[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV] Making The Bengali Detective was an incredibly intense period of filmmaking. I and my small team had no idea where our detective and his investigations would lead us. Each client brought their own revelations and twisting storyline. We had a central character die during the production, a subject who discovered her husband was sleeping with her brother’s wife. There was a poor grieving mother who then became a suspect in a triple murder case. And our hero detective turned up one day to greet us in a silver-and-gold […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 8:30 pm — Prospect Square Theatre] Our biggest surprise with Kaboom had to be the crazy standing ovation we got at our Cannes Premiere. I was in the Grand Palais, literally the hugest movie theatre I’ve ever seen, with five young actors from the cast, producers, crew, etc., all dressed up in our tuxes and the girls in these stunning gowns and we were all totally intimidated and terrified. I’d warned the actors that films often get booed in Cannes, even ones by major directors like Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, etc., so we were petrified. One […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 9:00 pm — Temple Theatre] Making The Interrupters was, by its very nature, a series of hoped-for surprises: Producer Alex Kotlowitz and I wanted to be awakened in the middle of the night by a violence interrupter and told we should come quick to capture them dealing with a potential mediation. No such moment was more surprising than “Flamo,” a young man full of rage, making his entrance into our film by opening his front door and angrily flinging his cell phone out into the snow. He was on a warpath of revenge against this […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 8:45 pm — Library Center Theatre] The element of surprise is built into the process of making movies.  Every film shoot is meticulously planned out in the smallest possible detail.  And every plan is thrown out the first day of filming.  This was definitely true for On the Ice.   We were trying to shoot a complex film with a large cast of non-actors, and many locations in one of the most remote places in the world.  Our most difficult location was the frozen Arctic Ocean.  Specifically we wanted to get to the lead, the place […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 9:45 pm — Broadway Centre Cinemas V, Salt Lake City] If I am completely honest, I would say that the biggest surprise was getting into competition at Sundance! I took on The Flaw because it seemed like a really difficult project to pull off. The brief was to make a film about the fundamental underlying cause of the present economic crisis. The first problem was therefore to identify what that was, to get beyond the stories of Wall Street shenanigans (which were obviously a big part of what went wrong, but equally clearly not the […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre] No surprises. Just overwhelmed by the commitment of the cast and crew. Proud of them all. Very proud.

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 9:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV] To me the biggest surprise in making The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 was meeting one of my subjects: Angela Davis. I had admired her for so many years from seeing her on TV and her biography. The footage that we assembled in the film is something that no one outside of Swedish television had seen before. While watching those segments from years ago, I was moved by her interviews and the way she spoke so directly and with knowledge and a subtlety that was so powerful. Then, when I actually […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 6:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre] As screenwriters we learn that you have to plant information and set up courses of action in the film’s first act to establish what happens next. Restoration’s script was no different. But while editing we concluded that the first act was far too laden and that we had to cut out a certain supporting character that appeared there. Of course we were convinced that spectators will miss all the information the character communicated. The information was critical to understanding the film. We experimented anyway, took the character out and shortened […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre] The making of this film has been a series of surprises. The first surprise hit when my wife came home from work and said that four federal agents had come into her office that day and arrested one of her employees. He was accused of burning down two timber facilities in Oregon four years earlier when he was part of the Earth Liberation Front, and if found guilty, he would go to prison for the rest of his life with no chance of parole. That seemed like a surprising sentence […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 6:00 pm — Broadway Centre Cinemas VI] Actually, a surprise occurred right after I finished shooting. Lost Kisses storyline is about a girl who can apparently speak to the Madonna, so I had been dealing with actors playing characters asking for miracles. Two or three weeks after we finished, a sort of a black liquid started to came out of the bark of a tree in Librino, the place we shot the film. People believed that it was Madonna’ s tear drops and started to go on pilgrimage to that tree. You can even watch […]