Behind the Scenes At The Movies

I have always loved behind the scenes stories about filmmaking. I have always been a film buff - even picked up a grad degree in it, and taught some video and film classes. I'm one of those people who watches all the extra stuff on the DVD. (For example, when I watched the DVD of Waitress, I really loved the film - but when I watched the behind the scenes about the director, I loved it on a higher level. Watch it.)

So I was very excited to discover a new (still in beta) website called Making Of . I will admit that what attracted my eye to the blurb about it in a magazine was the photo of Natalie Portman that accompanied it.

Natalie Portman is behind the site (with her friend and business partner Christine Aylward) which gives an inside look at the process of making movies through interviews with the insiders.

There are trailers, stills and such, but the best parts are the interviews. there are plenty of other sources of video interviews with actors and directors, so what interested me was the interviews with cinematographers, editors, makeup artists and others.

They are filming interviews at places like the Tribeca Film Festival. It's a little bit of an online film school and hopefully won't turn more towards the Entertainment Tonight side of the world.

Portman apparently has the directing bug too -

“I’ve only done a couple shorts— [it] was definitely part of the impetus for me to want to start something like this, because there were so many questions that I had. I’m lucky in that I can call up directors and be like, ‘What does this mean?’”

I checked out Woody Allen's upcoming film, Whatever Works, with Larry David on her site. I heard that film will open the Tribeca Film Festival.

I watched some interviews with cinematographers.

There's a "vault" with films already released and a section for new and in-production films.


Watch Portman on directing