MovieMaker

Actors Michael Shannon and Jacob Alexander join us to talk about Echo Boomers, a new heist movie about a gang of millennials who lash out at the system by breaking into super rich people's houses and stealing expensive art.

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The Cucalorus Film Festival, out of Wilmington, North Carolina (home of David Lynch's Blue Velvet!) is a film festival that loves inclusion — but not competition.

In this episode, chief instigating officer Dan Brawley and host and curator Aaron Hillis talk about the origins of the festival, how to get into it, and how to watch some fantastically weird movies from Hillis' secret vault, for free.

You can watch Wednesday, Nov. 18's Secret Convulsions screening here.

And Sunday, Nov. 22's Secret Convulsions screening here.

Plus: Listen to Dan Delgado's The Industry podcast for more on Jamaa Fanaka and Cannon Films.

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The Half of It director Alice Wu says her Netflix hit — imagine an '80s teen comedy with a gay Chinese-American girl as the hero — came from her college relationship with a straight guy.

"In best friendships, there is kind of a romance in it," she says. Her effort to understand the complicated feelings around that dynamic were the first seeds of the film.

Wu, who enrolled in MIT at age 16, talks about growing up in the Bay Area before it was a tech Mecca, red states and blue states, and the years she spent attending a Mormon church even though she wasn't Mormon. She also explains why she didn't set the film in the past.

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Let Him Go , the new film from Thomas Bezucha, stars Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as George and Margaret, a couple who travel from Montana to North Dakota to retrieve their grandson from a notorious family called the Weboys.

Bezucha talks about how he came across the source material of the film, how this film feels a little bit to him like a sequel to Costner's The Bodyguard, and why he never considered working with CGI fire.

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Amy Seimetz’s second feature film, She Dies Tomorrow, is about a young woman named Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) who holds the inescapable certainty that she will die in one day. When she confides in her friend Jane (Jane Adams), the prophecy begins to spread, igniting a chain reaction of existential dread.

Seimetz knew she wanted to bring her characteristic "dark sense of humor" to the film, and bend genre conventions. That meant shooting it in chunks, and funding it herself.

"I didn't want to have to answer questions about what it was going to be," she says. "I was the only person that I was answering to."

She Dies Tomorrow is now available on demand.

You can email your host, Eric Steuer, at [email protected] with feedback and guests you'd love to hear.

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His House, the bold new Netflix horror film from writer-director Remi Weekes, is a very scary haunted house story that is also a moving and empathetic story about immigration.

It stars Wunmi Mosaku and Ṣhop-pe Dìrísù as a couple who flee war in South Sudan, and make a harrowing escape to the UK. But there, they encounter new horrors.

Weekes also talks about debuting at Sundance and the short films that helped him hone his craft as a filmmaker. He co-founded Tell No One, a production company that emphasized experimentation and always trying to create something new.

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Ashland, Oregon is a small-town film mecca that draws Hollywood expats with its mix of a thriving film scene, proximity to big cities, and sprawling wide open spaces.

This year, Southern Oregon's Ashland Independent Film Festival has persevered and innovated through not only a pandemic, but fires that have destroyed homes and blackened acreage surrounding a beautiful town in the foothills of two mountain ranges.

AIFF artistic director Richard Herskowitz told us about what's its like to live in Ashland now, and how the festival has made positive changes that will outlast this tough year.

You can also watch videos from the festival on its YouTube channel, and learn more on the Ashland Independent Film Festival website.

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12 Hour Shift writer-director Brea Grant (Friday Night Lights, Heroes, Dexter) set her horror comedy in the late '90s because she wanted to portray a time when people spoke their minds a little more — and were more susceptible to urban legends.

The film follows a gruff Arkansas nurse (Angela Bettis) with a tidy side hustle as an organ harvester. But one night, things start to go wrong, cops start sniffing around, and loyalties are tested. Y2K lurks in the near future.

She talks with us about her Masters in American studies, bookmarks, and whether nurses think her characters are too rude.

Here's her podcast, Reading Glasses.

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Radium Girls, co-directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler and starring Joey King, is based on the true story of a group of young female factory workers in the 1920s who worked with radium — which was seen at the time as an almost miraculous element.

But the women soon began developing mysterious, terrible illnesses.

After a medical mystery — that included a misdiagnosis of syphilis for some of the victims — the women banded together to fight for their health, safety and rights.

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Jim Cummings is the writer director and star of The Wolf of Snow Hollow, in which a small mountain town is hit by a series of killings that seem like the work of a wolf. Or is it a werewolf?

The film stars Cummings as a deputy in meltdown, and Robert Forster plays the head of the department in one of his final roles. Cummings talks about how he broke into DIY indie filmmaking, how he mines real-life public freakouts for laughs, and the movies that Forster recommend to an unsuspecting co-star before his death last year.

Watch StudioFest's Demystified Jim Cummings Q&A here about how to stop making excuses, and start making your film.

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