UPDATE ON 2002'S 25 NEW FACES
Filmmaker Magazine caught up with last year’s impressive list of fresh new talent in order to see what they’ve been up to since being named one of our "25 New Faces."
Up and comer Aaron Stanford has kept himself quite busy in the last year, appearing in Spike Lee’s 25th Hour and Bryan Singer’s X-Men 2, and presently shows no signs of slowing down. He has just wrapped the film, Rick, starring opposite Bill Pullman for Content Films, and has begun work on his next film, Winter Solstice, co-starring Anthony LaPaglia and Allison Janney.
Keep an eye out for the naturalistic work of production designer Judy Becker, whose upcoming projects include Dandelion, directed by Mark Milgard, and Large’s Ark, directed by Zack Braff and starring Natalie Portman, Ian Holm, and Zack Braff.
Following Life On A String featuring Laurie Anderson (2002 Cannes, Berlin, London, Sao Paolo, Denver Film Festivals,) director Steven Lippman continues his series of acclaimed music short films (Youssou N'Dour, Regina Carter, Jane Monheit, Kronos Quartet) with an upcoming project with David Bowie. His narrative feature film, The History of Everything, is in the financing stage, and he's writing a new untitled screenplay with Obie-Award winning playwright Ain Gordon.
Aside from his regular gig as a camera operator and second unit director of photography on HBO’s Six Feet Under, Geoff Haley has also been busy working on a script which has just been sold and is currently in pre-production. Geoff is also getting ready to direct a pilot for Showtime.
Following the success of his first film Audit, director Brian To’s next project is a shocking dramatic comedy by the same writer as Audit, entitled A Vicious Circle. He also has in the works a romantic dramedy written by himself and Richard Lasser entitled Payday with Michael York (Austin Powers, Logan’s Run, Cabaret) attached to star.
This past year, filmmaker Garrett Scott has been heavily involved with marketing his unique documentary Cul de Sac. Look for this compelling portrayal of a man who stole an Army tank and went joyriding through San Diego streets on HBO or Cinemax in mid-2004.
Writer J.T. Petty has managed to keep his schedule pretty full since summer 2002, writing and directing Mimic: Sentinel, a straight-to-video giant cockroach movie for Dimension films to be released in November 2003, in addition to working on the sequel for "Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell," for which he shared a Game Developer’s Choice Award (the video game equivalent of the Academy Award) with game designer Clint Hocking for his scriptwriting work.
To say that filmmaker deco dawson has had an industrious past year might be an understatement–in addition to enjoying a number of "retrospectives," or complete showcases of his short film work (Ontario Cinematheque, the Pacific Cinematheque, the Canadian Film Institute, the Calgary International Film Festival, just to name a few), he has also recently completed two new short films, Defile in Veil for the Chicago Underground Film Fund and The Fever of the Western Nile for Swiss Gallery Curator Sigismond DeVagay, both premering later this summer. He is also in development on a multi format short film presented in the style of a German Folk Tale entitled The Hunter and the Belle Rose.
Through his non-profit production company Just Media, Daniel Junge just finished two shorts — one on a disabled amateur musical actor's league entitled We are Phamaly and one on a 1st Amendment Rights case involving bookstore records called Reading Your Rights — while continuing to work on a longer piece on alternative cancer therapy, called Cancer Cowboys. Never failing to impress, this ambitious documentary filmmaker is currently in Afghanistan shooting a group of puppeteers teaching kids about landmines.
Writer and director Neil Burger is currently developing Air Tight (written by Tony and Joe Gayton) for Castle Rock / Warner Brothers with Mike Lobell producing. Neil’s film Interview With the Assassin, a "fake documentary" a la Blair Witch Project that takes a look at JFK'S "grassy knoll gunman" theory, was nominated for three Independent Awards including Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.
Staying in harmony with her past career, Divya Srinivasan has been working on a wide variety of projects, including a music video for D.C. band The Apes called Black Tears. She is currently in post-production for a narrative short, The Lost Pines, soon to be scored by Austin band Knife in the Water.
Writer Josslyn Luckett has stayed in the vein of music since her lyrical jazz movie Didn’t Know What Time It Was and MTV Films’ Love Song. She is currently writing a script for Amaru Entertainment and MTV Networks about the early life/pre-fame years of Tupac Shakur.
Filmmaker Lisa Collins is presently hard-at-work polishing her script entitled The Grass is Greener, a fascinating exploration of race and identity in which three daughters of an aging B-movie actress exist as white during the day and black at night.
Craig Brewer, whose film The Poor and The Hungry toured a range of festivals and won Best Digital Film at the Hollywood Film Festival, is now diligently developing his next film Hustle and Flow, and also has in his hands writing job prospects from MTV, New Line, and Dreamworks.
Since we last spoke with him, director Przemyslaw Reut was awarded the ninth annual Turning Leaf Coastal Reserve Someone To Watch Award at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles. He is currently hard-at-work on an animated feature "in which all sorts of techniques are being mixed together to create a new style," in addition to finishing up a script for a character driven adventure story.
Following the success of their hilarious dark comedy P.E., M. Stark and Jacob Meszaros, represented by Endeavor, are attached to write and direct a feature for Warner Brothers based on a story from the National Public Radio series, "This American Life." The pair have also just completed writing a dark suburban science fiction comedy entitled Teenage Fantasy — keep your eyes peeled for more boisterously entertaining work from this writer/director team.
Screenwriter Coleman Hough is now on her second draft of the Katharine Graham story for HBO. Fans of her work can catch her performing her new monologue, Vanishing Point, in July at Dixon Place in New York, the same venue where she developed the material for her first screenplay, Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal.
Grace Lee is continuing work on The Grace Lee Project documentary, for which she received a Rockefeller Foundation grant. She is also finishing up a feature screenplay The Truth Stops Here, as well as collaborating with writer Rebecca Sonnenshine on a script about a dysfunctional family of martial artists.
Justin Haythe's first screenplay The Clearing, which he developed with director/producer Pieter Jan Brugge is in post-production at Fox Searchlight. Robert Redford, Helen Mirren and Willem Dafoe starring with Thousand Words co-producing. He is currently writing an original idea for Sam Mendes and Dreamworks. Justin is also an author. His first novel Honeymoon, will be published in 2004 by Grove in the US andPicador in the UK. His short fiction has been published in Harper's.
Production designer Steve Beatrice is currently working on a project for Lee Daniels Entertainment (Monsters Ball) called The Woodsman, directed by Nicole Kassel, starring Kevin Bacon.
Lucy Walker is currently editing a documentary for AMC and is completing the writing of her first feature script. She is also attached to direct several projects around New York, all still in the developmental stage.
Things are going swimmingly for documentary filmmaker Nicole Cattell, who has received a New York State Council for the Arts grant for her upcoming film currently in development, Mermaids: The Documentary, a "seafaring road movie through the oceans of the world in search of the original mermaid." She and her crew have also just completed principal photography, and are in post production on Revolucion: Visions of Cuba since the Revolution, a film in which four generations of Cuban photographers offer a rare window into the hopes and sorrows of the Cuban people.
Davidson Cole has recently completed a new script with his filmmaking partner and producer John Digles entitled Angels, a bold, surprising, dark comedy answering life’s greatest question: What happens after you die? Angels is currently being packaged by ICM, who represents the filmmaking team, while they prepare to work on a new feature script.
Go back to 2003's 25 Faces [1-5 | 6-10 | 11-15 | 16-20 | 21-25]
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