DGA Panel at TIFF: Five Directors Reveal Filming Challenges — SkimNews
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- Deadline and the DGA hosted their Art of Directing panel at TIFF with Curry Barker, Alex Gibney, Siân Heder, Rachel Morrison, and Bassam Tariq, where each filmmaker shared their biggest on-set challenge and riskiest decision.
- Curry Barker is directing, starring, and leading Focus Features/Blumhouse's "Anything But Ghosts," a 130-page script he refused to trim, shot in 26 days alongside co-star Aaron Paul despite holding the most lines in the film.
- Alex Gibney built his Musk documentary without the subject after Musk declined via tweet ("Gibney is a douche," to which Gibney replied "Douché"), prompting the team to create an animated avatar driven by Musk's existing audio and video recordings.
- Siân Heder's Apple film "Being Heumann," about disability rights activist Judy Heumann who led 100 people to storm a federal building in 1977, opens November 6 in cinemas and November 13 on Apple TV, with 12 disabled leads and 60 disabled background actors.
- Rachel Morrison shot Prime Video's "Love of Your Life" with Margaret Qualley across London, Portugal, New Orleans, and Boston — pushing back against the "tax incentive state plus green-screen plates" norm she said dominates studio filmmaking today.
- Bassam Tariq's "Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother," starring Mahershala Ali and John Cho, opens September 25 after a 30-day schedule with five action set pieces, an uphill Tariq said required front-loading audience guidance in the film's first five minutes.
Why it matters: The panel surfaces concrete, unglamorous production choices that contradict the industry's cost-cutting drift — from Heder's accessibility-first set build (only one accessible trailer existed in all of North America) to Morrison's insistence on four real locations over green-screen to Gibney animating his own subject after being shut out. Each story shows a director choosing craft or principle over the cheaper path their financing presumably pushed.
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