MovieMaker

Some people think of virtual reality as an escape from actual reality. But helping you escape reality is the opposite of what Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël hope to do through their immersive virtual reality company, Felix & Paul Studios.

The Emmy-winning Montreal-based studio takes audiences to places they might otherwise never go — to the International Space Station, inside the Oval Office, even back in time.

You can...

Coss Marte created a prison-based workout program in solitary confinement, then turned it into a thriving business called Conbody that employs ex-inmates. Their recidivism rate is zero.

Debra Granik, the brilliant Oscar-nominated director of films including Winter's Bone and Leave No Trace, tells the story in Conbody vs Everybody, premiering today at Sundance.

Hosted on Acast. See aca...

Documentary podcast Actual Facts is back on the MovieMaker feed to talk docs! Eric and Jason discuss "American Pain," a documentary that tells the story of twin brothers and bodybuilders Chris and Jeff George, who operated a franchise of pain clinics in Florida where they made millions of dollars handing out pills like candy. The film's director, Darren Foster, stops by to chat.

Actual Facts is hosted by Eric Steuer and Jason Be...

Cory Choy's Esme, My Love is a mother-daughter thriller, set in the wilds of upstate New York and powered by visual and auditory experimentation. Choy relied not just on his extensive experience as a sound designer (he runs NYC's Silver Sound) but also on his own life experiences, from recording music with his friends in his early teens to being a parent to listening to supernatural stories.

Esme, My Love is now available on yo...

Brian Helgeland has won an Oscar for the screenplay of L.A. Confidential and was nominated again for Mystic River. He wrote and directed films including Payback, A Knights Tale and 42.

But the film he always wanted to make is Finestkind, inspired by his experience on a fishing boat off the coast of his Massachusetts hometown. It's now out on Paramount+.

Photo by Maarten De Boer.

H...

Filmmaker Sharon "Rocky" Roggio is a lesbian filmmaker who hopes to someday change her Christian pastor father's mind about homosexuality.

Like many Christians, he believes that the Bible condemns it. But her new documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, argues that mistranslations at a 1946 gathering led to widespread misunderstandings used to justify bigotry and violence.

It's a scholarly, fascinating film...

John Carney and Gary Clark tell stories of scrappy amateurs trying to break into the music industry — because they've both been there.

Flora and Son is about a working-class young Irish woman (Eve Hewson, magnetic) who picks up a guitar for her son, and ends up learning to play it herself with help from an American teaching lessons online (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Because Carney is also the writer-director of the gorgeous Once an...

Cinematographer Steven Holleran doesn't do anything the easy way. For A Boy. A Girl. A Dream: Love on Election Night, he shot one continuous 90-minute film while racing down Sunset Boulevard. For Missing, he handed off cameras to the actors. And for his latest project, Sympathy for the Devil, he found ways to make a car ride with Nicholas Cage and Joel Kinnaman freakishly compelling.

Extraction 2 director Sam Hargrave thought long and hard about how to top the 12-minute nonstop action sequence in the first Extraction, and thought of one way to do it when he saw a weather forecast calling for snow: "What if we light Chris Hemsworth on fire?"

Here's our full talk with Hargrave about stunts, Oscars, the writer's strike, and yes, fire. And also the insane prison break sequence.

If you enjoy this episode, be s...

The new doc IT'S BASIC examines how the idea of Universal Basic Income – giving people money to do with as they please —plays out in the real world.

The doc by Marc Levin explores how innovators like former Stockton, California mayor Michael Tubbs have helped introduce programs that get money directly into the hands of those who need it. What do they do with this money? It's not what cynics would expect.

Pictured: Marc Levin...

Sav Rodgers was a 12-year-old queer kid in Kansas when he first found his mom's VHS copy of Chasing Amy, the Kevin Smith film he credits with saving his life. It also inspired Sav's triumphant TED Talk and now the documentary Chasing Chasing Amy, which premiered at Tribeca.

In this episode we talk with Sav and Chasing Chasing Amy producer Alex Schmider about films that serve a perfect purpose despite their imperfections, and mak...

Nardeep Khurmi wrote, directed and stars in Land of Gold, a cross-country, cross-cultural road trip exploring the dynamic between a Punjabi American truck driver (Khurmi) and a Mexican-American girl named Elena (Caroline Valenicia) whom he finds hiding in his trailer.

"Can you get more American," he asks, "than two communities of color, who have been marginalized by the country they want to call home, banding together to find th...

Ali Afshar has one of the most unique origin stories in Hollywood. His family moved to Petaluma, California after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and he sought peace against a backdrop of tragedy by wrestling and street racing. A stuntman older brother helped him make his way into acting, and he soon became a producer as well. His latest project is the bilingual upstairs-downstairs family drama Casa Grande, now airing on Amazon's F...

Alex Convery grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan was a superhero. He watched the Jordan doc THE LAST DANCE during pandemic lockdowns, like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he saw an amazing movie idea about the creation of Nike's trademark sneaker, Air Jordans.

Two years later, Convery's script has been made into a movie directed by Ben Affleck, starring Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis and o...

Two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple helped invent the modern-day documentary with her groundbreaking Harlan County, USA, which recounted a brutal coalminers' strike in dirt-poor Harlan County, Kentucky and won the 1976 Oscar for best documentary. She won her second Oscar in 1991 for American Dream, about a heartland strike against the Hormel Foods corporation.

She returns to the grassroots struggle for survival and dignity in h...

Born into the film industry, William Sherak has a long family history with innovators like James Cameron and George Lucas. He tells us about running Hollywood's go-to 3D company at exactly the right moment, watching Jurassic Park with Steven Spielberg, connecting with directing duo Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett), and helping salvage the Scream franchise from the smoldering wreckage of The Weinstein Company....

You know when you're watching a cop show, and a suspect says the cops planted a gun? Or drugs?

It happened for years in Baltimore thanks to the crooked Gun Trace Task Force. The new documentary I Got a Monster, by Kevin Abrams, explains the disgraced officers' M.O. and how they finally went down.

He also tells us how common he thinks the behavior is, and how to stop it.

If you're interested, here's the very interesting pod...

In his directorial debut, Kyle Marvin guided not only four of the greatest actors of all time — Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field — but also the GOAT football player in NFL history, who had never really acted before. He also juggled the interests of Endeavor Content, Brady's 199 Productions, many producers, and the NFL.

And yet he somehow managed an inspirational, feel-good movie that even the hard-to-impres...