Authors — Filmmaker Staff

“THESE AMAZING SHADOWS” | directors, Kurt Norton & Paul Marian

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Redstone Cinemas 8] We were really surprised by the extraordinarily wacky and absurdist humor of early filmmakers. Our documentary, These Amazing Shadows, focuses on the National Film Registry, so naturally we immersed ourselves in the incredible diversity of the 550 films on the list (Hollywood classics, avant-garde, documentaries, animation, home movies, silents and more). What quickly jumped out was that Monty Python, Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld have nothing on early filmmakers. Let’s just take two silent films as examples (I know some of you are thinking, “Silent films are boring!” but come […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“VAMPIRE” | writer-director, Iwai Shunji

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 6:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre] A few years after I wrote the first draft of the script, I read a news story in the local Japanese newspaper where the police were investigating a series of cases where the suspect or murderer would find and stalk his victims through online suicide websites/chat rooms and message boards. I found this coincidence completely shocking and surprising — I could not believe the similarities between the film and what was really happening. It’s creepy…
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“BENAVIDES BORN” | co-writer-director, Amy Wendel

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 8:30 pm — Library Centre Theatre] “Surprises,” wow. There were many in developing the story. Discovering this unique sport of women’s powerlifting and how big it is in South Texas was a wonderful surprise for us. We also had no idea that Texas had a mandatory and competitive “One Act” theater arts program. That program gave us an opportunity to survey a broad range of teenager talent, but more importantly, it is turning out graduates who are truly interested in storytelling and were eager to get involved in either script workshops or actual production. As […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“TERRI” | director, Azazel Jacobs

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 5;30 pm — Library Center Theatre] The biggest surprise, which is always the biggest surprise for me when I make a movie, is what things stay the same and what feels different. It’s never what I expect. Terri is the biggest story I have yet tried to tell, in size and scope, and it took more people, more money, more everything to make. Though it was great that people got paid, it was still tight in the ways that were familiar; there wasn’t money to be wasted and time was as precious as it always is, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“WE WERE HERE” | writer-director, David Weissman

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre] The biggest surprise was that I made it at all. I had been very ambivalent about making another documentary under any circumstances, certainly not one that would be dealing with such painful subject matter. The idea to make We Were Here came from a younger boyfriend, also a filmmaker, who hadn’t lived through those years, but had heard me speak many times of my experiences in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. I probably wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, but once the idea came up, it made […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD | co-writer-director, Morgan Spurlock

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre] The biggest surprise for me in the making of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was that we actually got brands and companies to not only agree to be in the film, but to actually pay for it. I called hundreds of companies and had hundreds of doors slammed in my face. I had people tell me how they’d “get reamed,” “be a laughing stock” or “never work again” if they took part in the movie. But every once in a while we’d get someone who would actually call back […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“THE BENGALI DETECTIVE | director, Philip Cox

[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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2011
“KABOOM” | writer-director, Gregg Araki

[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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2011
“THE INTERRUPTERS” | director, Steve James

[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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2011
“ON THE ICE” | writer-director, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean

[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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2011

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