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“Something Seismic was Shifting in This Country”: Five Questions for The Wolf Hour Writer/Director Alistair Banks Griffin
The Wolf Hour
With Alistair Banks Griffin's recommended second feature, The Wolf Hour, containing one of Naomi Watts's best performances, in theaters, we're running again our interview with Griffin following the film's Sundance premiere. -- Editor "I can't get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wave length then everybody else...." -- David Berkowitz In one of the Sundance Film Festival's real discoveries, Alistair Banks Griffins's 1977-set The Wolf Hour, Naomi Watts plays June, a novelist and cultural critic existing somewhere in the intellectual shadow of the era's greats, like Susan Sontag. After the publication of her first novel, The Patriarch, leads to her father's presumed suicide --… Read more
“Happiness Has Become a Kind of Ideology”: Jessica Hausner on Motherhood, Genetic Engineering, Being a Female Filmmaker and Her Sci-Fi Drama, Little Joe
Little Joe
Jessica Hausner’s unsettling and weirdly beautiful sci-fi drama Little Joe is named for the infertile red bloom that Alice (Emily Beecham), a scientist on a genetic engineering team, has developed as a supposedly harmless form of heroin: savoring its scent makes people feel happy. She has named the flower for her son (Kit Connor), and illicitly brings one home for young Joe to tend and talk to in his bedroom. What Alice supposedly doesn’t reckon with is Little Joe’s capacity for influencing whom Joe wants to live with as he approaches adolescence, herself or his father, her former partner. Or is it that Alice, who is devoted at least at much to her work as to Joe, has unconsciously planned… Read more
Sundance 2020 Announces 118 Feature Films
Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young in Shirley (Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Thatcher Keats)
For independent filmmakers the most eagerly awaited announcement of the year is here: the 118 feature films selected for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The films hail from 27 countries and were chosen from a dizzying record high of 3,853 features. And the 2020 edition is the final one for outgoing Festival Director John Cooper, who says, “The program this year, my last as Director, is a celebration: of art and artists, yes, but also of the community that makes the annual pilgrimage to Park City to see the most exciting new work being made today. Watching this group expand and thrive over the years has been exhilarating and wildly rewarding. Our 2020 Festival's lively and visionary crop of artists… Read more
Marriage Story Wins Four Awards, Including Best Picture, at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards; American Factory Wins Best Documentary
Noah Baumbach (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for IFP)
Marriage Story writer/director Noah Baumbach seemed a bit flustered his second trip to the podium last night at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards. Minutes earlier he had accepted the Best Screenplay Prize and, in prepared remarks, thanked his various collaborators as well as Ted Sarandos and Netflix -- not just for financing his film but saving the Paris Theater too. But when Natasha Lyonne announced Marriage Story for the Audience Award, Baumbach perhaps began to realize that he hadn't written enough speeches for the evening. "I hope you all remember what I said in the last speech because it's still relevant," he quipped. Baumbach would return to the stage twice more, winning Best Picture and, in a very funny (and… Read more
“This Is the First Film Todd and I Filmed Digitally”: DP Ed Lachman on Dark Waters
Ed Lachman and Todd Haynes on the set of Dark Waters
Starting with 2002's Far from Heaven, cinematographer Ed Lachman worked with director Todd Haynes on four features before this year's Dark Waters. Based on a true story, the movie follows corporate attorney Rob Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) as he investigates industrial pollution on a farm in Appalachia. The case widened to include the entire town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and led to a years-long lawsuit against DuPont. Lachman spoke with Filmmaker at Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, held this year in Toruń, Poland. Filmmaker: How did you and Todd approach this story? Lachman: In his storytelling Todd has always dealt with how our culture treats the outsider and insider. The difference is now we're all the outsiders. He was drawn to the project by how we're all being contaminated, both figuratively and literally, by… Read more
Back to One, Episode 86: Emily Beecham
Emily Beecham won the best actress award at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her brilliantly nuanced and tightly focused performance in Jessica Hausner's art house science fiction film Little Joe. Recently she played The Widow in the AMC series Into The Badlands, starred in Daphne, and had a memorable supporting role in Hail Caesar. In this episode she talks about the importance of connection, avoiding “attractive acting,” Mike Leigh, the strenuousness of intense physical performance, her Little Joe hair, and much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And if you're enjoying what you are hearing, please subscribe and rate us! As a Back To One listener you can… Read more
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