Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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Your Sister’s Sister | Writer/Director Lynn Shelton
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 8:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] In 2005, on the set of We Go Way Back (my first feature film as writer/director), I remember having the distinct feeling that I’d finally found what I was always meant to do. It was an electrifying and completely transformative revelation. As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring a variety of them before settling on narrative filmmaking unavoidable. I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“ESCAPE FIRE” | director, Matthew Heineman
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] I believe that documentary film has the ability to motivate, to inspire, and to help bring clarity to complicated issues in a way that other media cannot. Much of the traditional media attention on healthcare has focused on the partisan politics in our nation’s Capitol—from the contentious passage of the Affordable Care Act to the ongoing polarized debate about its impact. There have been countless articles, news stories, blog posts, and tweets about this topic. And everybody in America, whether they like it or not, has been affected […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS” | director, Fredrik Gertten
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 8:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] 1. Why are you a filmmaker? Why did you choose this profession? Do we really choose professions? I have done many different things in my life, from hard labor at a shipyard to starting up a musicians co-op record company. I worked as a journalist for years and had a weekly column in a daily in Southern Sweden/ I also worked as foreign correspondent for national radio, newspapers and magazines and hosted a TV show on the swedish king Charles XII and Tzar Peter the Great set in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“ROBOT AND FRANK” | director, Jake Schreier
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:30 pm –Rose Wagner Performing Arts center, SLC] I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
Hello I Must Be Going | Director Todd Luiso; Screenwriter Sarah Koskoff
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, January 19, 9:30 pm –Eccles Theatre, Park City] Sarah Koskoff: I had always only written for the stage, but when I wrote Hello I Must Be Going it was a film from the beginning and could only be a film. I wanted to explore what it would be like for a grown woman to wake up suddenly in her parents’ house with nothing of her own, totally dependent–the subtle humiliations of being an adult thrust into the position of being a child. There was something just so horrible and so painfully funny to me about her situation, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2012 -
Load & Play
Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story Antidote Films – Available Now “The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture,” writes Peter Dormer in The Culture of Craft, cited on the website to Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s new documentary, Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story. In his directorial follow-up to Soul Power, Kusama-Hinte (also a producer whose credits include The Kids are All Right and the board chairman of IFP) captures, in loving 16mm, a Martha’s Vineyard boatyard whose work is an elegy to those vanishing values of hand-crafted perfection cited by Dormer. Charlotte follows boat […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 10, 2012 -
GUS VAN SANT CHATS WITH MIKE MILLS ABOUT “BEGINNERS”
Originally published in the Spring 2011 issue. Beginners is nominated for Best Feature and Best Ensemble. “There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.”–Rainer Maria Rilke About the three characters in Mike Mills’s altogether winning second feature — Oliver, a sensitive yet romantically challenged graphic designer in his mid-30s (Ewan McGregor); Anna, a beautiful, single French actress (Melanie Laurent); and the designer’s father, Hal, a retired museum director and widower in his 70s, who has just come out of the closet (Christopher Plummer) — the film’s title, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 21, 2011 -
Shooting Tiny Furniture
Originally published in the Summer 2010 issue. Only a few months after we selected her for last year’s “25 New Faces” list, writer-director Lena Dunham went into production on her second feature Tiny Furniture. Shot by fellow 2009 “25 New Faces” Jody Lee Lipes and produced by Filmmaker contributing editor Alicia Van Couvering and Kyle Martin, the film wound up winning the Grand Prize at 2010’s SXSW Film Festival and was picked up by IFC for distribution this fall. The film was shot on the Canon 7D, and we asked Lipes, focus puller Joe Anderson and Technicolor colorist Sam Daley […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 17, 2011 -
“BEING ELMO: A PUPPETEER’S JOURNEY” | director, Constance Marks
Originally posted on Jan. 23, 2011 as part of our annual question we ask directors attending the Sundance Film Festival. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey is nominated for the Audience Award. [PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 23, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre] The most surprising thing I found while making BEING ELMO: A Puppeteer’s Journey was how insanely popular this furry red monster has become. For the past year I’ve carried a bright red Elmo messenger bag. I would get spontaneous feedback every day from almost everyone: old men, teenage girls, postal workers and especially mothers. Hundreds of times I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 9, 2011 -
CRASH THE SUPER BOWL IS BACK THIS YEAR!
SPONSORED POST Want to break into the commercial business on the largest stage imaginable? Doritos has launched their Sixth Annual “Crash The Super Bowl” contest, calling on filmmakers to create 30-second spots that will compete for a spot on this year’s big game. Last year’s memorable commercial, “Pug Attack,” featured a dog crashing through a glass door to get to the chips. Its creators, Tess Ortbals and J.R. Burningham, went on to form their own commercials company, Mythmakers Entertainment. This year’s winner will have a shot at a $1 million cash prize, the opportunity to work with some of the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 26, 2011
