged as an 1980s incarnation of the Big Bad Wolf. ("I think that really is one of the best fairytales of any decade - because Craven understands the roots of those myths," says del Toro.) At the heart of Craven's shocker is a young girl forced to suffer for the sins of her parents: a heroine tom between dreams and reality who ultimately finds the strength to face down the demons of the past, earning herself a single transformative shock of grey hair. This theme of the innocent child who must banish the darkness of the adult world is also fascinating to del Toro, whose latest movie is promoted in America with the tagline: "Innocence has a power that evil cannot imagine."

"Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth all feature a child facing a very adult situation," he agrees, "and dealing with it from a place of grace or purity. I would also add Hellboy to that list, because he too is a child, and he defines himself by choosing who he is and not who he is meant to be. I'm still in love with that character, to which I'm returning with my current project Hellboy 2. I want the film to be really experimental and personal, though it'll still be 'pop', of course, which is very much a side of my personality. I think of it in the same way that Warhol or Lichtenstein would look at a soup tin, or a vignette from a comic book, and see them somehow differently."

Del Toro had such a passion for Hellboy that he pursued the project in favour of a chance to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He also wrestled briefly with the ill-fated Exorcist prequel Dominion (aka Exorcist The Beginning), the prospect of which appealed to his lapsed-Catholic sensibility. "One of the most important movies in my life, emotionally," he says, "is William Peter Blatty's Twinkle, Twinkle "Killer" Kane [aka The Ninth Configuration]. It's a movie about redemption through sacrifice and the giving of your blood to save others that speaks to the soul of somebody who believes in a messiah. It deals with the fragility of faith, which is essential to Blatty's work - how faith is almost intangible and yet incredibly strong.

"And I think it affected me because, although I am no longer a Catholic, I share the belief that there is a state of grace that can be reached not through moral purity but through almost ethical purity - by being yourself and being immune to the world. It's a little ascetic, but it's essentially the thesis of Cronos. In that film the girl who does not mind dying is the truly immortal character. And the character played by Federico Luppi becomes immortal at the moment he decides to die, the moment he says: 'Fuck it, I don't want to kill my granddaughter.' Immortality doesn't mean you live longer; it means you are immune to death. I think that's the same thing that occupies Blatty: faith, the state of grace, immortality, redemption. And these are things that are important for me too."

These themes are central to Pan's Labyrinth, the climax of which becomes an epiphany of sacrifice and rebirth. "It's a movie about a girl who gives birth to herself," del Toro asserts, "into the world she believes in. At that moment, it doesn't matter if her body lives or dies. And this is something I have experienced. I remember literally the worst experience of my life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic [del Toro's first Hollywood feature, 1997, which was severely compromised by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping - which is brutal, but at least there are rules.

"I remember there was a moment on Mimic that was an almost out-of-body experience, when I achieved an absolute Taoist sense of being there, but being almost in a state of grace and being able to survive that fucking pain. And it is a strange mixture of becoming immune by not engaging, and believing you are not important at all - that the only important thing is the film. Now when I look at Mimic what I see is the pain of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful."

Pain and beauty, damnation and salvation, brutality and innocence: once again del Toro's conversation finds a way back to the central duality of creation and destruction, death and rebirth. "Those things are one and the same," he says. "It would be a cliche to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses - certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I've seen people being shot; I've had guns put to my head; I've seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated... because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility."

Like the heroine of Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro's own career now seems to be at a point of rebirth and regeneration. "Hopefully, this movie will allow me to start a new path," he says with deserved confidence. "The way I see my craft, and the way I see the stories I tell, has completely changed as a result of this movie.

"Shooting Pan's Labyrinth was very painful, but it also became a war about me not compromising. I gave back my entire salary in order to get the film made the way I wanted it. I probably should have abandoned it the moment the funding fell through the first time, but I stuck with it for almost two and a half years and refused to back down. It's the first time in the six movies I've directed where I've said, 'I'm doing this one my way, the whole way, no matter what.' Financiers ran out on me and everyone involved in my career was saying it was the biggest mistake I could make. But I'm very happy with the result. And for me, nothing will be the same again."

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Pan person: Guillermo del Toro talks to Mark Kermode about Pan's Labyrinth

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In this feature from our December 2006 issue, Guillermo del Toro talks to Mark Kermode about creating the vivid fantasy world, set in contrast to the bloody endgame of the Spanish Civil War and seen through the eyes of a young girl, for his acclaimed feature Pan's Labyrinth.

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How many have you seen?

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The Best Films Of 2024: ‘Conclave’, ‘Brutalist’, ‘Sacred Fig’ And More

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From two teams immersed in a television universe to the search for a new Pope to the love life of a sex worker, 2024 was a creative and diverse year film.

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Cinestudy is a free resource to help you edit using da Vinci Resolve. There are interactive demos and free downloadable footage and soundscapes, as well as great tips for how to create different effects. Check it out!

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CINESTUDY ( formerly Framelines) presents an Interactive Project and EDIT CHALLENGE!

Anyone can download the raw footage and edit the scene together however you want.

Below you can download the footage, then edit your own version of this short scene, and upload it to any sites, as long as you use our complete credits and use the hashtags!

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CINESTUDY ( formerly Framelines) presents an Interactive Project and EDIT CHALLENGE! Anyone can download the raw footage and edit the scene together however you want. Below you can download the footage, then edit your own version of this short scene, and upload it to any sites, as long as you use our complete credits and use the hashtags!

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

Jul 4, 2008 · Interviews of Shane Meadows, director of "This Is England". Bonus included in the US ...
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Posted: Jul 4, 2008

Missing: 2006 | Show results with: 2006

Jun 2, 2007 · This edition is all about This Is England and features interviews with Shane and some of the ...
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this is england film shane meadows interview 2006 - Google Search

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. Jul 4, 2008 · Interviews of Shane Meadows, director of "This Is England".

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Core Concepts: Nostalgia in This is England - Shane Meadows 2006-2015

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Edgar Wright Breaks Down Scenes from 'Shaun of the Dead,' 'Last Night in Soho' & More | Vanity Fair

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Interview with a young Christopher Nolan on Memento

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Interview with a young Christopher Nolan on Memento

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Check the 90's fits

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"Amy" Director Asif Kapadia wants Winehouse doc to make you think

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Interview with Matt Ross on Captain Fantastic

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Interview with Matt Ross on Captain Fantastic

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In the new film, "Captain Fantastic", written and directed by Matt Ross, Viggo Mortensen plays Ben Cash, a father who has chosen to live in (and off) the Pacific Northwest wilderness with his wife and their six children, home schooling them away from the corruptible ways of society, preparing their minds and bodies to fend for themselves. Although the film was awarded Best Director in the Un Certain Regards section at this years Cannes Film Festival, the response from U.S. critics has been polarizing.

Nevertheless, Ross is unfazed as he sat down with myself and two fellow colleagues, Patrick McDonald (of Hollywood Chicago.com) and Ian Simmons (of Kicking the Seat), at the Waldorf last month. Primarily known for his acting, Ross has worked in films directed by the likes of Terry Gilliam, John Woo, Martin Scorsese and George Clooney, and has also gained exposure on two HBO shows with memorable roles - as polygamist Alby Grant in "Big Love" and tech giant Gavin Belson in "Silicon Valley".

Comfortable and easy-going, Ross engaged us in an open and in-depth manner as he talked about growing up in an off-the-grid commune, how he instills an environment of "play" on his set and why Viggo is the man to lead this clan....
Pat McDonald: What did you discover about living off the grid that surprised you, both in its ease and its difficulties?
Matt Ross: Well, I don't live off the grid myself. I did as a child. I think one of the most difficult things is that if you don't have running water and its winter and you have to go to the bathroom and it's freezing - to go outside is difficulty. You know, we live very comfortable, all of use, no matter what your socio-economic level is - if you have electricity and running water, you live....
Pat McDonald: ....better than kings of the 16th century!
Matt Ross: ....we absolutely do. You know, if you go camping and you realize, "wow, it's actually cold outside at night". You know?
Pat McDonald: Did you have to research it?
Matt Ross: Well, yes I did. Like I said, my mother started a bunch of alternative living communities - I was say it's reductive and inaccurate to call them hippy communes because it was the 80s. They were people that wanted to live outside of cities, who wanted to live in harmony with nature, who tended to be artisans of crafts people and in a couple places I lived in Oregon, they bought land communally and then each person had their house, like you lived way up there and I'd have to go up a path to get to your house or whatever. And some people had running water and electricity, some people didn't.

So, I lived in that environment before - in the summers we slept in a teepee....uh, when I was home for Christmas, one of my close friends said, "What are you working on?" I told him about this movie and he said, "Oh! So-in-so lives this way." And I said, "No. I hadn't seen him since high school." I called him. He built his house in Washington State. He home schools his kids and he suggested many books to read - many of them I already read, those books are available, if you just do your research and go to the library or just go to Amazon - you know, we live in a culture of a lot of information. It's easily found. I did a lot of research.

My production designer, Russell Barnes and I - he grew up in New Zealand, in rural communities and off the grid - so, he brought lots to the table. He and I discussed a lot of it. Viggo was very adamant about making sure that everything was accurate. It's a fully functioning homestead. When you live off the grid, you have certain questions....What's your water source? That's primary - shelter and water are of primary importance. So, how do you have clean water? We show that in the movie. Uh, whether you have a roof over your head, you got to get your shelter. How are you preserving your food? We show that - not only are they cooking venison, they're smoking fish. They're jarring and canning. Uh, you see an outhouse, you know, sanitation is a big one. You know, all these questions were adamant on answering, because the movie takes place in the real world, it's not a fantasy.
David J. Fowlie: So, then with being off the grid and everything, the hard part is reintegration. That developed into the movie. Can you talk about where and how you wanted to introduce reintegration into your screenplay?
Matt Ross: Well, I'm not sure they reintegrate - well, without revealing the end of the movie - which we can talk about, but I'd prefer not to reveal any names....
David J. Fowlie: Of course. Well, they go on a journey....
Matt Ross: Right. They go on a journey and in this case, I don't believe he compensates any of his values. He's just come to realize that his children need some socialization and you'll see that in the narrative in a lot of ways. The journey in the movie, is not one about reintegration - it's more that they're unaccustomed to the outside world. They have some interaction with the local town, where they get their mail and I think it was a way of observing and commenting on the United States today through this family - as a way to kind of reflect on who we are, what our cultural is and what our values are, through this family.
Ian Simmons: Speaking about commenting on culture, there are many different ways to look at the voice that's presented in the film. In some ways, Ben is seen as this hero father, teaching his family how to live in the wild and turn their back on everything that's materialistic in society. But at the end, he perhaps doesn't have everything together. So, it's not black and white, there's a lot of gray there. How important was it for you to infect that or is that something you discovered.
Matt Ross: That was vital to me. I think that we are all the heroes of our own story and in movies no one thinks they're the bad guy and I think life is all shades of gray. Personally, I love movies that exist in shades of gray, where you think someone can behave heroically and villainously - if that's even a word, I don't think it is - in a villain-like manner. I think that, Viggo and I talked about this, Frank Langella and I talked about this, and I wrote Frank a letter, I said, "You're not the villain in this movie. I don't want to portray you that way. I think that he has a point of view of parenting and about our culture that's based on economic and socio-economic level and his education. And I don't think that he's, he's not the bad mean grandpa.

I also think that the movie portrays, I would say that there are many America's within the United States of America. I think this movie shows three - it shows the rural America, which in this case is this family and there are many kinds of rural America, it shows suburban America, which is Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn, which most of us exist because most of our country exists in the suburbs and then it portrays the Frank Langella and Anne Dowd characters, the grandparents, who are living in a gulf course culture or sort of gated community that tends to be a little bit conservative and sometimes religious.

My intention - to answer your question - is to portray them all with nuance. They all have positives and negatives. We are all flawed people. All the actors and I, tried to reflect what I felt was in the script. We're not vilifying or demonizing anyone. And maybe, ideally, I hope, you follow this character thinking this is the hero and over time you start to question why is there.
Pat McDonald: So, the kid actors, of all ages, were quite remarkable and you had to ask them to pretend about a concept that would seem for most of them far outside their lives. What was the most interesting question you got from the actors about their characters and which needed the most help understanding the concepts?
Matt Ross: Wow, that's a great question. I'm having to rack my brain to think about that. I think the surprising answer is that they did not have any problems with any of it, really. I don't think they knew who Noam Chomsky was - part of it was that it was a slow educational process. We had a two-week boot camp or we sent them to a wilderness survival camp, where they learned to make a fire or how to build a shelter. They learned how to find edible plants. They slept under the stars. They learned to track. They all had to play musical instruments. The two young women - they were girls at the time - Sammi Isler and Annalise Basso butchered a sheep, because they dress a deer in the movie. They all learned knife skills. They all learned some combat skills. We really began to acclimate them. Ultimately, it's for them to look like they know what they're doing. You can't learn German in two days, but you can memorize the lines with the right tone and intonations, so that the audience believes it.

But ultimately, what it's about is bonding with Viggo - they also did tons of rock-climbing. because of the rock-climbing sequence - they bond with Viggo, so they can begin to look at him as their father and learn to trust him and to love him. They ended up calling him Summer Dad. But I also gave them books. I gave them Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: For Children - yes, there's also a book for children. First they were like, "Really, dude? It's summer and we have to read these fucking books?" (all laugh) C'mon guys! C'mon....
Ian Simmons: Were they reading them on their phones, so you could?....
Matt Ross: No, man. In fact I had them sign a contract - No phones, No iPads on Set.
David J. Fowlie: Wow.
Matt Ross: I can't control what you do when you go home, but I want you to be present here. I don't want you to be in-between takes checking out IMDb or US magazine or whatever - I want you to be present here. So, there's no electronics on set. I made them sign a contract that they would eat well. I wanted them to at least experiment with not eating junk food. Um, you know, no coke, no candy. I want you to just, I told them these are all the things - and they took it seriously. They really took it seriously and they signed the contract and they said that the punishment was push-ups.
David J. Fowlie: That's funny, cuz I think you just answered my next question. I was wondering if you had a similar approach to directing as Viggo's character does to parenting in the movie.
Matt Ross: I think my ultimate directorial style is "play". You know, the word "play" in reference to theater, it's called a play - I believe in that verb. We come to play. We come to explore. I don't expect you to prop up this script like its a dead object. You know, we've all agreed on this text. We've all agreed on this narrative. You agreed to come do this. You're not thinking James Bond movie (all laugh) - you've read the script, you know what part you're playing and we agreed to do this and now let's play and explore and there's no right, there's no wrong. Let's just play. Let's rehearse in front of the camera and let's try a thousand different things.

And, you know, it's something I talk about a lot and I really believe this - and this is to answer your question - is that, none of us in our lives, whatever our careers are, can control what other people think of our work. Once it's done....they like your article or they don't like it. They think you're an idiot. They think you're brilliant. Whatever. You can't control that. What you can control is the joy in doing that....
Pat McDonald: ....is the work itself.
Matt Ross: ....is the work itself. So, on the day when we're working, I try and create an atmosphere where we're all enjoying the work. We work really hard. But that's the only think you can hold on to. I think that's true.
Ian Simmons: In terms of, the idea of "play", which sounds great and really comes across in the film and how everyone is committed to being free...but there is a scene towards the beginning where Ben breaks some really bad news to his family. And that was a gut-wrenching scene, because of all the reactions to the children who were fantastic. It feels so genuine. How did you get them to that place?
Matt Ross: Some of it is time....you know, this gets to "play". So, Viggo and I talked about it. The purpose of that scene for me was, as written, was that he doesn't lie or sugar coat anything. We have all these euphemisms for death - "oh, so-in-so passed away", "they've gone somewhere better" - and all these things. He just says, "She died"....
Pat McDonald: "She killed herself."
Matt Ross: "She killed herself". He tells them the absolute truth. He's not to protect them - he's trying to be honest. I mean, Kathryn Hahn's character later on, his sister, says, "Protecting children from certain truths they're too young to comprehend is not lying to them". Well, he actually believes it is depending on the circumstance and in this case he wants to be honest with them.

To prepare them for it, I talked to each kid individually about it. George (McKay, who plays Viggo's eldest son) and I had a very long talk about the death of someone he knew recently and how he wanted to express that feeling. Viggo had an idea - which went counter to the original scene, but we shot it anyway and it was a really good idea, which was that he would read a poem because he thought that, in some ways, in this family through literature they'd talk about things.

So, he read a poem - I can't remember, I think it's a Keats poem, I think The Mermaid, about a mermaid that, in her love for someone kills them and she brings them down to the depths, if I'm remembering correctly. And it's this poem kind of about death and he reads the poem and all the kids are looking like "what is dad talking about?" and they kind of understand it, because they're savvy, but they're not really sure and then he just comes right out and tells them.

For a while, that was in the edit and that comes down to "play", that was his idea. It's a collaboration. We brought it in. I shot it. He's great in it. It's a beautiful idea, but ultimately, I cut it out because I thought that it was unnecessary - well, I shouldn't say unnecessary - but I like the idea that he just comes in and says "I'm gonna tell the truth". Really, it's about talking. Talking, then discussing and playing. And the kids, you know, they all in their own ways, are emotionally connected children. And then, on some level, honestly, it's craft and acting. I didn't ask them "Is that a real tear or are you acting?" I didn't intrude in that way, because acting is an interpretive art and it just took time, but I'm glad it seemed affective to you.
Pat McDonald: So, Gavin Belson is one of those big league capitalists that the family rails against....
Matt Ross: Yes, indeed!
Pat McDonald: ....If that family were to speak up against Belson, how would Gavin fight back, based on how you know him by now?
Matt Ross: Oh, that's a hilarious question. Um, I think Gavin would cry and be very upset, because I think he sees himself as a man of the people in every way and I think he would say, "You know what, I'm gonna buy you all Teslas". He'd probably buy their affection.
David J. Fowlie: Can you talk about the casting of Viggo - cuz he's just so brilliant in this. Is this your ideal Ben? Did you always have Viggo in mind? And once he was signed on, did he add any characterization of the role that maybe wasn't in the script?
Matt Ross: So, yes, the first question is - when I was writing it, I did not have any specific actor in mind. I've said this many time, I think it's a fool's errand, you have no idea what people's schedules are, you don't know when people are available. You never know if you can get the script to them. I think I vaguely based, because of my age, I has sort of - Harrison Ford when he was in his forties, back in the day, because when I was in junior high, he was a huge star and I saw all those movies and there was something about him that was both masculine and vulnerable....
David J. Fowlie: "The Mosquito Coast" comes to mind....
Matt Ross: Yes, "Mosquito Coast" and "Witness" and I just love his persona as an actor, but Viggo was my first choice. My creative producer, Lynette Howell Taylor, said when it came time, "Who do you want to cast?" And I thought of Viggo and he's just an actor I've come to admire over the years. I've come to know him. I didn't know him before, but I needed someone who believed in what he said and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

Viggo is a highly-articulated, highly-intelligent man. He's physically fit, you need someone who's fit. The truth is, with some of our movie stars, I just wouldn't buy that they would convincingly live this way. And I feel like with Viggo, you do. I believe it and that may be based on what movies he's been in or - the truth is, he's a photographer and a writer and a painter - he's a Renaissance man and he is all those things and I've gotten to know him and he's built a home in a western state. I don't know if he'd want me to reveal where it is, but he'll say he's not Ben, yet he has a great knowledge of the natural environment - he's hunted and fished and lived in the forest and existed in harmony with nature and he knows this world - so he brought all that. A lot of the props in the movie are his, it's a lot of his own stuff. He planted the garden. He understands how to plant a functioning vegetable garden.

As for the second part of your question, I think every actor changes the tone, right? If it were Viggo Mortensen, it's be one thing. If it were Matt Damon, it'd be another thing - we could go through a list of actors and they'd all have their own tone. They all bring their own persona. I think that on the page, the character has a little more of a spark in his eye. A little more of a jokester. He was a little more playful and Viggo is a more centered, honest and his charisma is more low-key and he made his own Ben.
Ian Simmons: What did you learn about yourself, during the course of making this film, because it feels deeply personal?
Matt Ross: It is personal. That's always a hard question. I think, one of the great ironies of this movie is that it's a movie about a parent being the best he can be and yet I have two kids and my wife is raising my children in my stead - in my total absence. That's nothing but ironic.
David J. Fowlie: Kudos to her.
Matt Ross: Indeed. Indeed. Uh, one of the things I've learned, cuz the movie has a lot to do with parenting, among many other things, is that it's a day-to-day thing. You know, just being a good global citizen is a day-to-day judgement. I think being a good parent is and that every day is a different challenge. I think, really for me, it's about mindfulness and trying to be present, which are Buddhist concepts and you don't have to be Buddhist to practice those things, but I try and be as present as I can - with the people I'm talking to and the food I'm eating. I think life goes really quickly and it's very easy to be tuned out and not present. That's not to say that I don't play video games with my son, because I also do that. But I think one of the things I learned and am striving to do is being mindful.
Ian Simmons: Well, thank you very much.
Matt Ross: Thank you, guys.
"Captain Fantastic" received a limited theatrical release on July 8, 2016 and opens in Chicago this Friday, July 15, 2016.

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Interview with CAPTAIN FANTASTIC writer/director Matt Ross

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In the new film, "Captain Fantastic", written and directed by Matt Ross, Viggo Mortensen plays Ben Cash, a father who has chosen to live in (and off) the Pacific Northwest wilderness with his wife and their six children, home schooling them away from the corruptible ways of society, preparing their minds and bodies to...

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Todd Haynes: ‘She said, there’s a frock film coming up, with Cate attached … It sounded right up my alley’

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As his film Carol opens, the director talks about getting the 50s look in Cincinnati and the enduring influence of … Mary Poppins

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Make some of these your pick for movie night

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From 'The Zone of Interest' to 'Dune: Part Two', the best reasons to head to the cinema

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Save the cat! Amazing software to help you generate story ideas.

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Save the cat! Amazing software to help you generate story ideas.

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Use this to help you generate ideas for your own short films. An amazing rich resource.

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Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!® - The Language of Storytelling

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Save the Cat! provides writers the resources they need to develop their screenplays and novels based on a series of best-selling books, primarily written by Blake Snyder (1957- 2009). Our books, workshops, story structure software, apps, and story coaching teach you everything you need to unlock the…

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Best films of 2023 so far (According to the BBC)

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Best films of 2023 so far (According to the BBC)

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Get your watch list ticked off!

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By Nicholas Barber and Caryn James Features correspondent

(Credit: Searchlight Pictures/Warner Bros)

BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year, including Barbie, Oppenheimer, Maestro and Killers of the Flower Moon.

(Credit: Alamy)

The numbers in this list do not represent ranking, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.

This tough-minded, heart-breaking drama about race, class and motherhood was France's entry to last year's Oscar race, and I'm still mystified as to why it wasn't nominated. Alice Diop puts her experience making documentaries to good use, as she bases her story on the real-life case of a young Senegalese woman in France charged with abandoning her baby on a beach to die. Diop invents Rama, a pregnant novelist who goes to the town of Saint Omer to witness the trial, which plays into her own doubts and fears. As Laurence, the mother on trial, Guslagie Malanda is unnaturally calm, almost frozen in resignation. Kayije Kagame as Rama lets you see her mind racing and her heart pounding as she watches, even though her face is impassive. Diop based her dialogue on court transcripts, but the results go far beyond dry facts on the page to create an enthralling film with two profound and vivid women on screen. (CJ)

(Credit: Profile Pictures/One Two Films/Nordisk Film Production/Wild Bun)

Ali Abbasi's grisly Holy Spider is based on the true story of a married builder (Mehdi Bajestani) who murdered 16 sex workers in Iran's holy city of Mashhad in 2000 and 2001. Starring Zar Amir Ebrahimi (winner of the best actress award at Cannes) as the determined journalist investigating the crimes, it seems at first to be an atmospheric companion piece to Silence of the Lambs and other big-screen serial-killer dramas. The provocative twist is that some citizens and politicians see the murderer as a local hero on a moral crusade. Behind the generic thrills, Holy Spider is an examination of society-wide misogyny that seems all the more astute in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests. (NB)

(Credit: Alamy)

A culture clash comedy of manners with a horror meme twist, Nida Manzoor's (We are Lady Parts) film is one of the freshest, most fun-to-watch of the year. Manzoor's first inventive choice is to create an unlikely teenage heroine, Ria (Priya Kansara), a London girl of Pakistani descent, who is determined to become a stuntwoman, adding martial arts flair and action to the movie. Then Manzoor ramps up the stakes, when Ria's older sister decides to marry a rich, handsome man whom Ria suspects is not what he seems. His over-the-top, controlling mother has a sinister smile worthy of a Disney villain. As the outlandish elements pile on, the film gleefully blends all its elements, from Ria's comic schemes to thwart the wedding, to her Bollywood-ready dance scene and nuanced portraits of her understanding parents, creating a smart and thoroughly enjoyable romp. (CJ)

(Credit: Neon)

4. How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Inspired by Andreas Malm's non-fiction book, this unbearably tense indie thriller introduces a rag-tag group of eco-activists who are planning to bomb an oil pipeline in West Texas. They have all been hurt by pollution, corporate greed, and the climate crisis, and this, they believe, is the only way they can fight back. Cutting between their nervous preparations and the back stories that led them to Texas, Daniel Goldhaber's tightly focused film echoes several classic heist movies - Reservoir Dogs in particular - but it has some crucial differences. The criminals aren't motivated by greed, the details of their amateur bomb-making are fascinatingly specific, and, because they are handling explosive chemicals, they are always in danger of killing themselves by accident. (NB)

Celine Song's lovely, nuanced first feature is a romance that rejects the clichés of the genre. Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) were best friends, closely bonded forever as children in Korea, until her family immigrated to Canada. Years later, when she is married and living in New York, he re-enters her life. Their reconnection is at first wavering, and their meeting in New York full of deep feeling along with sharp realism, as the film recognises both the allure of a long-ago love for Nora, and the strength of her marriage to Arthur (John Magaro). Through Nora and Hae Sung's deftly portrayed relationship, Song also unveils themes of memory and cultural identity, but it is the love story that dominates and lingers, demonstrating that romance doesn't always lead to a kiss in the rain. Sometimes it is wrapped in a beautiful wistfulness. (CJ)

(Credit: Toho)

Suzume is a teenage schoolgirl who discovers that the derelict doors in abandoned towns all over Japan can be used as portals to another dimension. Now it's up to her to stop a destructive monster getting through those doors, with the help of a boy who has been turned into a chair, and a talking kitten that could well be a goddess. Yes, the apocalyptic new anime from Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering with You) is a dazzling feat of imagination, but the writer-director balances magical fantasy with warmth, humour and deep concern for his country. Suzume's mythical exploits are set in a gorgeously painted, recognisable Japan, and she and her friends are ordinary people with ordinary hopes and regrets - and that includes the boy who's been turned into a chair. (NB)

(Credit: Universal)

Christopher Nolan's magnificent film is among the best of his career. He combines all the elements he has brought to other films - the volatile action of The Dark Knight trilogy, the cerebral layers of Memento and the absorbing narrative of Inception - in this character study of the conflicted American hero J Robert Oppenheimer (the flawless Cillian Murphy), the physicist known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb, who grappled with the moral consequences of his actions for the rest of his life. With fiery tension Nolan depicts the first testing of the bomb, and throughout interweaves the drama of Oppenheimer's politically ambitious nemesis, the government bureaucrat Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who orchestrated false suspicions of communist involvement that shadowed the scientist's post-war life. Nolan long ago mastered the balancing act between artistic accomplishment and commercial success, and Oppenheimer stands as the finest example of a movie that is both freshly imagined and hugely popular. (CJ)

(Credit: ZIP CINEMA & CJ ENM Co)

Broker is as bittersweet and nuanced as the previous films from Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters), but it's also his funniest, most crowd-pleasing work: the Japanese writer-director's first Korean production is a romantic road movie reminiscent of Little Miss Sunshine as well as the Coen brothers' crime capers. Song Kang Ho from Parasite plays a Busan launderette owner with an unusual side hustle. With the aid of a big-hearted sidekick, he sells unwanted infants to couples who want to circumvent the legal adoption process, but only after he's satisfied that they are the ideal parents for the child. When one infant's birth mother wants to get involved in the business, and two police detectives start following them, secret motives are revealed, sympathies shift, mysteries deepen and dangers multiply, all the way to the poignant, elegantly plotted finale. (NB)

(Credit: Les Films Pelléas/ Les Films de Pierre)

Winner of this year's Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet's drama about a writer accused of killing her husband is a brilliant oxymoron: a film made with remarkable clarity even as it explores a search for truths that may never be found. Sandra Huller plays the accused, also named Sandra, whose husband tumbled to his death from the window of their house in the French Alps. Whether it was accident, suicide or murder is the question driving the plot and its courtroom scenes, but at its heart the film deals with the couple's crumbling marriage and with Sandra's flinty personality. Huller's bracingly original performance makes her enigmatic even while revealing her fierce independence, selfishness, and lies. The elusiveness of truth itself eventually extends to the motives of the couple's 11-year-old son, sympathetic to both his father's memory and his mother's jeopardy, in a film as coolly detached yet as beautiful as its snowy landscape. (CJ)

(Credit: HBO Films)

In June 2017, FBI agents visited the home of Reality Winner (her real name, unlikely as it may seem), a US Government translator who had leaked a classified document to the press. Tina Satter's ingenious debut film dramatises their encounter, with Sydney Sweeney in the lead role, and dialogue taken wholesale from recordings made at the time. What this means is that the low-key interrogation has the repetitions and hesitations of actual speech, which makes Reality seem close to reality (one of several ways that the title applies), yet also weirdly nightmarish. It's somewhere between an art installation, a documentary, and a nerve-racking horror movie. Some news outlets branded Winner a treacherous radical, yet Satter's haunting film depicts a vulnerable, confused, but brave young woman who is trapped in a bare white room with two men twice her size. (NB)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Credit: Apple TV+)

11. Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese's epic is as ambitious as anything he has done. Drawing on David Grann's non-fiction book about the murders of dozens of members of the oil-rich Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma. Scorsese places a jaw-dropping story of a marriage, power and money into an expansive Western landscape and the cultural sweep of the era, in all its violence, racism and ethnic hatred. The film's lead actors are at their stunning best, which is saying a lot. Robert De Niro is stern and callous as the powerful cattle baron William Hale and Leonardo DiCaprio is vibrant as his mercenary nephew, Ernest. In a performance of serene eloquence, Lily Gladstone is Mollie, whom Ernest marries and plots to murder for the money she has as part of the Osage nation. Mollie is the heart of the story, and Scorsese and Gladstone do her real-life story justice. (CJ)

(Credit: Warner Bros)

Could Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling bag Oscar nominations for playing plastic toys in a candy-coloured advert for branded merchandise? It's certainly possible, given the success of what has become the highest-grossing film of 2023 so far, as well as the highest-grossing film ever to be directed solely by a woman. And those are just two of its achievements. Barbie was overseen by Mattel, the company which manufactures the dolls, but its director and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, seems to have been granted the freedom to bring her own quirky vision to the screen. She upended expectations not only by commenting on commercialism and the patriarchy (much to the annoyance of some internet commentators), but by leaping into the realms of postmodern, Charlie Kaufman-ish weirdness. Beyond that, Barbie is a genuinely funny feelgood comedy - and how many of those do we see in cinemas these days? (NB)

(Credit: courtesy of TIFF)

In his audacious first film, writer and director Cord Jefferson blends nuanced family drama with a brash, funny satire of racial stereotyping. In a perfectly balanced performance, Jeffrey Wright grounds the film as a novelist and academic so disgusted by the state of the culture and so tired of reductive images of black people that he writes a book playing into every stereotype, only to have his angrily written tease become a bestseller. Meanwhile, he is dealing with his ageing mother, played with poignancy and grace by Leslie Uggams, and his siblings, played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K Brown, perfectly cast. Loosely based on Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure, the film makes its publishing and academic racists too cartoonish, easy targets, but Jefferson's skill still makes American Fiction one of the year's most bracing comic-dramas. (CJ)

The Creator (Credit: 20th Century Studios)

What a treat to see an original science-fiction blockbuster, for a change, rather than an adaptation or a reboot of some over-used, decades-old intellectual property. Even better, The Creator works as a self-contained one-off at a time when most films of this kind are blatant attempts to set up franchises. Directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), it's set in the all-too-near future, when humanity is battling for survival against artificially intelligent robots, and a commando (John David Washington) is given the task of destroying the enemy's ultimate weapon. The likes of The Terminator, Blade Runner and The Matrix had similar premises, of course, but Edwards has crafted a gritty war epic with its own sombre mood, and with hazy imagery that makes even the most far-fetched androids and spaceships look real. He also opts for a sprawling, philosophical plot that mixes doom and gloom with a dash of hard-won optimism. (NB)

(Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Courtesy of NEON)

Ava DuVernay's deeply engaging and emotionally wrenching Origin is something only a filmmaker with her imagination and vision could have made. She transforms Isabel Wilkerson's rigorous non-fiction book Caste - which argues that caste, even more than race, subjugates people worldwide - into a personal story about Wilkerson's process of researching and writing the book while grieving the recent deaths of the most important people in her life. Aunjanue Ellis's performance as Wilkerson creates a character both cerebral and heartfelt. And the film always keeps the book's sweeping historical argument in sight, giving it dramatic shape with scenes from a World War Two Nazi book-burning, to untouchables cleaning sewers in 20th-Century India and the 2012 killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin, which appalled the US. As she did in the series When They See Us, here DuVernay turns reality into an intensely moving drama. (CJ)

(Credit: Focus Features)

Christmas, 1970. A resentful teenage boy (Dominic Sessa) is forced to spend the holiday without friends or family in his grand boarding school, so it falls to a curmudgeonly classics teacher (Paul Giamatti) and a bereaved cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) to look after him. Packed with jokes and colour by its screenwriter, David Hemingson, this warm festive comedy is directed by Alexander Payne. Because of its tone, its relaxed setting and its period setting, it has been compared to various 1970s indie classics, but The Holdovers is also a pleasing throwback to the early 2000s, when it wasn't unusual for the likes of Payne, Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach to make mid-budget, grown-up comedy dramas about relatively ordinary people. Indeed, Payne and Giamatti collaborated on Sideways in 2004, and The Holdovers could be the most delightful project that either of them has been involved in since. (NB)

(Credit: Searchlight Pictures)

Andrew Haigh had already established himself as a writer-director of great sensitivity with films including 45 Years and Weekend, but All of Us Strangers takes him to a new level. Andrew Scott has never been better or more touching, as a middle-aged writer Adam, who starts a relationship with a younger man, played with energy and vulnerability by Paul Mescal. Writing about his late parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), Adam imagines that he can enter the past and meet them as an adult, although they haven't aged since he was 12. Beautifully filmed to create an ethereal quality, from Adam's childhood home to his austere high-rise London flat, All of Us Strangers is not a ghost story, but an immersion into memory and the painfulness of love and loss that, remarkably, rejects mawkishness and creates piercingly real emotions in the hero's past and present. (CJ)

(Credit: Atsushi Nishijima)

The Favourite was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, co-written by Tony McNamara, and it starred Emma Stone. Now the three of them have reunited for Poor Things, a raucous adaptation of Alasdair Gray's fabulous comic novel - and it's even more inventive and over-the-top than The Favourite was. Stone plays Bella, a drowned woman who is brought back to life by a Frankenstein-like scientist (Willem Dafoe). As she has no memories of her previous existence, she has no hang-ups or inhibitions either, so she can push aside the conventions of Victorian Europe - or the film's surreal, picture-book version of Victorian Europe, anyway. Stone is magnificently odd as the fearless Bella, and yet somewhere beneath the wackiness of this rollicking fairy tale is a piquant commentary on the ways in which women are tied down by a patriarchal society. (NB)

The Boy and the Heron (Credit: Studio Ghibli/Courtesy TIFF)

The master of animation, Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, returns after a decade with another dazzling, majestic work that moves between reality and fantasy and weaves together many strands from his life and previous films. Set during the World War Two period of the 82-year-old Miyazaki's own childhood, the story centres on a boy named Mahito, whose mother is killed by a bomb in Tokyo and whose father works for a company creating Japanese military planes. Like the heroines of Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), Mahito enters a magical, often terrifying world, where his mother might be calling to him - and where he encounters ominous giant pink parakeets and other dangers. Through the lonely, fearless Mahito, the film explores grief and the fuzzy line between life and death in Miyazaki's unmistakable style, with hand-drawn images of delicate beauty and colours. (CJ)

Maestro (Credit: Netflix)

Bradley Cooper follows his directorial debut, A Star Is Born, with another in-depth account of love in the music business, proving in the process that he isn't just a heart-throb actor who is having a go behind the camera, but a major director in his own right. His vibrant and technically dazzling biopic of Leonard Bernstein is distinctive in several ways, not least in that it ignores some of the composer and conductor's most famous achievements (such as scoring West Side Story) to focus instead on his long and complicated marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Carey Mulligan's sparkling performance as Montealegre is a career highlight, and Cooper is almost as impressive in the central role. He shows just how exhausting and egocentric Bernstein could be, but the film glows with his deep affection for the maestro. (NB)

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Barbie, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon: The 20 best films of 2023

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BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year, including Barbie, Oppenheimer, Maestro and Killers of the Flower Moon.

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A great video about how to make good decisions when filming. Also includes a colour grading tutorial in Da Vinci Resolve (free software that is amazing!!)

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This is How You Practice Cinematography (All By Yourself)

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Why do Wes Anderson movies look like that?

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Why do Wes Anderson movies look like that?

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Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

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Online Film-making course from BFI for £15

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Online Film-making course from BFI for £15

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How to Make a Short Film - Online Filmmaking Course - FutureLearn

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Do you have a passion for film? Learn the key skills of filmmaking in this online course from the British Film Institute.

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Where to watch this year's Oscar Nominated films...

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Where to watch this year's Oscar Nominated films...

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"All Quiet on the Western Front" is my fave from the list. Absolutely incredible cinematography and mise-en-scene (but don't watch if you don't want to be sad afterwards....)

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Oscars Streaming Guide: Where to Watch All The Feature Film Nominees

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. The nominees for the 95th Academy Awards were announced Tues…

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The 20 best films of 2022 (according to the BBC)

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The 20 best films of 2022 (according to the BBC)

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How many have you seen?

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Delightfully bonkers on the surface, this inventive extravaganza from the directing team called Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) has a deep layer of family feeling and a well-earned emotional pull at the end. Michelle Yeoh is ideal and comically straight-faced as Evelyn, a harried laundromat owner with tax problems who enters a multiverse of alt-Evelyns. Exploding with colour, at times the film is a phantasmagoria of morphing identities and shifting universes - in one Evelyn does laundry, in another she's a movie star - yet it always remains true to its believably humane characters. It's the rare art film that can make audiences cry, and also rake in a ton of money, taking in more than $100 million at the box office worldwide. (CJ)
2. Top Gun: Maverick
A belated sequel to 1986's Top Gun seemed like a bad idea. But when Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) returned to the US Navy's elite fighter-pilot school, the resulting blockbuster wasn't just a thrilling showcase for some spectacular aerobatic displays, but a touching, bittersweet drama about getting older. It was also the year's most successful film. So... how did Cruise and co do it? Simple, really. They brought back all the elements from the original Top Gun, and then they improved every single one of them. Of course, it helps that Cruise looks better today than he did in 1986. (NB)

3. Turning Red
This joyous Pixar coming-of-age cartoon introduces a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) who transforms into a giant fluffy red panda whenever she gets stressed. Her fast-moving misadventures are rendered with all the expertise you would expect from Pixar, but Turning Red is more personal than the studio's other releases. From its multi-cultural urban setting to its positivity about being a proudly nerdy teenage girl, everything in it seems to come straight from the heart of its director and co-writer, Domee Shi. It's just a shame that the film went straight to streaming, rather than getting the cinema release it deserved. (NB)

4. Happening
The past is a template for the present in Audrey Diwan's eloquent, heart-wrenching story, based on a memoir by Annie Ernaux, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. Anne, an ordinary college student, (touchingly played by Anamaria Vartolomei) is desperate to get an abortion in France in 1963. Knowing that motherhood would destroy her future, Anne unhesitatingly seeks out illegal help, in detailed scenes that expose the hypocrisy of the medical establishment and the callousness of society at large. Diwan's measured approach reflects the heroine's quiet determination, avoiding preachiness and melodrama even as Anne races against time toward a suspenseful ending. Artful and socially resonant, Happening is one of the most poignant and moving films of the year. (CJ)

5. After Yang
Let's just flatly say: Kogonada is a genius. The director of the stylish character piece Columbus (2017), and a major force behind the exquisite Apple TV+ series Pachinko, he breathes new life and visual brilliance into After Yang's tired-sounding premise of an artificial intelligence with feelings. Colin Farrell is affecting as a father trying to repair his young daughter's beloved AI robot, Yang, played by Justin H Min with the unmistakable glimmer of a human soul. Filmed in a style that is still and beautiful, infused with golden light, and set in a timeless near-future, this transcendent film is stunning, from the exuberant family dance competition in the opening credits to its revelatory ending. (CJ)
6. Moonage Daydream
Brett Morgen's Crossfire Hurricane and Cobain: Montage of Heck bent the rules of the rock documentary, but his David Bowie film, Moonage Daydream, smashes them to pieces. Instead of taking viewers on a guided tour of the best-known parts of Bowie's life and career, it plunges them into a long, trippy exploration of his influences, travels, philosophies, and artistic endeavours: his acrylic painting and stage acting get more time than some of his albums. It's a bold approach to a fascinating and hugely charming man. And, as psychedelic as it can be, it eventually hones in on one universal question: what is the best way for any human being to live their life? (NB)

7. Triangle of Sadness
In the latest corrosive satire from Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, The Square), the writer-director takes aim at the capitalist craziness inherent in fashion modelling, social media and luxury cruises. What's unique about Triangle of Sadness, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is Ostlund's combination of subtlety and excess. He makes astute observations about small social niceties, but he pushes every awkward situation to the point where viewers gasp and wince. And then there's the scene in which a shipful of super-rich passengers suffers one of cinema's worst ever bouts of seasickness... (NB)
8. The Eternal Daughter
Tilda Swinton gives two stunning performances, playing both an aging mother, Rosalind, and her middle-aged, filmmaker daughter, Julie, in one of the year's most eloquent, hauntingly beautiful films. Writer and director Joanna Hogg plays off ghost stories, with the two women staying at a creaky old isolated hotel, where they seem to be the only guests. But as Julie grapples with trying to write a screenplay about her mother, and they talk about the past, it becomes clear that the film is really mining depths of memory and regret, questioning what we can and can't know about the people we love. The women's conversations and the atmospheric story, which unfold with ease, lead us to wonder what might have happened and what might have been imagined. What is undoubtedly real is the deep emotional impact of this delicately told film, evidence of a brilliant director at work. (CJ)

9. The Fabelmans
We've known for decades that the broken families in Steven Spielberg's films were inspired by his own, but in the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans he gives us the story in a pure, direct, realistic form - no extra-terrestrials required - and creates one of his most emotionally honest, least sentimental works. The film is shaped by sharply-drawn performances from Gabriel LaBelle as the adolescent Sammy (Spielberg's fictional alter ego), Michelle Williams as his imaginative, frustrated mother, and especially Paul Dano as his no-nonsense father - the latter two being people so different, they are doomed to break apart. Sammy's amateur movies add wit to the film, but it is the family feeling that endures. Looking back with adult eyes, Spielberg sees his parents with all their flaws, yet infuses the film with warmth, understanding and love. (CJ)
10. RRR
RRR isn't just one of the best films of the year - it's several of the best films of the year. SS Rajamouli's Telugu-language masterpiece is an inspiring historical drama about Indian citizens rebelling against the British Raj in the 1920s; it's a glitzy romantic musical worthy of Hollywood's golden age; it's a shadowy crime thriller about two double agents who become friends; it's a crazily over-the-top action movie, and it's a thunderous superhero epic. What's most amazing is that all these genres and tones fit so seamlessly together to tell one powerful story. (NB)

11. The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh's usual dark humour and honed dialogue are there in The Banshees of Inisherin, but he has swapped the splashy violence and aggressive irony of his earlier films (In Bruges; Seven Psychopaths) for something sadder, stranger and more poetic. This is a quiet, small-scale comedy drama that hinges on an absurd disagreement between two seemingly decent men (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) in a small pub on a tiny Irish island. It builds into a haunting fable, and a reminder of what a terrific actor Farrell can be. (NB)
12. Babylon
Epics are sprawling and messy, and so is Damien Chazelle's ( La La Land) ambitious extravaganza about early Hollywood, when talking pictures came to be. There are so many buoyant set pieces and colourful performances, though, that they overcome the film's misbegotten flaws (too many endings). Margot Robbie is bold and sympathetic as Nellie LaRoy, a wild child actress who enters the film by crashing a crowded party full of jazz, drugs, naked bodies and star-making producers. Brad Pitt is at first hilarious as a silent-movie idol trapped in period films. A behind-the-scenes sequence about making one of his pictures is a frantic comic episode that could stand alone. And he is poignant as a new generation pushes him aside. There is an elephant, a studio mogul and a gossip columnist, all swirled into a bravura film that takes you fully inside its world, and suggests that the dark side of Hollywood and its magical creations were always one and the same. (CJ)

13. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Benoit Blanc has another murder mystery to solve in Rian Johnson's irresistible follow-up to Knives Out. As in the first film, the suspects are a clique of wealthy, entitled Americans, but this time they're tech tycoons and social-media influencers (Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monaie, Dave Bautista) lounging around a private Greek island. The twisty plot isn't quite as ingenious as Johnson's last one, but the writer-director has gone all-out to make everything in Glass Onion as big, broad, funny and colourful as Daniel Craig's southern drawl. (NB)
14. Decision to Leave
Park Chan-wook puts a ravishing spin on a timeless story of romantic obsession and a detective who falls for his suspect. In Busan, South Korea, the meticulous Hae-jin investigates the death of an older man who fell off a mountain, leaving behind his beautiful young widow, Seo-rae. That she is a Chinese immigrant adds another layer of language and cultural misunderstanding. Suspicion begins to turn toward her, but by then Hae-jin may be too much under her spell to care. Park expertly feeds us just enough information to keep us enthralled and guessing as we go down the rabbit hole. This is also one of the best directed films of the year, each shot composed for maximum effect. Its off-kilter compositions, close-ups and wide vistas of city and countryside are captivating but never distracting. Park may owe a debt to Vertigo, but he makes the genre his own. (CJ)

15. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
You've probably never seen a Pinocchio who dances for Mussolini, but Guillermo del Toro's dark, stirring, yet life-affirming take on the classic tale of the puppet who becomes a real boy has more in common with Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, his own fantastical, politically charged films, than with the familiar Disney version. With bright, artfully designed puppets and dazzling stop-motion animation, he and co-director Mark Gustafson create a Geppetto whose young son is killed by a bomb during World War One. Decades later, in a drunken state of grief, he carves Pinocchio, a spindly-legged, long-nosed creature full of joy, who comes to call Geppetto Papa and to encounter a glittering blue Wood Sprite and her sister, Death (both voiced by Tilda Swinton; it's her year of dual roles). It's hard to imagine a more unsettling version of the story - Pinocchio runs off to join a carnival, and is forced to perform for the Fascist leader - or one as glorious and rich. It is as alive as its once-wooden hero, who loves life as much as any human boy could. (CJ)
16. Tár
In her typical crisply intelligent and authoritative fashion, Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a renowned conductor who is preparing for a major recording of a Mahler symphony. She seems to be an inspirational heroine, but as the big day approaches, Todd Field's novelistic drama whispers questions about how well Lydia has actually behaved over the years, how much her failings matter, and what her ultimate punishment should be. Who knew that two-and-a-half hours of conversations about classical music, arts sponsorship, and sexual politics could be so tense and gripping? (NB)

A coming-of-age story and an achingly beautiful depiction of a fragile father-daughter relationship, Charlotte Wells' first feature is a marvel of nuance, full of evident but often unspoken affection. Paul Mescal (Normal People) is touching as Calum, separated from his daughter's mother, trying to connect with 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio, in an amazingly natural performance). During their holiday week at a slightly run-down resort in Turkey, they swim, sit on the beach and eat ice cream. Sophie is just old enough to see that in some way her father is deeply unhappy, but not adult enough to know more. An ordinary film would lead toward an explosive ending, but despite the mounting tension there is nothing plot-driven about this subtle, piercing, small wonder of a film, recently named Best British Film at the British Independent Film Awards. (CJ)
18. Onoda: 10,000 Nights in The Jungle
Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese "holdout" who refused to believe that World War Two had ended, and who carried on a guerilla campaign for decades in a jungle in the Philippines. This three-hour survival epic, directed by Arthur Harari, conveys the true story's mind-boggling scale and strangeness, but it's also a sympathetic character study of Onoda (played by Yûya Endô and then, in later years, by Kanji Tsuda). The lieutenant is presented as naive and misguided, but not too different from anyone who clings to a warped worldview, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary. (NB)

19. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
It might not be the year's best science-fiction extravaganza about alternate realities - that honour goes to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - but Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is deliriously entertaining in its own right. The weirdest and scariest of Marvel's blockbusters, it was directed by Sam Raimi, who made both the Evil Dead and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, and he fills the screen with his love of classic superhero comics and horror movies. The film isn't just an exuberant celebration of pulp fantasy, though. There are some poignant musings on family, faith and sacrifice in among the flying zombies and green-furred minotaurs. (NB)

Vicky Krieps' (Phantom Thread) quietly fierce performance as Empress Elisabeth of Austria is a perfect match for this sumptuous period piece with a brash contemporary soul. The story is set in 1877, when Elisabeth is turning 40, no longer the popular beauty she once was. Her palaces, stables and grounds have become a prison. Marie Kreutzer's film presents its heroine as an independent-minded woman in an era that is not yet on the cusp of modernity, signalling that paradox with a soundtrack of pop songs. Such bold moves give Corsage a bracing energy as it captures the inner struggles of a woman trying to escape the confines of social expectations and of time itself. The story departs from the facts most radically in creating a new final act for Elisabeth, one that is not necessarily happier but is true to her wilful nature and to this audacious film's savvy sense of invention. (CJ)
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Delightfully bonkers on the surface, this inventive extravaganza from the directing team called Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) has a deep layer of family feeling and a well-earned emotional pull at the end. Michelle Yeoh is ideal and comically straight-faced as Evelyn, a harried laundromat owner with tax problems who enters a multiverse of alt-Evelyns.

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Wes Anderson's directing style: Why is it so great?

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Wes Anderson's directing style: Why is it so great?

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One of Ms Roffey's favourite directors - find out why

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VIDEO ESSAY: Wes Anderson's Directing Style Explained

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A complete guide to Wes Anderson style, the director's filmmaking techniques, and how you can develop your own unique cinematic voice like Anderson.

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A series of masterclasses (pay £14 for access to all 30 high quality lessons) by acclaimed director Martin Scorcese - well worth an investment if you plan to continue to Film School after A-Level!

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Guerilla Filmmaking Tips

What is guerilla filmmaking?

Before we dig into how movies get made "guerrilla style" or any notable examples, let's define guerilla filmmaking so we're all on the same page.

GUERILLA FILMMAKING DEFINITION

What is guerilla filmmaking?

Guerilla filmmaking is a shooting style that is done clandestinely with no film permits, limited props, and usually a bare-minimum crew. This usually means shooting on-location quickly before anyone else notices what's going on; preparation beforehand is essential, as is maintaining a low profile. This means not having a big boom mic, lights set up or having too many crew members around when shooting.

Why guerilla?

The term "guerilla" (or "guerrilla") is taken from the Spanish word for a style of warfare waged between small bands of non-professional soldiers and official government military. In filmmaking, you can see how this idea applies because this filmmaking style is not as organized (or legal) as a normal movie shoot. While a guerrilla shoot can be organized in its own way, it's still very risky, which is why it's also nicknamed "run and gun."

What are guerilla filmmaking characteristics?

Skeleton crews

Not doing multiple takes

Documentary or handheld look

Shooting in real locations (without a permit)

Less noticeable camera and audio equipment

Shooting Guerrilla Style

How do you shoot guerrilla style?

While we do not endorse the shooting and production style of guerilla filmmaking, we can provide you with guerilla filmmaking tips that cover the do's and don'ts.

Before going into all that, feel free to watch the video below about the do's and don'ts of guerilla filmmaking from Film Riot.

Useful guerilla filmmaking tips

Guerilla filmmaking is cheaper than most other kinds. Since you can bypass film permits (which means not needing to secure locations):

Do use a minimal film crew, and

Do shoot your scenes just once (if you can, of course).

Guerilla filmmaking provides you with a freedom you might not otherwise have if you were shooting things "the normal way."

If you want to shoot in a certain location:

Do be prepared ahead of time, get everything ready, and then shoot.

Do make sure your crew knows exactly what to do at the time of filming.

However, shooting in a public without a permit has serious drawbacks, so:

Don't film if your location is too crowded with bystanders.

Don't go to a shoot unprepared for the possible consequences.

Don't get into further trouble with authority figures if they ask you to stop what you're doing.

There's a real spontaneity to guerilla filmmaking, which might also be part of the fun or process. The idea is that you only have one chance or two to get something right, so:

Do be on your guard at all times; in case someone asks what you're doing (just say it's a student film).

Do have your schedule set to avoid losing time.

Do make sure your entire cast, crew, and equipment can leave the filming area just as soon as you're done with your shoot.

Don't use too many props that might make your shoots harder to manage.

Don't be too ambitious with your locations or budget.

Don't make it too obvious you're filming, i.e. yelling "ACTION" and "CUT."

Famous Guerrilla Style Movies

Examples of Guerilla Filmmaking

After going over some guerilla filmmaking tips, let's take a look at some notable examples in cinema. Plenty of well-known filmmakers have done guerilla films for one reason or another, and we'll list them below.

Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles made the blacksploitation classicSweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) guerilla style with a minimal crew and amatuer actors. Even though he had made a successful studio film prior, he wanted to go make a guerilla film with Sweetback, wanting to tell a story the studios were not going to back.

While not 100% a guerrilla film, Peebles did not do things the orthodox way, such as having a permit to set a car on fire, but not doing it on the day permitted. Peebles also performed his own stunts and he and his crew carried firearms out of safety (since no one on the set was unionized).

William Friedkin

Winner of five Academy Awards, William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971) was a major success when it was released. While it wasn't a small independent guerilla film, parts of the film had to be shot guerrilla style, which meant shooting on location in many parts of New York City.

Friedkin on The French Connection

The movie's famous car chase is probably the most notable example. Involving an elevated subway train, the scene features a car speeding through real life streets among real pedestrians. While a celebrated sequence, director Friedkin has since said he'd never attempt anything like that again.

Spike Lee

Writer-director Spike Lee's first major full length film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), was a guerilla film made with the help of donations, grants, and family. Even being shot guerilla style, it ended up making eight times its budget back and putting Lee on the map. He even put out a book detailing his experiences with making his first movie, entitled Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking.

Robert Rodriguez

Made with just over $7,000 (half of which the director got from participating in experimental medical tests), Robert Rodriguez is one of the most famous filmmakers who went from no-budget to big budget in just a few years.

Rodriguez on shooting a guerrilla film

His feature film debut, El Mariachi (1992), was shot guerilla style in Texas and Mexico, used no actual film crew, used a wheelchair for dolly shots, and took advantage of the environment as much as possible (such as using a real prison warden and guard for a scene). Rodriguez later put his book Rebel Without a Crew, which details his tips and tricks for shooting a guerilla film.

Darren Aronofsky

For his first feature film, (1998), Darren Aronofsky got friends and family to donate enough money for him to get it made. He also made sure to limit the amount of money used for wardrobe, and even managed to convert a Brooklyn apartment into his own personal studio set.

Being a New York native, Aronofsky chose to set the film in his hometown, which meant shooting scenes guerrilla style. This includes scenes in the subway, something he would do again later with (2010).

UP NEXT

Zero budget filmmaking tips

Now that you have a good idea of what guerilla filmmaking is and what goes into it, read our article on zero budget filmmaking tips. We not only cover examples and scenarios, but show how, with our software, you can make a great looking movie on a limited budget.

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Guerrilla Filmmaking - Gear, Tricks & Everything You Need

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Before we dig into how movies get made "guerrilla style" or any notable examples, let's define guerilla filmmaking so we're all on the same page. Guerilla filmmaking is a shooting style that is done clandestinely with no film permits, limited props, and usually a bare-minimum crew.

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On paper, you're ready. You took the courses. You read the books. But do you know all the key cinematography techniques? The things that come from being on set?

Perhaps you've been working Director of Photography for years. Would a quick refresher on some of the 30 best cinematography techniques and tips hurt?

We've compiled some of the best tricks of the cinematography trade into this one post that will get you jobs, keep you working, and keep your work inspired.

So whether it's on paper or on set, we're gonna make sure you're ready to shoot.

Let's jump in!

Watch: Advanced Filmaking Techniques

What is cinematography?

Cinematography definition

It can be hard to simply define cinematography and all of its nuances. Technically, cinematography is the art and the science of recording light either electronically onto an image sensor or chemically onto film stock for a film or video production. Functionally, cinematography is understood to encapsulate everything having to do with the camera - its movement, the images it captures, the light it receives, etc.

Masterful lighting and cinematic techniques gave The Third Man some of the best cinematography ever

What does a cinematographer do?

A cinematographer or director of photography (shortened to DP or DoP) is the crew chief that presides over the camera and light crews on a film or video production. They usually get involved throughout the entire production lifecycle and liaise closely with the director to create the images you see onscreen.

So what exactly does a cinematographer do?

Dissect the screenplay

Research film techniques and cinematic techniques that relate to the subject matter and elicit the intended emotional responses from an audience.

Creates shot lists, floor plans, and lighting diagrams

Manages the camera and light crews

Make decisions about cinematic elements such as lenses, filters, lights, and other camera/lighting requirements.

Responsible for making decisions about aspect ratio, digital effects, image contrast, and frame rates.

Make decisions about camera movements and film lighting techniques to prompt a specific emotional responses from an audience.

Often liaises with the director and colorist during the color-grading phase on a project

That's the job of the cinematographer in a nutshell. As we move forward through these 30 best cinematography techniques and tips, let's keep in mind what the real aim of the job always is: telling a story visually.

Top 7 Cinematography Techniques & Tips

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.1

The best cinematographers think outside the box

When Stanley Kubrick set out to film Barry Lyndon, he and his longtime cinematographer John Alcott wanted to break new ground and needed to develop new cinematography techniques.

They wanted to shoot the entire film with natural light. A pretty daring and ambitious film lighting idea.

For an indoor candle-lit scene, they wanted to ACTUALLY film by candlelight. This would have pushed the film stock of the era too far.

So Kubrick and Alcott borrowed a special lens made by NASA to complete their scene.

​Cinematography Example: Unique camera techniques were used to create this stunning shot

The result of this solution is nothing short of painterly.

Finding the next great camera technique may just be a matter of devising a creative solution to achieve your visual goals.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.2

Story over spectacle
​

"There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it's not necessarily right for the film - you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don't stay in there with the characters and the story."

- Roger Deakins

Who are we to argue with Roger Deakins, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time?

Remember you are always telling a story. A visual story, yes, but a story all the same. That means not getting too preoccupied with developing a distinct "cinematic style" and instead focus on story.

The irony:

Doing that will unveil your own unique voice, just like it did for Deakins.

Watch Deakins share his advice and cinematography techniques for DPs:

Some of the best cinematography ever became practically invisible in its service of the story. Gordon Willis, the genius director of photography behind moody oscar winning classics like The Godfather and Manhattan, took an entirely different approach to All The President's Men.

​DP Gordon Willis used light to show that in the newsroom, light would uncover the truth

Perhaps the greatest cinematography technique you have will be your ability to recognize what will serve the story.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.3

Study great cinematography

Remember to stay inspired. Study great cinematographers.

Even the greats studied the greats.

When asked how he made Citizen Kane Orson Welles said "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford".

This was in reference to Ford's own classic Stagecoach, which pioneered not just the western (no pun intended), but some of the dramatic chiaroscuro film lighting and camera technique.

​John Ford's cinematic technique in Stagecoach had a big influence on a then young Orson Welles

It's safe to say Orson Welles considered Ford's work to employ some of the best cinematography techniques ever. Ford's great cinematography was so powerful for Welles that it led him to to create his own all time classic.

And groundbreaking film lighting techniques.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.4

Manage your time effectively

The camera and lighting crew is often the biggest crew on a film set.

You are going to be interacting with all of those department heads, and you are directly (or indirectly) in charge of all of them and their work.

This means always having a plan and executing it. Which means having and respecting storyboards and a shot list. Using the proper tools are cinematography techniques unto themselves.

Why?

You will ALWAYS be under the gun for time. Just like money, there is never enough.

The 1st AD will be asking how low until picture is up constantly. Because the Producers will be asking HIM how long until picture is up constantly.

So before you even step on set, know the coverage. Know the set-ups. Know the lighting plans. Know it all backwards and forwards and how you'll move efficiently between them.

In film school you probably learned how to light.

But did you learn how to light fast? Or how to efficiently adjust when daylight is almost gone? When you might not make the day and you feel the the entire production waiting as you get a little fill on the lead actress?

Be ready.

But how?

Be prepared.

The crew will often look to you to move forward. Don't let them down.

Use shot list software to know the ins and outs of every shot. In the video below, DP and ShareGrid cofounder, Brent Barbano, walks us through his process of creating a professional shot list:

It doesn't stop with the shot list. The shooting schedule is just as critical. Communicate with your AD so you can prioritize the order you'll be shooting which scenes. That means working with film scheduling software and seeing how logistics will affect everything you do.

Here's Brent Barbano how cinematographers should work ADs to understand the shooting schedule:

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.5

Be an artist (but a reasonable one)

While you shouldn't get too precious with your work, and alway serve the story, be versed in visual art and design terminology.

It can be great shorthand with your Director and Production Designer, as well as others.

Time is of the essence and great cinematography need not be painstaking. At the same time, treat your shots, and each frame, like a work of art you want to get right.

Even if you're doing it on the fly, make sure your framing works from a purely visual standpoint. There are many excellent camera techniques you can implement to achieve this.

Take some time to familiarize yourself with great artwork. The tools of creating powerful images may have changed, but the basic principles have remained the same for hundreds of years.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 2.6

Take creative chances

Push yourself creatively.

We touched on this a bit in other cinematography techniques, but emphasis never hurt.

The overall idea here is to emphasize that taking risks can pay off. If they are calculated ones that you run by others.

Don't be afraid to break some of those rules that instructors drilled into heads. Dogmatic cinematography techniques can be detrimental to innovation. Some rules were made to be broken.

Plus...

Playing it safe leads to getting into the habit of average/mundane shooting.

Your best cinematography might appear when you think out of the box.

Pick your spots, of course. If you get too crazy all the time you might have some issues staying employed.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.1

Know the script

Seems like another 'no brainer'.

But...

Far too often camera crews and even DoP's don't know the script backwards and forwards.

And you can see the same mindset at play in online forums and groups where the focus is skewed so heavily towards gear and technical cinematography techniques versus the art of visual storytelling.

Being a cinematographer is as creative as it is technical.

Make sure the ideas you bring to the table are grounded in a knowledge of the scripted material.

We know debating fancy new camera and gimbals are fun, but the best DP's aren't just gearheads.

DP Gregg Toland innovated and truly "changed the game" with light and shadow on Citizen Kane

A great early example of a DP and Director innovating together and serving the story is Citizen Kane.

DP Gregg Toland kept his depth of field, and used light and shadow to direct the eye, creating a more dramatic look.

Without a focus on how to serve the story, such innovation would have been rendered meaningless.

So?

Make notes in your script. Bring up visual suggestions, questions, and ideas.

Have conversations about styles to emulate, other film's this story reminds you of.

The better you know the project the better you'll be able to help serve it.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.2

Use the right gear for the job

Not every shoot will need a fully decked out Alexa package with cinema zooms. Sometimes a shoulder mounted ENG camera is exactly what a project needs.

Get familiar with ALL types of cameras and lenses. Not just the big ticket cinema stuff. Being precise about what you need is one of the most important cinematography techniques you'll develop.

Because if and when the director asks for something out of the ordinary you'll need to be ready with not only suggestions, but also the requisite knowledge to implement them.

Knowing how to achieve the same end goals will make you favorite of producers as well.

Which likely means more jobs.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.3

Perform camera tests

Learn how to do traditional camera tests with a chip chart, color chart, and human models, and then do them once you get your hands on the camera.

With proper testing, you can see exactly how the camera reacts before you get on set and determine a lot of lighting and shooting strategies beforehand.

As opposed to on set where you'll have a dozen people waiting for you to get to know the camera.

You might have learned to do this in film school. But we're putting it here because we don't want anyone to take it for granted.

Sometimes certain basics fall by the wayside. This is one you should never let that happen to.

FOR THE BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY, BE SURE TO TEST:

Different camera settings (ISO, working stop, LUTs, color spaces, etc)

Filters

Lighting choices (color temps, diffusion, direction, brightness)

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.4

Make a shot list

You'll want to make a shot list right after a tech scout to determine what lenses you need. A well organized shot list is going to be one of your best tools on set.

In StudioBinder, you can create a new shot list. From there you can spin off new shots, group and sort your shots by type.

You can even add pictures from your scout directly into the app, which will create a storyboard you can show your director.

How to Create a Shot List

You can also quickly add and organize shots on the go.

Many other cinematography techniques are dependent on your ability to understand and utilize tools like this first!

As a shot list example, take a look at how lifestyle and adventure filmmaker Matt Komo planned out a 24-hour film production using StudioBinder's shot list feature.

How to Plan Your Shot List

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.5

Location, location, location

We mentioned John Ford before, but another thing he helped institute was shooting on location for maximum visual impact.

Ford's cinematic technique: Shoot epic locations like Monument Valley

Ford shot countless westerns in Arizona's stunning natural landscape of monument valley.

He knew the location well, and the towering red rocks helped him frame his shots perfectly.

Find good locations. Understand what the light will look like there at different times of the year, or day (more on that later).

The better your locations, the better your look with potentially less work from you and your crew.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.6

Storyboards, moodboards, and never say "fix it in post"

Well, you can say it. Sometimes it's fun to say.

Just try not to depend on it.

The best cinematography typically comes from your locations and lighting and not with DaVinci Resolve. Post production software will not be listed amongst our cinematography techniques.

Plus, whatever you can't capture naturally on-set, might takes way more time and money to recreate in post.

The best way to make sure to get the best look the first time around? Give yourself TIME to create it.

That'll mean planning the shoot carefully, and committing to your game plan on set. If you don't think you'll have time, use screenshots from existing films and tv shows and create a storyboard or moodboard in StudioBinder and share it with your team as a previz.

If it looks good here, chances are it'll work for you on set.

Remember, you are being hired for your expertise in cinematography techniques.

Your producer will love you for saving him thousands. Post fixes are way more expensive than having the Art Department touch up a flaw.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 3.7

Check and double-check the call sheet

The triple check the call sheet.

Why?

Because otherwise you could be late. Or in the wrong place.

You might get through film school without ever seeing a proper professional call sheet.

Does this really belong among other cinematography techniques?

Maybe. Maybe not. Do it either way.

If that's the case, look at some now. Check out the call sheet function in StudioBinder and get to know what you'll be looking at.

This is what production will send you EACH day. You'll want to know where everything important is on it.

They will put in important details about the next days shoot. Many of them you will be consulted on.

Some of them are just good to know. For example, how long will you have between crew call and first shot?

How long will you have to change scenes?

What time is the talent arriving? When are they done make-up? How does any of this effect your planning?

I don't know. But you should. And you WILL.

Because you're going to know all about call sheets before you even get one.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TIP 4.1

Prepare to do it all

You probably left film school with certain ideas about what a cinematographer's role on set was.

Surprise!

It won't always be that way.

On some jobs you'll have to serve as your own gaffer. And electric. And grip. And... production designer.

The list could go on.

You should have a working knowledge of every role on a set.

This isn't just in case you have to fill in. It's also so you can understand and respect the process of everyone else's work.

Knowing how long to give hair and make-up is important. Knowing that you need to allow for them to have "last looks" before you roll can also come in handy.

The set needs to flow, which means you need to be in sync with everyone else. It's ideal not to act as though you are an island.

So get to know the whole process.

And be ready to fill in...

You probably left film school with certain ideas about what a cinematographer's role on set was.

Surprise!

It won't always be that way.

On some jobs you'll have to serve as your own gaffer. And electric. And grip. And... production designer.

The list could go on.

You should have a working knowledge of every role on a set.

This isn't just in case you have to fill in. It's also so you can understand and respect the process of everyone else's work.

Knowing how long to give hair and make-up is important. Knowing that you need to allow for them to have "last looks" before you roll can also come in handy.

The set needs to flow, which means you need to be in sync with everyone else. It's ideal not to act as though you are an island.

So get to know the whole process.

And be ready to fill in...

CINEMATOGRAPHY TIP 4.2

Develop (and follow) a workflow

As cinematographer Art Adams puts it: "Block. Light. Rehearse. Tweak. Shoot. Repeat. Every. Single. Setup."

It really is that important. If you can't light the actors, use stand-ins.

Make sure they're at least same height and approximate skin tone. All the film lighting techniques in the world can't light someone who isn't there.

A key part of this is communicating that this will be necessary to the director, 1st AD, and the actors. Everyone wants to work with you, but no one likes be surprised.

If you keep a consistent workflow then you become easier to predict. Your team knows what to start doing when.

Suddenly the production starts to hum along.

​Look at this happy film crew just humming right along...

CINEMATOGRAPHY TIP 4.3

Lead your crew

Some of the most important filmmaking tips aren't actually camera techniques or film lighting tricks, but people skills.

Crews respect clear, fast decision making.

Be aware of how much work you're creating for them. They're probably happy to do the work but will become unhappy if they find themselves being told to take down a light and then they have to put it right back 15 minutes later.

So be clear and respectful. Take the blame for mistakes. Be a responsible leader.

Efficient cinematographers are the best cinematographers in the crew's eyes. Because it means good cinematography, fast setups, and finishing on time.

Keep track of who you've worked with in your crew, and who you've worked for in production in a crew database like in StudioBinder.

Learn more about how to use Studiobinder's crew contact lists here.

You don't want to lose track of anyone, or forget them.

You never know who you might need on a job, or who the next job might come from.

Utilizing and managing your team are both good cinematography techniques.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TIP 4.4

Hire the right team and listen

Remember how we mentioned that huge crew?

And how you're in charge of them?

Well, keep in mind that starting out you may not be the most experienced person on set.

In fact the most experienced person may be working for you, with years of camera experience and film lighting techniques under their belts.

Your gaffer and key grip in particular are both highly trained creative individuals. Use them to help solve problems. You don't have to figure everything out on your own.

Check your ego at the door.

This is a pretty good policy no matter what you are doing. Ego's only ever get in the way.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TIP 4.5

Don't argue in public

Try not to argue.

Disagreements happen all the time. The first thing you should try and do is see where the other person might be right.

After you've done that and there is still a fundamental 'misunderstanding'...

I'd ask for a sidebar. Take a moment to cool down, and discuss away from everyone else. Then talk it out.

Because no one ever looks good calling people out in public. Even if you are right.

Also doing the whole "Can I talk to you alone for a second" might as well be arguing on set.

So find a tactful peaceful time and place to approach this talk.

This is especially true if it's cinematographer vs. director.

Directors can get defensive if challenged in front of people, because they look like they're not in charge. Talking privately eliminates that fear of embarrassment.

Remember what we said about egos? Check them at the door.

At the same time, recognize that not everyone else will be doing that. So be careful of egos.

They are FRAGILE.

A film crew on a set is like an army going into battle. Remember who the enemy is. It's not the men and women you are in the trenches with.

Keep morale high, fight for the same things. Approach disagreements as though you want to same end result and just see different paths. Work together to find the right path.

This sort of approach will keep your set functioning well. It'll keep you working.

It'll keep you sane.

Before you get to set, have some go-to strategies for working with difficult crew. Of all the cinematography techniques in this post, that one might serve you the most.

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.1

Keep the frame moving

How you use your frame is one of the most critical camera techniques. Whether it be moving that frame, or moving items within that frame. You want to keep things active and visually engaging.

A director has a lot on a film set to manage. Try identifying a way to get the camera moving during a rehearsal or blocking of a scene.

If production can afford it, talk with the director about where you could use a dolly, or a jib, or even a steadicam.

Strategize on where you can insert some cost effective camera movements that will help bring the project to life.

All this is to say, that you don't need to be Michael Bay and throw a bunch of unmotivated camera movement in your projects. Check out our video below to give you some great examples of motivated creative camera movements that'll take your cinematography to the next level.

Pro TIP

The video above is part of a free 5-part video series called Filmmaking Techniques. It's e ssential viewing for visual storytellers.

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.2

Get creative with lenses

You don't ALWAYS need a 21mm wide shot or an 85mm close up. Slapping a wide lens on for a close up, or a long lens for an establishing shot are creative cinematography techniques that intrigue viewers.

Of course you only want to do that if it works for the story you're telling. But experimenting never hurt.

Sometimes the thing you 'tried for fun' can send you in a creative new direction. Don't be afraid to give something unorthodox a look. Time permitting, of course.

Speaking of unorthodox...

Looking for creative lens choices? Two words:

TERRENCE MALICK.

For more creative lens inspiration, make sure to check out our Mastering the Shot List video series on Youtube, where we take a closer look at the creative camera (and defining) lens choices by famous auteurs such as PT Anderson, Aronofksy, Tarantino, Tarkovsky, Refn, and Inarritu and others.
Watch Now: "Mastering the Shot List" for Creative Inspiration →
Creative lens choices can be important in creating a cinematic look, but planning this well in advance is more important.

Our video on The Lens Plot, popularized by Sidney Lumet's 'Making Movies' will help fast-track you.

What's Malick without his "creative" lens choices? Ep1 of Mastering the Shot List

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.3

Look through the frame

Even if you aren't looking through a monitor, it's vital that you look at your shoot through a frame of some kind. Whether it's an old-school director's viewfinder, a mobile phone camera, or just your fingers.

​Even the great Alfred Hitchcock resorted to the finger-frame.

This frame is what the audience will ultimately see, and you have to be able to picture what's going into it. Any device that helps train your eye to think of the world in terms of the frame will make you a better cinematographer in the long run.

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.4

Bring a quality camera to tech scouts

Bringing a still camera on location scouts is so important, we hesitate to even refer to it as one of our cinematography techniques. But it does merit some further consideration.

When all else fails, you can use your phone, but ideally you want a DSLR with the same size sensor as your shooting camera.

Most 35mm equivalent cinema cameras have an APS-C (or close to) sensor.

You should also bring a zoom that has the same approximate focal range as the lenses you'll be shooting on. You can test out different focal lengths and find exact camera positions.

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.5

Find ways to add depth

You probably already know that all depth in film is, essentially, an illusion. You're tricking the eye into believing that a flat picture has a third dimension it really doesn't have.

So how do you really use that in terms of story?

​In The Graduate, Ben runs towards a telephoto lens. It gives the impression he's getting nowhere.

In Jaws, the depth of field is toyed with to emphasize a moment of terror (aka the "dolly zoom.")

There are many ways you can add depth, and moving beyond one trick is essential if you want to move to the next level of cinematography techniques. Here are 5 ways you can add depth to your shots.

CAMERA TECHNIQUE 5.6

Choose a working stop

Changing stops shot to shot leads to depth of field inconsistencies, since lens sharpness changes at different stops.

Most lenses are sharpest at 2-2 ½ stops closed from wide open.

For every scene you should be able to choose a single exposure and stick to it for every angle. In some cases stick to a single stop for a whole sequence or the whole show.

Know the trade offs when you pick your stop. For example, shooting wide open almost always means less sharpness when the lens is in focus.

FILM LIGHTING TECHNIQUE 6.1

Mix color temperatures

We've mentioned some classic black and white inspirations and cinematic techniques, but what about the standard today (for the last 60 years): color!

Try using colors to create the same kind of dramatic contrasts and juxtapositions. Enter film lighting color gels:

​Mixing discordant colors can be a dramatic and effective cinematic technique

Suddenly the image catches the eye in a different manner than before. Similar to the way more classical cinematic techniques leveraged bright outlines and shadows when shooting black and white.

Wes Anderson preferred camera technique: color and center-staging

Colors pop more when they are laid alongside contrasting colors, and photographed properly.

Some of this comes down to production design, but it's also where cinematic film techniques from different departments start to co-mingle.

When it comes to identifying the right colors, having an understanding of color theory is critical. The video below will walk you through the principles, and it's part of a free 5-part video series called Filmmaking Techniques. It's e ssential viewing for visual storytellers.

Related Posts

If you're looking to take your film color theory to the next level, also make sure to pickup our free ebook on Film Color:
FREE Ebook Download: See Over 50+ Examples of Color in Film →

FILM LIGHTING TECHNIQUE 6.2

Hard light versus soft light

Hard and soft lighting techniques create very different feelings. Try experimenting with both to get a sense of what you like for what types of scenes.

A lot of people are using LED panels nowadays but it nearly eliminates all hard light (which may not be the preference). Use fresnel and pars when appropriate.

Hard lighting would definitely qualify as a sexy cinematic technique

Hard light is way easier to control than soft light. Hard lights can be softened, but soft lights can't be hardened. If you really need to control shadows and keep light from spilling everywhere a fresnel will make your life easier than a kino.

Much softer lighting used here by the Coen Bros

You don't need to always opt for what looks sexiest, of course. Remember one of our other cinematography techniques: telling a good story.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 7.1

Don't go into debt for gear

This is a good guideline in general. Going into debt is never ideal.

When it comes to camera gear there can be a tendency to try and make yourself and your work more appealing by owning all the cool toys.

Yes, it might help when packaging your services, but at some point it's not worth creating a mountain of debt over it. If you want to invest in one camera, say, and you think you can make the cost back in a few jobs, sure.

But invest carefully. Know that your quality of work, and how it is to work with you, will factor in more than how much gear you own.

The dirty little secret?

Once producers know you own some cool gear, they might hire you hoping to get it for free. Or at least heavily discounted. So after a while, your client incentive becomes a wash.

Producers. Gotta love 'em, right?

So when should you buy gear? Brent Barbano, cofounder of ShareGrid, can help you figure out when it makes more sense to buy or rent gear.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 7.2

Reel > Camera Gear

Things break. Gear gets obsolete. Spending $100K on fancy camera equipment will not make jobs come to you.

You're a cinematographer, not a rental house.

The best cinematographers can create the best cinematography from any camera they're handed.

The job is to know how to evaluate the limitations and advantages of your gear, reach into your bag of filmmaking techniques, and make the best image under those conditions.

Equipment will come and go. Your expertise and skills on-set will only get better with time.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 7.3

Know when to end your reel

This is more of a job hunt technique than a film technique.

Nevertheless, remember that people have short attention spans.

VERY short attention spans.

So when designing a reel to send out to jobs or post on crew job sites like ProductionBeast, keep it short. Many directors and producers will decide to turn it off in the first 30 seconds.

Don't take it personally. They have tons of these to watch.

Use that knowledge as a tool to create a better reel. Grab them with your best stuff first.

And then get out fast.

So even if you're one of the best cinematographers in the world, you're looking at 2:30 max.

Also don't pad your reel. Shorter and higher quality is better than a few more shots, some of which aren't the best.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 7.4

Stay on top of new tech (also drones)

Technology marches on. There will be no shortage of new toys to play with. Research them as best you can.

Know how and when to use them.

For example, aerial drones with cameras attached have gotten cheaper and cheaper, and fly-over shots that were once the providence of well-heeled studio productions are now yours.

But as amazing and EPIC as drone video footage can be, they do have their limitations. For example, did you know that most drone cameras currently don't have zoom lenses? Read more about drone cinematography techniques here and here.

CINEMATOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE 8.1

The best cinematographers...

Are equal parts artist, technician, and manager.

It's a multi-faceted job, and no number of film techniques will make up for hard earned experience.

The more you work, and the more you practice, the more likely you are to formulate those well crafted shot lists that make the entire shoot a breeze.

We know we didn't cover everything. Maybe we covered things you know and learned in film school.

Tell us in the comments below some some cinematography techniques YOU picked up in the field!

Oh, and in case you can't remember everything you read above, download our convenient, Cinematography Techniques Cheatsheet PDF below, so you can print and take it with you when you're on the move (or at least until all of these points become second nature).

Until then, break a lens!

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StudioBinder

StudioBinder is a film production software built out of Santa Monica, CA. Our mission is to make the production experience more streamlined, efficient, and pleasant.

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30 Cinematography Techniques You Won't Learn in Film School

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On paper, you're ready. You took the courses. You read the books. But do you know all the key cinematography techniques? The things that come from being on set? Perhaps you've been working Director of Photography for years. Would a quick refresher on some of the 30 best cinematography techniques and tips hurt?

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The 11 Best Free Movies On YouTube Right Now

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Exciting courses on offer for budding directors

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Our flagship courses for 16-19 year olds.

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BFI Film Festivals For Young Film Makers

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BFI Film Festivals For Young Film Makers

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The following festivals either specialise in films made by young filmmakers, or have a strand dedicated to new works by young directors. Visit their websites for information on how to submit your film.

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The following festivals either specialise in films made by young filmmakers, or have a strand dedicated to new works by young directors. Visit their websites for information on how to submit your film.