Down and Yonder started for me sometime around 2010 in a two bedroom apartment in Sherman Oaks, California. I felt honored that Flippo would trust my opinion enough to give me one of his early drafts to read. As soon as I finished it, I remember telling him how much I...

In a recent episode of Nerdwriter, video essayist Evan Puschank spoke about There Will Be Blood and how by simply paying attention to the length of the shots, a viewer can begin to understand their favorite film, if not completely, than at least better. It's a wonderfu...

We have a sizable chunk of 2017 behind us, and it's slowly revealing itself through the fog. The quality movies from this year so far have absolutely nothing in common except for the ability, one in which we should never take for granted, to reach out and enthrall an a...

I've known Chris Schulz for about seven years. We met on the other side of the country, through a mutual friend. Even before I saw him act, I was already impressed by his intelligence and dedication to the craft. This is a guy with talent to burn, and I'm proud to say...

One of the first conversations I had with Chris Schulz (our "Wally" from The Future West and Down and Yonder) was about theater and the joy of live performance. He said that the theater was beautiful because a live performance is a fleeting thing. It exists one moment...

Most film essays are written with the unspoken knowledge that the author really believes something, and he or she is going to do their best to convince you, to make you come to their side. However, today I want to talk about a subject in which I'm simply agnostic. I ju...

Now that Down and Yonder is about to wrap up, I wanted to take the (little bit) of downtime we have in order to talk with other filmmakers about the craft .

I first met Spencer Howard at the Chattanooga Film Festival in 2014. I was there to screen my short, The Fut...

“Underrated” and “overrated” don’t really work when it comes to film criticism, and they don’t work because they exist outside of the work itself. I’ve tried to ween myself off of the terms, but they’re tough words to quit. We live in the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic...

My time on Down and Yonder is coming to an end. That’s weird to type out because there have been many times where I thought I would never get to type it. Making a feature is enormously difficult, and there is so much that was out of our control, that was up to pure cha...

In an interview, John Lasseter said that, whenever Pixar sets out to make a new film, that the team doesn't necessarily know how it's all going to turn out. He compared it to jumping out of a plane and stitching together the parachute as you fall.

I didn't quite underst...