Authors — Ray Pride
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“Most of the Film is Done in 120 Beats Per Minute, But Some of It Is At 140 BPM”: Tom Tykwer on Run Lola Run
With Run Lola Run‘s 25th anniversary release this weekend in a new 4K restoration, we are reposting our Spring, 1999 cover interview with director Tom Tykwer. Among the last year’s festival staples, the most exhilarating may have been Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. The self-taught 34-year-old Berliner’s third feature is a clock-driven, lighter-than-air romantic-action-comedy-thriller floating atop a percolating electronica score. The film plays out three potential narratives of what dangers and distractions the streets of Berlin hold just before noon for Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), two effortlessly cool, suddenly in trouble twentysomething lovers. Manni loses 100,000 marks […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 5, 2024 -
“I Don’t Know How to Fake It, To Do Something I Don’t Believe In”: Michael Almereyda on Vampires, Mummies, Writing Hollywood Screenplays and Directing Independent Films
After more than a quarter century of publication, Filmmaker has a huge archive, and most of our print articles have never appeared online. Over the next several months we’ll be correcting that by curating some of our best articles and interviews, particularly from directors who continue to make strong and vital work today. We’ll start with this Winter, 1999 interview of Michael Almereyda by Ray Pride, published on the release of his film Trance, that is also an excellent overview of his early directing career and Hollywood screenwriting work. — Editor Filmmakers working outside the major studios often find themselves […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 5, 2019 -
Onrushing Now
Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 11, 2018 -
Corrective Lens
While promoting The Act Of Killing — his punchy, audacious, madly performative, deeply troubling masterpiece about the legacy of genocide in Indonesia 50 years later — Joshua Oppenheimer didn’t much let on that there was a second, complementary feature in the works. While editing the first film, and before his secondary subjects in the government and paramilitaries knew what a bold, damning document he had fashioned, Oppenheimer shot a round of elegant, formally restrained interviews with his earlier subjects through the offices of his collaborator, Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother had been murdered. Among a range of substantial […]
by Ray Pride on Jul 23, 2015 -
All Together Now: Ned Benson on The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
When Ned Benson started writing The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby 10 years ago, he had no idea his directorial debut would permutate into a unique creature, or, by present count, four unique incarnations, all of which are equally subjective movie-going experiences. Eleanor Rigby world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 as two features, Her and Him, joined into a 201-minute juggernaut. Her immediately immerses us into the sorrow of one Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain), a woman who’s suffered a loss but cannot bear to talk about it, whether with her estranged husband, Conor (James McAvoy), her sister Katy […]
by Ray Pride on Jul 17, 2014 -
Thoughts on Roger Ebert, 35mm and Peter Wintonick
Instant remembrances flower online when strangers die. Twitter turns into an instantaneous altar, as if the site where a hero fell. And some writers are very good at devising a rapid remembrance of a long friendship or acquaintance into a succinct, maybe even final summation. After years of aggregating news headlines at Movie City News, linking to keenly observed obituaries daily, my impulse runs the other direction when I knew the deceased. I’m not ready that soon to thread the nuance of all that time into a tidy dispatch; I want to grip the fragments of soon-fading memory. I didn’t […]
by Ray Pride on Dec 31, 2013 -
Voices From the Street
A first feature by Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq (chosen for Filmmaker’s 2012 25 New Faces of Independent Film), These Birds Walk is an observational documentary following the hopes of a young Karachi runaway named Omar. The boy, no more than 10-years-old, escapes his rural village and, as the film begins, is ready to run away from his city youth home. Omar is befriended by Asad, a young ambulance driver who works near the orphanage, which is maintained by one of Pakistan’s great philanthropists, elderly Abdul Sattar Edhi. Two questions resound through Omar’s days, through ups and downs: Where is […]
by Ray Pride on Oct 21, 2013 -
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2013
Greeks, if not Greece, persist. In March, the 15th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival presented 76 Greek premieres among its teeming 10 days of attractions, streaming many films across Greece and Cyprus, as well as 520 films in a Market with 55 buyers from around the world. “Here we are again, despite the hardships,” Dimitri Eipides, artistic director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and TDF reflected on opening night. Of its 1999 inaugural, he said, “Audiences were skeptical then. The establishment of an internationally acclaimed institution celebrating the art of documentary was something unheard of in Greece. But […]
by Ray Pride on Jul 18, 2013 -
Caught On Film
In Medan, Indonesia, when the government was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo was one of many small-time gangsters who hawked movie tickets and plotted petty crimes in front of cinemas showing American movies. He and his buddies, who translate “gangster” as meaning “free men,” were enlisted as death squads after Communists cut off imports of U. S. films, such as their beloved Elvis Presley musicals. More than a million intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and alleged Communists and leftists were murdered. The “movie theater gangsters” were always eager to dance across the road to garrote an alleged Communist or […]
by Ray Pride on Apr 23, 2013 -
Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2012
Opening a film festival with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors shows sullen optimism, of which the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival had plenty. The 10-day event in mid-November brimmed with hope and sunshine, but also what felt like bone-weariness from six years of producing both the international and the spring documentary festival with declining resources in a country where bankers and politicians are determined to spiral into further decline. Past parallel events, such as filmmaker master classes and a daily convocation of directors called “Just Talking,” were missed. Neither a first-time festivalgoer nor the crowds would notice: Capacity was reported at […]
by Ray Pride on Jan 29, 2013
