[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 3:00 pm -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


The inventor and venture capitalist Jim Clark and I have been dive buddies for the last 10 years but over the last 35 years of diving we have been witnessing the catastrophic collapse of the reefs and sea-life abundance. Jim and I decided to do something about it by setting up a nonprofit foundation, the Oceanic Preservation Society, to make ocean-based films and photographs to create awareness and inspire change. I have been a photographer for decades, mostly for National Geographic magazine, but I had never made a film before and Jim is legendary for his Midas touch in business. He’s helped send man to the moon, he invented the first 3-D graphics engine with Silicon Graphics, the first Internet browser and the third billion-dollar company he created he said was to prove that the first two were not a fluke. When he set up OPS, he told me, “Just make a difference.”

To educate myself on the various ocean topics, I traveled to marine mammal conferences and sat in on dozens of dry scientific talks. At one of these events in San Diego, Ric O’Barry, the trainer of Flipper, was supposed to be a keynote speaker but at the last minute, the event’s sponsor, Sea World, refused to let him speak. Curious, I phoned up Ric and asked him why. He said he was going to try and expose a secret cove in Japan where most swim-with-dolphin programs and dolphinariums are supplied from. Ric told me that he spent 10 years building up the captive dolphin industry, he caught and trained the five Flippers who collectively played the part of Flipper, and he’s spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down. After Cathy, the main Flipper dolphin committed suicide in his arms (dolphins are not automatic air breathers), Ric became the most vocal dolphin advocate in the world. Exposing the secret cove to the world had become his life’s mission and one week later after we both traveled to Japan — it had become mine as well. Ric O’ Barry then became the central character in our documentary.

Early in the inception of OPS, Jim introduced me to Steven Spielberg who advised me from his experience to, “Never make a film on boats or with animals.” Our first film, The Cove, went on to involve a lot of boats and large uncooperative marine animals. Added to that, the secret cove, which is the subject of our film, is flanked on three sides by steep cliffs. Tunnel entrances are protected by guards and dogs and steel fences with barbed wire and spiked gates. Activists have been trying to penetrate the cove without much success for decades, mostly because the thugs who guard it and the police who support them will harm you or jail you if you get caught. Add Spielberg’s sage advice to the dangers of our chosen subject and you can imagine the kind of pressures playing on this first-time director’s mind. But having learned of the atrocities of the cove, there was no way I and this Ocean’s Eleven filmmaking crew I assembled were going to turn our backs — we were on a mission.

John Ford said that making a movie is like painting a picture with an army and in a lot of ways, making The Cove felt like we were making a film in a war zone. To make this film we needed people with a special set of skills, not necessarily filmmaking skills. World Champion free diver Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and her trainer/husband Kirk Krack helped us set the underwater cameras and microphones quickly and quietly in the cove. Simon Hutchins, a former electronics wizard for Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force, Canada, helped create an OPS Air Force of unmanned drones, a gyro-stabilized camera video camera mounted below a remote-controlled helicopter and a blimp for aerial surveillance. A former photo assistant of mine had gone on to become the head mold maker at a division of Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic (now called Kerner Optical), and they made fake rocks to hide high-definition cameras and microphones. My buddy Charles Hambleton is no stranger to civil disobedience, he was arrested twice on the same day for trespassing while protesting Rocky Flats where they made nuclear triggers — he placed many of our rock/cameras in the cove. We stole past the cove guards and foiled the police by using military grade thermal cameras (which were not supposed to leave the U.S.) and diversionary techniques used by Special Forces. We made this film with more of a Mission Impossible Team than a documentary film crew and at one point in the editing, we realized that the covert footage we were shooting as B-roll for a possible making-of section of a DVD was one of the most compelling parts of the raw footage. We decided to incorporate that part of the story into our film.

The result is that The Cove plays much more like a feature action adventure movie written by Steven King than a traditional documentary where you feel like you are taking medicine. From the opening minutes of The Cove, the viewer realizes that this is not an ordinary documentary. Like the filmmakers, the viewer is taken on an extraordinary adventure, a real-life mystery story that involves cover-ups, police chases, crimes against nature and the revelation of an ever-unraveling web of secrets that eventually expand to touch everyone. Because the story was unfolding and evolving so quickly we didn’t work with a script until principal photography was finished, which provided a challenge for producer Fisher Stevens. He brought in industry veterans writer Mark Monroe and editor Geoff Richman to tie the documentary thriller together in an unconventional way where exposition is revealed only to advance the story of the unfolding thriller. In the end we all created a film that you couldn’t have dreamt up and told a story I believe we would have missed completely if we left the offices working from a script. If The Cove finds an audience, it will be because we ignored industry conventions and let our passion to make a difference guide the story. Hopefully we also live up to Jim Clark’s expectations for the film — he hasn’t seen it yet.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 9:59 AM Comments (0)

Saturday, January 17, 2009

THE VICIOUS KIND
director, Lee Toland Krieger 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:30 pm -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]


What I can remember from very early on in the process of making The Vicious Kind was the desire to shoot my film on film. Specifically 35mm film. Even from the conceptual stage, I latched on to the idea that film would offer the kind of texture that a small, character-driven family story like mine would require. What’s so interesting about making movies today is that the choices of medium are so wide and changing every day. Even seven or eight years ago, if you had anything north of $300k for a feature, it was a given that you’d shoot on film. Nowadays even major studio event films are shooting digital. The digital era is definitely here and it seems to be here to stay. The myriad of digital cameras are opening doors to filmmakers who 10 years ago wouldn’t be able to make their film. And while I certainly think it’s positive that less expensive mediums are allowing new filmmakers to be discovered, I also think it should force us to be increasingly precious about the quality of our storytelling. To be candid, I think there are a lot of films that are being made because people can make them, not because they should be made. I understand this is subjective, and may be an issue at all budget levels, but it seems to be especially rampant in the ultralow-budget world. Certainly every filmmaker has felt how oversaturated the market has become with product in the last seven years or so. The YouTube generation has really propelled this movement; anyone, literally anyone, can be a filmmaker now. I think while it can be a wonderful platform for filmmakers with limited means to find exposures, the 17 year old with a funny clip that gets nine million views in a week doesn’t necessarily warrant a three-picture deal. I include myself in this category; in 2004, I made a film for $75k. The script I wrote wasn’t solid enough to warrant a production, and had I needed more money to make the film, the powers that be probably wouldn’t have allowed me to go forward.

When The Vicious Kind got up and running and it became clear that resources were going to be very limited, the question of medium came up. Ten years ago, there wouldn’t have been a discussion about medium — I would just be discussing with my d.p. which stock(s) to shoot on. Now I had to battle the producers for the right to shoot on film. While I was initially turned off by their resistance, the battle was ultimately a healthy process; I was forced to consider mediums, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but also with respect to what my story really warranted. It forced me to make sure my material was airtight. I even ended up trimming a few pages in an effort to make my plea to producers even stronger, a decision which undoubtedly made the script stronger. Looking back, I think the vetting process the producers put me through was healthy. But it was a process they might not have put me through had we decided to shoot digitally from the start. I had to be especially precious when considering my story because every eighth of a page really counted, especially when tallying how much film we would need. Fortunately I had a great team and they ultimately supported the look I was after and my desire to shoot on film, despite the dent in the budget. I hope that the digital era continues to grow a mile a minute for large and small filmmakers alike, but no matter where it takes us, we continue to put story first.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

MYSTERY TEAM
director, Dan Eckman 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:30 pm -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]


Our movie Mystery Team is the first full-length feature film by DERRICK Comedy, a sketch-comedy group I’ve been a part of for four years now. Our sketch videos have been viewed more than 100 million times online. We never tried to figure out “what plays on the Internet,” and when we did have shorts that became popular, we never tried to figure out what made them popular in terms of universal truths about Internet viewership. We viewed YouTube as a content delivery system and looked at our popularity on YouTube as a sign that there’s an audience out there for our dark, weird ideas. We basically tried to do what we’d want to do in any medium: write what we find funny and shoot it as well as we can.

Mystery Team is the story of three Encyclopedia Brown-style kid crime solvers attempting to prove themselves as real detectives by solving a double murder. It’s also the story of five people who came up doing sketch comedy on YouTube trying to prove themselves as real filmmakers by shooting a movie that harkens back to the Amblin genre comedies of the 1980s while maintaining our specific sense of humor. We feel like we’re in a unique position. While a lot of the industry is trying to work the Internet into their equations, we’re wanting to head in the other direction: toward feature-length films screened in brick-and-mortar movie theaters.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

PAPER HEART
co-writer-director, Nicholas Jasenovec 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:00 pm -- Racquet Club, Park City]


One of our goals while making Paper Heart was to establish a consistent reality since we would be combining a documentary on love with a loosely scripted love story. [Yi] Charlyne and I felt that most modern romantic films were very formulaic and unrealistic, but hoped that if an audience believed in what they were watching, they would be more affected by it. And with audiences being more familiar than ever with reality-based programming, we knew we had to do a great job to convince them there was no difference between our two stories. Or at least confuse them enough to the point where they weren’t sure what was what.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

DEAD SNOW
co-writer-director, Tommy Wirkola 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:59 pm -- Egyptian Theatre, Park City]


Dead Snow is in a very direct way the result of cinema today. Even though the premise of the film is based on a idea that I have had for a long time, there wasn’t a better time to release it until now.

After we made a debut film, Kill Buljo, we decided to go for the idea for Dead Snow simply because people don’t make these kind of movies any more. Most of the horror films that are released these days are 100 percent merciless, with violence all the way through and nothing to release the tension. We wanted to go back to the feel of the ’80s horror films, more specifically The Evil Dead series and Braindead. We wanted a mixture of blood and guts, and lots of it, combined with a decent amount of scares, but also dark humor, things that would make Dead Snow a more fulfilling movie then the average horror film these days.

We feel that when you get all of these things in a movie, you will leave the theater with a smile, despite seeing skulls ripped in two and things like that.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

PROM NIGHT IN MISSISSIPPI
director, Paul Saltzman 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:30 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]

My approach to telling our story was not influenced by the changes in the way people are beginning to view cinema. Intimacy, and the freedom of the senior students at Charleston High to share their feelings with us, the audience, was paramount. By inviting the students to create their own video diaries, by not seeking to make any editorial points as a filmmaker, courage and cowardice show themselves. The heart of our story — racial feelings and the end, on April 19, 2008, of separate white and black proms in the one high school in Charleston, Mississippi — required a non-intrusive, straightforward approach. I believe these are universal ways to approach intimate storytelling, irrespective of changes to the world of cinema viewing.

“Somos dueños de lo que decimos y esclavos de lo que callamos.”

“We’re owners of what we say and slaves of what we silence.”

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

BARKING WATER
writer-director, Sterlin Harjo 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 2:15 pm -- Racquet Club, Park City]


I knew before we began making Barking Water that I wanted to try something different. The story is about an older couple who has had a very tumultuous relationship for the past 40 years. The woman, Irene, comes to the man, Frankie, on his deathbed and agrees to take him from the hospital and get him home. The problem, of course, is that Frankie is dying, so the film explores their relationship as she tries to get him home to see his daughter before he dies. Under the stress of getting him home in time Irene must keep things together and be strong, and Frankie is both reflective and emotional on his final journey. That was the story at its core, and once the story was established we could go anywhere we wanted with scenes, style and dialogue. The actors were given the freedom to say things their own way and the situation was the same for me. If I felt like changing a scene or making a new scene up, the crew and everyone adjusted. This was something that I wanted from the beginning and, to the producers’ and crew’s credit, everyone really got behind this idea. I think it was a relief for everyone to make a film with a small crew and just roll their sleeves up and make it happen. It was a reminder to everyone why we began making films in the first place. I wanted to establish an atmosphere that allowed us to experiment while making the film with the hopes that this energy would translate to the screen. It’s a road movie and the nature of the story is to not be contained and laid out in a row. When you watch a road movie you want to feel like anything goes, and we tried to make the film with this same spirit of freedom. It was important to me to shoot the film in sequential order so that we could experience this trip that these characters take with them, and this also helped the actors a great deal because their characters are growing as we move along in the story. We also took the physical trip with the characters that I had mapped out while writing the film. The landscape and the characters both changed a great deal throughout the shoot. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

500 DAYS OF SUMMER
director, Marc Webb 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 6:15 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


I think “story” is the same as it has always been. Maybe the delivery devices change, maybe the venues evolve, maybe the audiences can absorb information faster and maybe they’re more sophisticated in their demands. But the basic craft and fundamentals of story remain unchanged.

We certainly didn’t adjust the concept of the film for YouTube, or any small screen for that matter. Maybe on some subconscious level, the short episodic nature of “the days” grew from watching too many YouTube video bursts. But I can’t say for sure. If anything, after making videos for several years all of which ARE designed for small formats — I was excited to make something for the cinema. Widescreen. Shot on film. Very few close-ups.

In the case of 500 Days of Summer, the forces affecting cinema were more about production logistics. Communication is faster. Software is cheaper. Reference materials are easier to find and distribute. Basically you can do more with less.

Example: My editor, Alan Bell, doubled (we bamboozled him) as our effects supervisor. After his day in front of his Final Cut system, he went home and worked on countless morphs, split screens, face replacements and speed changes (bless his soul), NONE of which you will notice. All of these FX were at the service of making the story flow faster and smoother, refining or combining takes. It’s a whole layer of postproduction that would have been impossible for smaller films just a few years ago. And in a very real way it’s now an extension of the editing process.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

THE GREATEST
writer-director, Shana Feste 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 3:15 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


It probably would have been smarter if I had thought of kids on a subway watching my movie on their iPod — but then I would have come to the inevitable conclusion that they would never be moved by a drama where you can’t see an actors’ eyes and immediately gotten bored and turned it off. I wanted most of all to make a film similar to the character-driven dramas of the late ’70s that I loved so much as a kid. I can't imagine those play well on iPods. I would actually never even admit to my d.p. John Bailey that I had seen anything on iTunes — he is such a wonderful film purist that we didn’t even consider doing a DI. So if the current trends in cinema are watching movies on iPods and laptops then sadly, I did not take that into consideration during the conception of my film.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
director, Michael O. Scott 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 3:00 pm -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


Over the Hills and Far Away is a piece of true magical realism. A family struggles to cope with their son’s autism. In an act of inspiration and desperation combined, they travel to Mongolia and journey through the country on horseback in search of mysterious shamans who they believe can heal their son. It’s hard to believe that this is a documentary and not a dramatic narrative. It’s a filmmaker’s dream to be able to work with such material. So for me it wasn’t a question of finding or manipulating the story, it was a question of how I was to capture this journey and return without serious injury. This film would not have been possible without the advent of new, compact, high-resolution cameras. As I galloped on my horse, camera in one hand and reins in the other, weaving side to side, up and down, lurching forward, attempting to keep up with the family, holding the camera as steady as is possible while mounted on a huge, bouncing animal, I had to give many moments of thanks to the small Canon HDV that I was filming on. The trip was definitely the most difficult I have ever filmed, but I can’t even imagine what it would have been like with a 16mm or a full-size video camera. The gift that this new technology gave me was true vérité moments in an unlikely situation. We were able to capture more than just stunning landscapes and wide travel shots. I was able to get into the story, close to the subjects, separated from my sound guy by a wireless transmitter and receiver, who, by the way, was also on horseback, mixers mounted on the saddle bags, boom in hand. In many ways, I’m a traditionalist when it comes to cinema. I love to work with actual film — the emulsions, the crystals, the hands on, physical reactions taking place. But in this case, the incredible story eclipsed style, and in return, created its own style, which, ironically, ended up being the most honest representation of both the story and the state of cinema today.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

THE QUEEN AND I
director, Nahid Persson Sarvestani 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 6:15 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City]


As a documentary filmmaker I am always telling a story, painting a picture of a reality that to some may be disturbing, to others offensive, but hopefully always eye-opening and informative. As such it will always be the content, the core and the soul of the film that is the driving force behind my creative process. The technological aspects and various formats are secondary. My latest doc The Queen and I is a simple story marked by extraordinary events. Whether my films are screened on iPods, laptops or cell phones it is ultimately the story that has to connect with the audience.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

AMREEKA
writer-director, Cherien Dabis 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 12:15 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


I didn’t respond to the changes in the way people are beginning to view cinema today. My story development process, which began back in 2003, was very much influenced by my own personal experience and my need for authenticity, especially in light of the political issues that rose to the forefront after 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. From the start I knew that I wanted to craft a universal story and imbue it with humor so that it was accessible and relatable to a mass audience, but I wasn’t at all thinking about new forms of distribution. If anything, I was dreaming of the big screen. Aside from that, I thought or hoped rather that people would watch the film on television and eventually the Internet. Any screen smaller than a computer didn’t even register because it doesn’t appeal to me for long form, especially if subtitles are concerned. It’s too difficult to appreciate the filmmaking let alone immerse oneself in the story on a cell phone screen.

I think these small-screen viewing models work best for the short form. And while I can appreciate the new forms of storytelling that they’re inspiring, I gravitate toward a more traditional definition. I like a well-structured, character-driven story that allows the audience to emotionally connect with the material. Without that connection, I find myself wandering. It was very important to me in Amreeka to create the intimacy necessary to allow the audience to feel like they know these characters and can relate to them. Each story is different but for this particular one, that connection was what I was hoping to achieve. And I think that’s important to preserve.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

I SAW YOU CRYING
Frontier section artist spotlight: Maria Marshall 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 5:30 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]


As an artist I am at liberty to use everything as an influence to tell the story.

I have made a three-minute wonder that was entirely filmed on a mobile phone. A series of three-minute films were commissioned by the British television station
Channel 4, and the films aired before the 7:00 p.m. news. I discovered early on how to be true to materials, and this awareness is reflected in my work.

The Internet and YouTube are sources for information at our fingertips. I am, however, very specific when I visit the sites, as I am conscious that too much information can make you lose focus. So I edit my influences.

My audience (not a large one, but an interested one) is used to visiting a gallery in search of stimulation, an alternative thought process, a need to expand the mind. This is the relationship that I have with the space and with a viewer who is on the fly…therefore the content should grab them and let them go, but stay with them — for years if not forever.
Ambitious, I know.

Remixing existing stories isn’t new. I use it, however, to tell my own stories. For example in The Emperor’s New Clothes, filmed in a desert, my son Jake Marshall Naef 8 puts on layers of clothes until he is unable to move. The soundtrack is President Bush’s speech giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq. The visual layering is coordinated with the layering of clothes. As the film is reversed, the layers are removed to give back the clarity to his speech, like peeling off the lies resulting in a naked boy and the naked truth. The “naked truth” is juxtaposed with Bush’s voice saying “God Bless America” as he prepares to invade Iraq under false pretenses. Another film, Stearman 41, is a response to that unbelievable footage of 9/11.

So the dissemination of information becomes key. I Saw You Crying is an obvious reaction to a clear, unsolved issue.

I watch many films and am particularly drawn to concepts. In my own films, even if the story is an emotional one, there is always a conceptual construction. I then use tools that enable me to be true to my materials, i.e. video for documentary-type films and 35mm for films that have the punch of an ad or speak of escapism. I am constantly borrowing, whether it be visuals, speeches or ideas — the end result bearing my individual stamp.

As an artist if I were to use YouTube to show my work, I would have a different approach. Somehow I remain precious about it — needing that controlled environment to show my work. To give it space to be considered. I think it undermines the gallery structure where they wish to show the work and for someone to support it by buying it. YouTube is for everyone, and the artist or gallerist is not remunerated. My work would also get lost in the mass of information. How could it rise to the surface? What kind of people surf YouTube? My kids and their friends? But their friends are not my audience. Not yet!

On the other hand I could be incredibly shortsighted; it could be that it is possible that it would reach people that may not normally go into a gallery and, that those people would then go to the galleries. YouTube would most definitely compromise the way that the viewer views the work. The sound would be small, the colors would vary and above all there would be a completely different relationship with the content due to the size of the screen. Perhaps one of these days I will jump in and test the YouTube waters. The worst that could happen would be, I guess, nothing!

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

COLD SOULS
writer-director, Sophie Barthes 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 5:15 pm -- Racquet Club, Park City]



Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I still believe that watching a film should be a collective experience in the darkness of a movie theater, with the viewer floating in a mental state somewhere between consciousness and sleep. I feel that filmmaking as a creative process and as a medium is very close to the process of dreaming. A film is an association of images outside of our control interacting with our memories and emotions. So by replacing the big screen with miniature devices, we’re losing an aspect of cinema that to me is essential. I cannot separate the story from its visual execution and the search for aesthetic pleasure. What would be the aesthetical impact of screening movies on iPhones or small portable devices? Does it mean that we’ll have to shoot mostly extreme close-ups? Hopefully the ritual of going to the movies will survive. Now that I think about it, a true technological progress would be blocking cell phone reception in movie theaters so audiences would actually focus and watch movies without text messaging or blogging at the same time.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

VICTORIA DAY
writer-director, David Bezmozgis 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 6:00 pm -- Egyptian Theatre, Park City]

I wrote the first draft of Victoria Day in 2001 before the existence of YouTube or the invention of the iPod. So, Victoria Day in its conception and execution wasn’t influenced by these things. But even if I were to conceive of it anew today, the story would take the same shape, simply because I don’t believe that the effect I hope to achieve — namely an emotional effect — can be achieved any other way. In my experience, the kinds of stories that I’ve seen told on YouTube and the Internet seem to have as their primary objective the amusement, diversion, or political agitation of the viewer. I'm sure there are exceptions, but given the physical limitations of file size and small screen, I think it’s hard to accomplish much more right now. And so, since what interests me is the telling of stories that engage people emotionally (which I’ll define as the enigmatic interplay between the tragic and the comic), I take as my models other films and stories that have moved me. When I sit down to write a story, my only objective is to faithfully render a feeling or combination of feelings without boring myself and others. (These “others” I have in mind are antipodal to the people who might be satisfied by the material currently available on YouTube.) And insofar as any reactionary impulse informing the making of Victoria Day, it had more to do with the kinds of things I saw in movie theaters and less to do with the kinds of things I saw on my computer.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

Friday, January 16, 2009

STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE
director, Laurel Nakadate 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:15 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City]


I think a lot about the small, small screens getting attention these days: iPods, cell phones, YouTube and MySpace. I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about the many strangers around the world, sitting in front of their Web cams, reaching out through their video yelps. I’m amazed by the matter-of-fact placement of their bodies in front of their computers, squarely there, waiting, presenting themselves, as if in front of a firing squad of voyeuristic strangers that may love them or shoot them. I obsess over these desperate and lovely attempts to say something. To be loved, to be recorded, to be remembered, to matter somehow. This user-generated material has been getting a lot of attention lately, mostly because of the way money makes people crazy. But that’s not why I think so much about it. I’m in love with it because of the desperation, the folk art/everyman quality of it. The “I’m just doing my best, I’m just trying to tell you this thing,” quality of it. Like a 5 year old home from kindergarten for the first time, he just wants to take off its backpack and tell you about his day.

I spent a lot of time searching online before I made my film Stay the Same Never Change. Most of that time was spent looking for teenage girls. I found a number of my actors through searches on MySpace and Craigslist and random Internet posts. The cast is composed almost entirely of amateur actors from Kansas City, where I shot the film. It was important to me to find “real people” and not trained actors to tell this story. I wanted to go deep into the community, to go home with strangers, to have dinner in rooms I didn’t belong in. I found all of that online and brought it out into the real world.

When I peer into the lives of others through two-inch screens I see a sadness and amazement that ring true to me. But mostly I see something verging on bravery. And at the end of the day, I wanted my movie to be brave. I wanted to tell a story about girls and men in a Midwest town, not far from my own hometown, who try every day to be brave and keep going.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

LYMELIFE
co-writer-director, Derick Martini 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 pm -- Screening Room, Sundance Resort]


Due to the daunting forces affecting independent cinema today, the tragedy that has become specialty distributors’ monumental struggle to find audiences, my instinct while directing Lymelife was to constantly push the envelope in every single scene we shot. If that meant tossing my written words out the window, so be it. I was determined to deliver a brutally honest and unsentimental depiction of an American family going through crisis in the late ’70s, a time of emotional and economic change which turns out to be relevant today. I would say to my producers and actors on a regular basis, “We’re all here telling a story for no money, working long hours — if the results are such that you can see this story on ABC or NBC, why bother? It’s a fool’s errand.” So our pursuit every day was to make what was on the page better and keep digging until we found the emotional truth in every moment. Toward the end of the shoot, Baldwin, a dear friend of mine, laughed at me and said something to the effect of “I just realized that you’ve been telling me before every scene we shoot that it was the most important scene in the movie. How can every scene in the film be the most important one, Martini?” I didn’t have an answer for him at the time because I found it quite funny, but in hindsight, I’d take that statement a step further and respond, “not only is every single scene in the picture the most important scene, but every single moment is the most important moment in the picture.” And this conditioning I’ve adopted while directing my first feature I intend to take with me to every picture I make.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

REPORTER
director, Eric Metzgar 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:30 pm -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


With Reporter (and my other films), I have done my best to ignore and avoid the modern forces that encourage the shrinking (and consequent speeding up) of cinematic storytelling. I just don’t see the good in trying to satiate the racing human mind and its desperate and diminishing attention span. I try instead to suffuse my films with the qualities of life and art that I most cherish but seem increasingly endangered: subtlety, silence, stillness, tenderness, sincerity and a spaciousness that allows the viewer (hopefully) to experience some sort of discovery.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

GRACE
writer-director, Paul Solet 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:59 pm -- Egyptian Theatre, Park City]


The factor affecting cinema today most relevant to Grace is the prevalence of the filmmaking community’s faith in the shortcut. There’s an idea that we can make movies by checklist, that the way to write a successful script is by formula, and the way to make a successful film is by gimmickry or spectacle — that we just need to get in front of a camera and our computers will figure out the rest later.

With Grace, we resisted that and put total faith in footwork. We just tried to make the best film we could from an artistic standpoint at every step of the way. If we felt something could be better, it wasn’t done.

I wrote dozens of drafts of the script, storyboarded and re-storyboarded every set up in the film again and again, wrote extensive biographies for every character, and broke down every act, sequence, scene and beat every way I could come up with until I was sure they were not only as effective as I could make them, but that they were all there to contribute to the whole.

Cinematographer Zoran Popovic and I worked for months putting together the film’s look, pouring over references from film and fine art and still photography. When we cast, we cast for skill and bravery, not for safety or familiarity. And we crewed the film with people who loved their work and loved the script, not with people who were just looking to finish the day early.

I’m sure you can fail taking this approach, too, but I bet you sleep a hell of a lot better.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN
director-producer, Kevin Willmott 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]


We made a conscious effort to fight against the issues of Internet and nonarthouse distribution. All those avenues are exciting and interesting in many ways, however, no one seems to be writing any checks for them. I still believe that most filmmakers make a film to be shown in a theater.

We felt our story was cinematic in scale and because of the importance of the history involved, we needed to try to reach as large an audience as possible. I still think that is through arthouse cinemas.

You make a film to be acknowledged and for it to have an affect on the culture as a whole. I think there is coming a time when the Internet and other sources may do that, but I have not seen it yet.

We were trying to respond to a cinematic history involving Native Americans that has been discriminatory in countless ways. We tried to compete with films that created the stereotypes and negative images of Native Americans and felt that The Only Good Indian needed to be on the same cinematic level as those films.

Those realities are what shaped our decision to shoot on 35mm. There is a richness and warmth in those legendary films that we were trying to connect with.

Some of the greatest films in our history have issued these negative images. It seemed very important to respond with the same cinematic integrity. In essence, we are trying to reclaim those negative images, take ownership of them and allow people to reconstruct images that take back this history.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

ART & COPY
director, Doug Pray 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm -- Prospector Square Theatre, Park City]

Art & Copy is a movie about advertising, creativity, and the innate human urge we have to communicate - whether it's painting on cave walls or selling canned spaghetti. What makes this documentary a reflection of its times may be simply that people are finding my characters to be inspirational, at a time when many documentaries-- for a lot of very good reasons-- are depressing, and losing their audiences a result. Maybe times are changing, and people are ready to be less cynical. (Even about advertising...?)

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

THE GLASS HOUSE
writer-producer, Melissa Hibbard 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City]


The idea for making The Glass House came organically when the director, Hamid Rahmanian, and I were invited to the Omid e Mehr Center in Tehran during a short visit to Iran (for what should have been a couple of weeks and turned into two years). At first we weren’t interested in covering a women’s crisis center in Iran — it had been done a few times already. Our biggest hesitation was the difficulty in penetrating the thick façade of pretenses that dominate Iranian culture; intimacy with one’s subject is almost unattainable there. However after spending a couple of hours at Omid, surrounded by an incredible group of resilient teenage girls, we knew we would be fools not to accept the challenge, especially when the founder of the center, Marjaneh Halati, gave us unfettered access to the center and the girls.

Over the next 13 months, we were able to attain a very intimate relationship with the girls, spending eight hours a day at the center getting to know each one individually, working to gain their trust. Usually it was just Hamid and his camera following the girls around, rarely asking questions, melting into the background, capturing whatever happened. I think it was the fact that we were a very small team — only Hamid and I — that gave the girls a sense of ease. The intimacy experienced in the film came as a result of nothing less than time.

The story came much later. Once we had identified who our characters were, we focused on getting to know the girls and their lives. One could say that we let the girls lead us. It was not until we had shot more than 125 hours of footage that we sat down to think about the story, and it took us another year to flush out what that story would be, again just Hamid and I. We knew we had a gem but wrestled with a big, unrefined rock for months before we saw results. Back in Iran we didn’t want to impose a “story” on the girls, and we would pay for that over the long winter and spring months it took to construct a cohesive narrative that takes the viewers into the gritty reality of urban Tehran.

I wouldn’t say that the story was impacted by the current state of cinema any more than any previous state of cinema. Good storytelling is good storytelling — although through the Internet we were able to raise a good chunk of change for postproduction after we ran out of money. That is something one could not have achieved five years ago.

What modern cinema has afforded us is the opportunity to shake off the heavy — and expensive — shackles of our trade and become individual artists again. The technology has become so small, cheap and uninvasive that we as individuals (or an army of two as in our case) can focus on sculpting our stories by creating more intimate spaces where we, as filmmakers, and our subjects can live a closer, tighter existence.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

DADA'S DANCE
director, Zhang Yuan 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm -- Tower Theatre, Salt Lake City]


A year of significance for China is 1989 — a significant year for many Chinese of my age.

It is the year when the Tiananmen Square incident shook the world. In that same year, I concluded my four years of study at Beijing Film Academy and made my debut film Mama.

The making of Mama ended up not only holding significant meaning for me but for Chinese cinema in the broader context. Prior to 1989, Chinese film rigidly followed the ways of the Soviet big brother — all productions were controlled by a dozen state operated film studios. I was just out of school and with the 10,000 Yuan I raised myself, I began shooting Mama. The first scene was located in my room, the place I lived in at the time. Mama had been through all kinds of difficulties and was finally completed with a total budget of less than 200,000 Yuan. It was at first beyond my awareness that the completion of this ultrasmall budget film announced the end of an old production system — it was the birth of China’s independent cinema.

When rock ’n’ roll first appeared on the mainland in the early 1990s, people did not know what a music video was. In 1991, together with Cui Jian, the soul figure of China’s rock music, we made the very first music video in Chinese history, “Wild in the Snow.” Since then, my filmmaking career has drifted between making feature films,
documentary and music videos. The question I was most often asked by a foreign reporter was about the content censorship system in China. This is one question that a Chinese filmmaker must confront on top of all the other difficulties of filmmaking we share with all other filmmakers around the world. I am sorry to say that despite China’s tremendous economic advancement over the past 20 years, the film censorship seem to remain as orthodox as before. Of the past 10 films I have made, half did not reach China’s audience. It was during the time I made Seventeen Years in 1997 when I made an important decision — that I wanted my films to reach the audience of my native land. I have traveled and collected notes from 17 prisons, and in the end, the film was shown in public.

Techniques of film had been evolving, from the Lumieres to todays digital media, and modes of reception were also changing, from the cinemas to videotape to DVD, and now the Internet. China had been changing alongside everything else that changed, and the “pioneering” rock music video we once made is now mainstream. The taboo theme of homosexuality presented in East Palace, West Palace is now an openly discussed subject. Even independent film production is now the standard mode to produce films in China today. Things that were once forbidden became the norm.

It has been 20 years in between 1989’s Mama and 2009’s Dada, though it may be unintentional, but I am proud to see that the images I have recorded captured the shadows of our time — the 20 years of most dramatic changes by far in China’s history.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

TAKING CHANCE
co-writer-director, Ross Katz 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:15 pm -- Racquet Club, Park City]


I went to school for two years at Temple University, studying story and structure with professors David Parry and Allen Barber. I was completely impatient (which has never gone away) and always wanted to go shoot, shoot, shoot. But David’s and Allen’s message, understood through studying all kinds of films, was always about story. No matter how ready I thought I was, they would always come back to “who is your audience,” “why are you telling this story,” and “the script isn’t ready.” They were right. Though I never got my degree (I dropped out after two years because I was restless and wanted to get going), their emphasis on these questions has stayed with me every second.

When I was an assistant to producer Lindsay Doran (one of the most inspiring producers today), I watched and listened as she worked with writers on draft after draft. Whenever I thought to myself, “"When are they going to make this movie?” a better new draft would come in. Though I never got an actual degree, I consider myself a graduate of Good Machine University. While at Good Machine, James Schamus, Ted Hope, Anne Carey, Anthony Bregman and Mary Jane Skalski furthered my education on the importance of not shooting before a script is ready. Whether a small, radical independent or a larger more mainstream movie, the bar was very, very high for them.

At the Sundance Producers Conference a few years back, Gary Winick and I were on a panel together talking about movies shot on DV for tiny amounts of money. Gary and John Sloss radically reshaped the landscape by making movies for impossibly low amounts of money. They were never satisfied with saying, “Oh well it’s pretty good, considering we had no money.” They applied the same emphasis on structure and storytelling that they would have if the film had cost $10 million. I wondered what movies could work in this format. I also wondered what it meant that filmmaking was in the process of being democratized. We had an offer to shoot In the Bedroom on video, but none of us could imagine making it on anything other than 35mm. Yet there were many great movies where the story was so compelling, the format didn’t matter. And over time, filmmakers began to stop apologizing for shooting on video and started infusing the format into the storytelling. So we sort of went back to basics. The script still had to be strong or the movie wouldn’t work, regardless of format.

My development processs on Taking Chance, with co-screenwriter Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, was very old-school. I attribute this to HBO Films and the executive producers’ emphasis on story. Even though I knew better as a producer, while writing I was pretty impatient. Even though the technology could potentially allow us a shorter prep and shorter shoot, we didn’t pass go before they felt the script was right. It was a rigorous process and they made the script better at every pass.

We shot our film the old-fashioned way too (I remember running into a great guy from a film lab. Incredulous, he said, “You’re processing your film photochemically?!” I was like, “Uh, you mean like shooting film and going through the chemical bath — yeah.”) I did think about how the film would play on an iPod or a laptop. Ultimately, because we have distribution with HBO Films, I was safe in terms of having at least one major platform for the film. When I look at the film now, I think it can play well on various platforms. But ultimately new technology didn’t play a role in how the film was conceived. I think we would have had to think somewhat differently if we didn’t have distribution.

What’s so great now is that the bar keeps rising and rising on films made for the Internet (and cellphones ). When you look at the brilliant shorts on Funnyordie.com, you realize that the best films go back to basics of storytelling, just tailored for the medium.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE
directors, Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:00 pm -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


Our film is the story of a man born in 1919 as told by his daughters, who were born in the late 1970s. William Kunstler was a radical civil rights lawyer who took part in many of the major activist and social movements from 1960 to 1994. But we didn’t make this film for the people who lived through that history with him. We made it for younger generations. This is a film about legacy, about looking at your parents’ lives and deciding what to take from their experience. It is a film about what it means to be a person of courage and to take action in your own lifetime.

For us, telling a good story is making a film that inspires people, something that moves an audience to laugh or cry together, to talk about what they experienced, and to take that experience home with them. When we were making this film, we weren’t thinking specifically about new forms of small-screen distribution, but we embrace these new opportunities and know that they will help us in a goal of reaching younger viewers in the U.S. and abroad. It’s an exciting time to be a filmmaker and a moviegoer. There are more stories being told, more voices to hear, and more communities to join.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

NO IMPACT MAN
producer, Eden H. Wurmfeld 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]


As filmmakers interested in creating character-driven films about social issues, we saw the story of No Impact Man as a great opportunity. An intimate, cinema vérité look at a family trying to find their place in our culture of consumption and the affect that has on the environment.

The idea of No Impact Man was that Colin Beavan, his wife and their daughter would remove themselves to the greatest extent possible from the various aspects of life that cause negative environmental impact while also increasing their positive impact in the community. Their self-imposed environmental asceticism would unfold in stages: creating no trash, conserving water, eating sustainably,\ and volunteering with local organizations. They were also to give away their TV, turn off their electricity and cancel their newspaper and magazine subscriptions, creating a Walden-like oasis of low impact in the middle of the bustling city.

A year without media you say? Not exactly. Colin and his wife Michelle are no strangers to media. He is an author and she a journalist and the No Impact experiment itself was conceived of as a book. Soon after the year began Colin started a daily blog. As he chronicled his trials and tribulations an online community grew. With thousands of hits a day to his Web site he was quickly noticed by the more mainstream media. The New York Times heard about the project and wrote a major story, “A Year Without Toilet Paper.” With that came what we now call the media explosion and their virtual media-free zone was history. The intrusion of the media in our lives not only became a theme of the film as we were shooting it, but also a theme we consciously underscored in the editing of the material. The irony of Beavan’s Waldenesque year being interrupted by the media explosion cannot be denied.

In an era where media attention is not just the major networks and newspapers, the chatter in cyberspace took on a life of its own. While much of it was positive and supportive, there was also some very biting criticism. From Gawker to countless environmental Web sites, from right-wing global warming deniers to radical environmentalists, the No Impact experiment was the focus of much discussion.

Colin and Michelle could not help but react to the attention and criticism and likewise, the media also became a focus of the documentary. In the film we see Colin reading criticism on the Web as his self-doubt emerges.

Michelle fears her job at BusinessWeek might be in jeopardy from the publicity and eventually confronts a blogger about her criticism of the project. In the end Colin realizes that it is only through the harnessing of this publicity to educate and inspire will people start treating the climate crisis as the emergency it is.

Through the story of No Impact Man we see how the media can be both part of the problem and part of the solution. Our over-consumptive disposable culture is often fueled by a saturation of advertising that is piped to us through the media. On the other hand, the media and new media in particular, provides a unique potential to confront modern-day challenges by creating a new form of community.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

THE KILLING ROOM
director, Jonathan Liebesman 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am -- Prospector Square Theatre, Park City]


The Killing Room was never consciously shaped by any changes in the collective structures of other films today. However any filmmaker is influenced by what he or she sees around in film, movies, books and life.

I do believe that there is a collective consciousness that breezes through many films as far as technique or structural choices are concerned. As for technique and execution, for a while now, the Hollywood films that have made the most impact on me have been those that attempt to make their situations very real and grounded, such as Paul Greengrass’s movies. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan also inject a handheld reality and stream of consciousness into their hyperreal stories in order to ground them and elevate them.

As far as structure, as filmmakers, we are able to explore tangents in shorthand without losing the audience. Although on the surface this may seem non-linear, today’s filmmakers are able to keep an emotional linearity which brings the audience through any number of stories being told at once. The Hours comes to mind as well as Iñárritu’s films.

Although these films have different stories that are structured non-linearly, for me, their real power is fueled by a very linear emotional motor. The Limey has a fantastic shorthand. These films remind me of the mind which jumps around visually, and the order of our thoughts; what we think of next is always emotionally motivated from the previous thought.

I don’t think audiences have evolved to cope with modern films, with quick cuts and non-linear visuals, as much as filmmakers’ skills have evolved in imitating real thought patterns of the audience that have remained the same since the cave.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

CARMO, HIT THE ROAD
writer-director, Murilo Pasta 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:00 pm -- Screening Room, Sundance Resort]


My story was shaped by the only force affecting cinema today that really counts: the financing aspect.

I’m a Third World filmmaker with no private income, no friends in high places and no godfathers in the filmmaking world.

The three notions that have guided me in this five-year journey, from Carmo’s conception through to being selected for Sundance, are: strategy, strategy and strategy.
What choice did I have?

So before I could even consider desired visual approach, casting possibilities, prospective budgeting levels, etc., I decided that my debut feature film would be a road movie.
Why?

Cos’ you can hardly go wrong with the genre.

If you pick the right location and a handful of interesting characters you’re halfway there.

Even though I was born and grew up in Brazil I had never been to the landscape that I chose to portray in Carmo. The region, Mato Grosso do Sul, is a state the size of California, located some 1,000 miles away from the big centers, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

As I spent 18 years of my life abroad, the first draft screenplay, written in 2003 while living and working in the UK, was thus entirely written with the help of a handful of travel guides.

So, there you go: Number one, I chose the genre; Number two, I picked the location.
But I still needed a story.

I duly found one in a Brazilian newspaper article.

It was the real story of a Brazilian country girl who goes to the big city in the hope of conquering the world only to end up working as an au pair for an upper-middle-class São Paulo family.

She returns to her hometown for a weekend… It’s Saturday night and she’s at a beer house with her girlfriends telling tall tales about her amazing life in the metropolis. She gets drunk. A playboy farmer chats her up. She goes to the beer house’s car park with him. They grope and snog in his SUV. A bandito on the run turns up wielding a gun, kidnaps the pair, drops the playboy by the roadside and continues in his vehicle with her. What follows is a tropical variation of Bonnie and Clyde with a lot more humor and a lot less violence. Bingo! I had my story.

I’m oversimplifying things but it was indeed more or less like that.

I wrote a story set on the Paraguay/Brazil/Bolivia border without having ever been there, surrounded by piles of travel guides on the kitchen table of my Liverpool flat whilst directing a British soap opera set in Lancashire. Exciting stuff.

I spent the next three-and-half years being a whore in every possible sense. Cap in hand, I managed to raise some $2 million dollars. But boy, did I compromise.

To begin with I changed the male protagonist — the bandito. He was originally Brazilian. We got some cash from Argentina and he instantly became Argentinean. We suddenly lost the cash from Argentina and got some from Spain instead. He swiftly became a Spaniard.

Among numerous other things, I had to accept an actor to play one of the main supporting roles who wasn’t my choice at all. He’s pals with one of the major investors in Carmo and he’s a big Brazilian soap opera star. He was rather gently pushed down my throat. In the original script his character was menacing, brooding, sinister. The guy is not an immensely accomplished actor, so I had to completely adapt both the character and the screenplay to accommodate him. A truly dark character turned into a comic one — the only route to make the actor possibly interesting.

Also two of the three lead investors would typically cough up in short and intermittent bursts, which meant we ran out of cash several times during pre, production and post. Carmo only has a proper ending sequence thanks to my credit card. We finished the movie with me putting all the production expenses on my card during the last week of the shoot. My Spanish partners paid me back later but at the time I didn’t have a clue whether I was going to see that money ever again. And so on and so forth. But I’m not complaining. How could I? Carmo somehow works. I’ve been picked for Sundance. Life is wonderful.
Sod them all.

My next film will be a romantic comedy in English, Head Over Heels, and I may end up being even more of a whore. With dignity. Cos that’s the only thing that really matters in this business. All the other discussions — well honestly, they’re academic. Little counts other than whether you’ll be able to raise the cash to make your movie and whether you’ll manage to keep your integrity and composure no matter how much compromising will be involved.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

YOU WONT MISS ME
co-writer-director, Ry Russo-Young 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]


I think everything affected the film from Obama to YouTube to my hopes of making a movie without thinking too much. I tried to just run with ideas, people, locations and not be so self-conscious this time around. I was very proud of Orphans (my first film) but in a way You Wont Miss Me was a reaction to making such a restrained movie. This time I wanted to make a movie that could only be made RIGHT NOW. That would scream of the times that we live in. So I used five different formats to capture a 23-year-old misfit named Shelly Brown. The portrait is rendered in fragments and as these pieces add up, a larger image of the character emerges.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

HUMPDAY
director, Lynn Shelton 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


It would be great to make a film that would work great for an audience no matter how they saw it…be it on their iPod or laptop or on the big screen or whatever. Ultimately though, I’m pretty old-school. There’s nothing like that communal experience of sitting in a darkened theater with a group of strangers and going on a journey together…one that takes over your senses with its sheer scope and thereby pulls you — hook, line and sinker — into another world. That is an experience that I cherish and it is the way that I would love for audiences to experience my films. It is the experience I have in mind when I’m developing, shooting, editing, mixing and mastering my work.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

ONE DAY IN A LIFE
co-writer-director, Stefano Tummolini 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:45 pm -- Broadway Centre Cinemas V, Salt Lake City]


The conception and the structure of my story were not affected while the execution was. The script was considered a potential flop by all the producers who had read it, so I had to film it on my own, almost without money. Time was the first thing I had to give up. Cinema needs a certain time to be made, but time is money. I’m sure that if I’d had a little more, the execution would have been better.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

TOE TO TOE
writer-director, Emily Abt 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:15 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


My filmmaking process wasn’t greatly influenced by changing distribution methods. I don’t want to bend toward trends that dictate that a filmmaker’s work be shorter, faster or sexier to watch on an iPod. I’m more than happy to create Web-friendly content for paying clients, but the films that I sink years into developing are not intended to be glanced at during a subway ride by a multitasking teenager. If those are the only eyeballs I can get then I’ll take them but I want audiences to loose/see themselves in the stories I create, and the best place for that to happen is, call me old-fashioned, in a theater.

My stories are mostly inspired by social problems that I find upsetting and want to explore. When I get into the grind of creating these stories, I fall in love with my characters and they drag me through the process against my better judgment. That’s what films are to me — something I enjoy creating so much that I don’t worry about what will happen to them when they’re completed. I’m sure I should think more about innovative distribution strategies when I’m developing a project but my “if you built it, they will come” approach, not the business side of things, is what keeps me amped in those baby stages. I figure that if I put my guts on the page and make that story so good that it drips, a bunch of folks will eventually want to see the film that brings those words to life.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

NOLLYWOOD BABYLON
writer-directors, Ben Addelman 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm -- Screening Room, Sundance Resort]



A lot gets tossed around these days about how new technology is changing the nature of storytelling. The ability of the audience to use technology to influence how a story unfolds is considered novel, complete with all the symptoms that characterize a fresh idea with legs. But one look at Nollywood, Nigeria’s grassroots film industry, now the third biggest in the world and the main subject of our film Nollywood Babylon, paints a different picture.

Nollywood’s approach emphasizes the immediate: shoot a film in a week, sell it in the market a few weeks later. When we first started our research, watching tons of Nollywood movies, a lot of them seemed seriously lacking in the basic ingredients of narrative. With apologies to the Seinfeld clan, it was baffling how two or three characters could talk about nothing for an entire scene.

But traveling to Lagos changed everything. Lagosians were eating these films up, in many cases watching three or four a day. We were obviously missing something.

As Lancelot, the director we follow, points out, in Africa, the grammar of oral storytelling is familiar to everyone. The storytellers’ job is to plant an idea in the audience’s mind, not actually represent the idea themselves. That’s for the audience to decide. The audience is the author.

For Lancelot and many others, Hollywood is “fake” because it uses the techniques of cinema to construct a reality that is completely foreign to them. It imposes its own vision of the world onto its audience. Nollywood does the exact opposite, and so for millions of people who watch Nollywood films across the globe, Nollywood is real because Nollywood give its audience the freedom to create the story from their own experience.

So remixing, ripping, sampling — whatever you want to call it — is nothing new. It only seems new to us because we are used to being so far removed from our storytellers. And that’s the number one thing that technology has done for stories is to bring their tellers closer to their audience. Shame on us for once again thinking of something as new that in other parts of the world they have been doing for years.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

O'ER THE LAND
director, Deborah Stratman 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am -- Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City]


I think I might be one of the few filmmakers out there who still cuts on a flatbed. Or rather, if I shoot on film, I cut on film; if I shoot on video, I cut on a computer. I still cut on film for a few reasons (it’s easier on my eyes, the tables are all being given away so I don’t have to compete for an editing space, I like handling the plastic), but most important is work speed. And by speed, I don’t mean faster. The slowness is seminal to the end product. Maybe it’s because I am, in essence, a slow thinker. But the way my thoughts are given form when I cut film is radically different than when I work on a computer. My films unfurl the way they do in large part because of my faith in slowness, and because of the way analog/mechanical processes accommodate that slowness.

I’m not antinonlinear; I’ve embraced it on many occasions. I just appreciate the unique temporal and pressure differences that each process lends itself to. As someone who still works in film, or plans to keep it up as long as market forces allow, I’m definitely negatively affected by the systematic discontinuation of some of my favorite film stocks and the closing down of film labs across the country. It can be depressing and pretty stressful to have your artistic tools threatened by obsolescence.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

HEART OF TIME
writer-director, Alberto Cortés 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm -- Screening Room, Sundance Resort]


Film has always been affected by diverse forces; many times has its near death been foreseen before the arrival of a new media, but today, more than 100 years from the invention of the cinematographer, cinema is still very similar to how it all began: celluloid, light and emotions on the screen with moving images in a dark room. The story of Heart of Time comes from inside the life of a rural community, a simple love story that is developed within the fight and the resistance of the modern Zapatistas. This led me to create this film with the essentials of film: the authenticity of who is in front of the camera and the honesty of who is behind. In this case, the rest is artifice.

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THE MISSING PERSON
writer-director, Noah Buschell 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]


For me, “story” is the most overused word in the film world these days. I hear actors saying, “I just wanna tell good stories.” I hear producers saying, “I have an intense passion for storytelling.” Jerry Bruckheimer is in some commercial calling himself a storyteller. Maybe he is.

I don’t understand when indie movies became synonymous with storytelling. When did this extreme emphasis on narrative take place? As if a movie doesn’t lend itself equally well to being a poem or a painting. But we don’t hear leading ladies saying, “I’m looking for great paintings to make.” This is probably one of the hardest things facing independent filmmakers like myself today. If one wants to make a film that’s not plot-driven, one has to disguise it. I wrote a script that was in the costume of a noir film. In reality it was much more of a “lucid dream” script than a “detective whodunit” script.

It’s funny that Sundance is celebrating the art of storytelling for its anniversary. To me independent film was always a place where movies could be anything. When I think of A Woman Under the Influence, I think of it as a portrait. Terrence Malick’s Badlands seems as much a haiku ballad as it does a story. Robert Altman used to say he saw his films more as paintings than stories.

I can’t help but feel that when a lot of people are talking about storytelling in movies today, what they’re really talking about is the homogenization and dumbing down of film. Everything is articulated, everything moves along, you’re told all the answers, and nothing is left up in the air. There’s no time for breathing, morphing, strangeness, or wildness. It's movies as a narrow intellectual activity, made to go down easy on a laptop. Basically it's academic and numbing. The catering to people’s brains, as opposed to their bodies, their guts.

We have our own stories about ourselves and others. We all are real good at telling stories. The brain does it all day long. But there’s an experience and a vision beyond stories. And that’s what has brought me to movies in the first place. Those moments where your mind gets blown open. Concepts vanish. Judgments give out. Watching Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in a dark theater is like listening to Charlie Parker or reading Emily Dickinson. The small, rational mind gives way to something beyond thought.

So that’s the battle these days for a filmmaker like myself. I’m interested in going beyond stories, but the indie world is more and more story driven.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10:00 AM Comments (0)

Thursday, January 8, 2009

AFGHAN STAR
director, Havana Marking 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:15 pm -- Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City]


Afghan Star is a documentary about a TV show of the same name. It’s a powerful TV format we all know — a version of Pop Idol — but in a country that most of us don’t: Afghanistan. With the backdrop of warfare and Taliban repression (they banned music and used to impale TVs on spikes) you certainly wouldn’t expect to find a TV music talent contest. But Afghan Star: The Series is now one of the most potent forces of change the country has. You can imagine then, with that history, that there are a very different set of forces affecting film and media in Afghanistan.

The narrative structure of my documentary, following the contestants and producers from the regional auditions to the finals in Kabul, was clear from the start, but events unfolded to make it a modern-day thriller. When one woman danced on stage all hell broke loose: both her life and the future of the show was threatened. Their futures in turn came to symbolize that of the fragile nation itself.

Being in Afghanistan for four months affected my filmmaking greatly. Not only was the way we operated completely different (I couldn’t plan anything in advance due to kidnap threat, I couldn’t go anywhere my bodyguard didn’t allow, I couldn’t print anything so no call sheets, and with erratic electricity lighting was darn tricky) but seeing how important a TV music show was to the people of Afghanistan — 11 out of 30 million Afghans watched the final episode while producers and contestants literally risked their lives —made me understand the power of media in an amazing new way. These were forces that we in the West have all but forgotten.

In the UK there have been numerous scandals about documentary, reality and competition TV. Votes have been rigged, “real” people have been actors, and docs have been manipulated completely for high drama. In a film about Annie Leibovitz, footage of the Queen walking into a photo shoot was recut to make it look like she was storming out (“Queengate”). When filmmakers are arrogant enough to mess with the Queen, you know there is a problem.

Everything is raw in Afghanistan. We witnessed the effects of the show first hand. When a female contestant let her headscarf slip — to much scandal — within weeks the young girls were taking theirs off deliberately. Gradually the youth were getting more confident and as people voted for their favorite singers by SMS, the first time they have voted for anything, the very concept of democracy was being established. If they had for one moment believed the votes were rigged, the whole attitude to a political system would have been questioned.

The power of those in media, be it reality show producer, documentary filmmaker, fiction writer — whoever — is not to be underestimated, and their ethical responsibility to the audience and to their characters is great. It’s obvious of course, but something that media across the globe seems to forget for the sake of a good story, especially now that there is so much competition. But learning this once again has made my film a much more powerful piece. My characters’ lives were at stake: I couldn’t afford to get it wrong.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:03 PM Comments (0)

BOY INTERRUPTED
director, Dana Perry 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


The story of my film, Boy Interrupted, was not affected much by recently changing digital technology. If anything, the film is a throwback to conventional documentary filmmaking; straightforward chronological storytelling – no tricks. Authenticity was our guide. The goal was to tell the story of my son Evan's bipolar illness and suicide in as factual a manner as possible, with home movies and first-hand interviews bearing witness to our experience as a family.

I love the self-contained and mostly humorous videos I see on YouTube and Facebook and admire their makers. But the story of this film would never break down into that kind of bite-size delivery. It's almost like the feature-length film is itself a mini-sketch of Evan's life. That is, relative to the continuum of raising, loving, and losing Evan, the film can only capture a portion of the whole experience of his life and death. It is a portrait of family, illness, love and grief too complex to abbreviate.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:02 PM Comments (0)

IT MIGHT GET LOUD
director, David Guggenheim 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 am -- Temple Theatre, Park City]


The hardest thing about making documentaries is finding a story inside your material — it’s just so much harder than scripted material. And so what you find are a lot of documentaries that are written in advance; that is to say that the filmmaker knew what he or she wanted to say before beginning shooting. So you feel a kind of steering going on, and therefore a falseness. The other extreme is that you see documentaries that have no story at all. The filmmaker saw something interesting, they shot a lot and they just strung a bunch of interesting events together, and you, the viewer, feel completely lost. So this is the tension you feel when you set off to make a new documentary. On It Might Get Loud I wanted to try things differently. On An Inconvenient Truth I found that my best interviews with Al Gore were done with no crew and no camera — just me and him and a microphone, sitting sometimes for hours. This allowed the conversation to wander, and it was much, much more personal. So the first thing I did was interview the guitarists, sound only, for extensive sit-down interviews. Jimmy Page in London, The Edge in L.A. and London and Jack White in Los Angeles. There were times when I wondered if I wasn’t making a huge mistake. Jimmy would say something incredible and it killed me that I didn’t have him saying it on camera. But what it allowed me to do was ask any question, and follow what interested me or what was on their minds at the moment, and go deeply, not worrying about where the movie needed to go. It also gave the interviews a much more intimate tone and feeling. Later, in the editing room, without a frame of picture, Greg Finton the editor and I would cut these interviews into “story strings,” and slowly, a story would reveal itself. What emerged were three stories that came forward without preconceived intentions from me.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:01 PM Comments (0)

JOHNNY MAD DOG
writer-director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 8:30 am -- Prospector Square Theatre, Park City]


Johnny Mad Dog is based on a novel by Emmanuel Dongala. At first, I wrote a faithful adaptation of the book following the same narrative construction, which was centered on two main characters: Johnny, a 15-year-old child soldier, and Laokolé, a 13-year-old girl who runs away with her family. They are in the same situation in the last days of a civil war in Africa. The same unit of time, place and space. Two roads which cross paths, two different points of view, two destinies.

Once this first version of the scenario was completed, we began to look for financing to start preproduction on the film.
The second step was for me to research the reality of the scenario, to know if all the stories like those described in the book had really taken place during the war. I then went to Liberia in 2004, a country that had experienced 14 years of civil war and was believed to have used many child soldiers.

My work then consisted of meeting ex-child soldiers, ex-generals, those who fought beside Charles Taylor or beside LURD. At the same time, I began the casting and location scouting for the film. During several months, I plunged my scenario into the reality of the situation. Having selected 15 children, ex-child soldiers, to play the “small boy unit” in the film, I settled down with them, and we lived together under the same roof during one year to prepare the film. I told them sequences and they improvised from their own experiences. This allowed me to rewrite the scenario and the dialogue to be as close as possible to what actually happened.

The adaptation of the book was then transformed into something more raw, erasing little by little the psychology of the characters and the classic narrative weft of the story, for the benefit of the documentary style and the authentic reimagining of sequences. How to imagine giving a child soldier a psychological distance while it is exactly for this total absence of consciousness that these children soldiers were used?

The film found its own identity little by little, taking away the narrative structure to become a film much more visceral than informative. With this transformation, the film became perhaps less accessible to a wide public, although free of any conventional constraints.

It was important that this film depict the point of view of the children in this war. I wanted to immerse the spectator in the madness, the chaos, the violence, by making him live the events himself rather than staying in his comfortable position, outside of the story. Give him a real experience rather than a classic narrative structure. It seems to me that this is what has to evolve the cinema today, to provoke, to move, to involve the audience, whatever the method of distribution. The cinema as an experience to make us more sensitive to and understanding of our current world.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4:00 PM Comments (0)

MARY AND MAX
writer-director-designer, Adam Elliot 

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 15, 6:00 & 9:30 pm -- Eccles Theatre, Park City]


My producer and I make clay-animated biographies (or “clayographies” as I like to call them). As with all my films, my latest stop-motion animation, Mary and Max, has a simple plot and the structure is nothing too elaborate or terribly clever. I used to shudder at the thought of calling them formulaic but in many ways they are. My aim as a writer-director is to create a rich and engaging story and then tell it well. I do not obsess over plot and structure and I believe in writing from the heart and not from guidelines in scriptwriting manuals. Nor do I obsess over length. I try not to differentiate between my shorts and my first feature. They are all individual works that have lengths that are needed to tell their stories. I put as much thought and care into my 4-minute film Cousin as I did into my 92-minute film Mary and Max. Why do people obsess with length? Why is it some films that are short seem so long, and some that are long seem too quick? I have sat through short films that have felt like I’ve been watching Titanic three times in a row. My mother always used to say it’s “quality, not quantity.”

Anyway I digress. Have forces affecting all of cinema today affected the structure and lengths of my films? Absolutely not. If people choose to watch my films on their phones (and they do), or see a retrospective of my work at a film festival on the big screen, then that is their choice; I do not mind too much. All I hope is that they leave feeling nourished and that they feel they have not wasted their money. I feel it is an honor as a filmmaker that a complete stranger will be prepared to give up and hour and a half of their lives to spend time with my story. I have always approached my films in the same way; I let them tell me their story. I let the characters become so real that they begin to tell me what story direction we should go in. I believe that storytelling is equipment for living and that all really good stories follow an age-old pattern and rhythm. I believe that when we go to the cinema the experience is not that far removed than from when we sat around campfires in caves telling stories and yarns. Storytelling is the oldest art form and even though cinema is changing (and always has and should), the people creating the stories should not bend too much to the increasing and dramatic changes around us that seem to accelerate each year.

There are enough bad films out there that we need to worry more about creating good stories and less about how they are delivered and the form they should take. There have never been so many ways to watch a film and engage with a story. The quality of delivery has never been better; it’s a shame the quality of the content seems to have never been worse. Maybe I’m old-fashioned; maybe I’ll suddenly become obsolete? Whenever I am in doubt, I remember two things I learned at film school many years ago:

1. The three ingredients of a good film are script, script and script.

2. An audience will always forgive a bad sound, always forgive bad acting, bad special effects, costumes, set design, lighting and editing…but they will never forgive a bad story.

Hopefully these old-fashioned and possibly quirky mantras will still adhere many years into the future and that however we tell stories and whatever the length and form they come in, the essence of a good story will always remain the same. Unless we all evolve a third eyeball or ear, then our primeval brains will continue to absorb stories in the way that seems natural and intuitive; there may be hundreds of ways to engage with a story, but we still only have two ears and two eyes to do so with.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3:07 PM Comments (0)