Authors — Jason Guerrasio

RUNNING OUT OF AIR: PENNING MIDNIGHT MOVIE “BURIED” | By Melissa Silvestri

This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue. Hell can be many things — being buried alive in the Iraqi desert, for example, or perhaps just watching your screenplay slowly disintegrate on the shelf during never-ending studio “development.” The opposite of most screenwriters, Chris Sparling knows the former but not the latter. He went directly from struggling indie director to successful Hollywood scribe when the screenplay for his horror thriller Buried was picked up, cast with a major up-and-coming star, and thrown before the cameras in just six months. And now it’s receiving its U.S. premiere at the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“SPLICE” | co-writer-director, Vincenzo Natali

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] With any independent film there is a point where limited budget requires hacking off a limb or two to get to the finish line. But in the case of Splice, which stars a humanoid creature, there was a price tag associated with removing body parts (it was a costly special effect). Much of my time in post was spent deciding what visual effects shots could be deleted to lower the budget. At the time it felt like death from a thousand cuts, but as is often the case […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“SINS OF MY FATHER” | director, Nicolas Entel

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] My biggest challenge was daring to make this documentary, which from the very beginning was almost an impossible idea. On one hand, we set out to retell Pablo Escobar’s story, not as yet another gangster film, which it isn’t despite popular perception, but as an intricate political thriller. On the other hand, we challenged the longstanding belief in Colombia that violence and hate pass from generation to generation. The intellectual challenges behind these two ideas were actually more difficult than getting Escobar’s son back into Colombia […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“7 DAYS” | director, Daniel Grou

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] 7 Days (director, Daniel Grou) To show or not the murdered girl on screen. One of the reasons it was difficult was because in order to show her, I had to figure out how she would look. In other words, what the murderer/rapist had done to her. It troubled and pained me to go there. Also, I was concerned with the impact the image would have on the viewer. I wanted it to be a shocking, upsetting image. A disturbing one. I was worried that it might […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“ARMLESS” | director, Habid Azar

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] Finding locations with no budget was by far the hardest thing we had to do. There are two specific examples that I think are interesting: We had a one-page scene that took place in an operating room. Finding an actual operating room was impossible so the decision became do we change the scene or do we fake the location? In the end our brilliant production designers Ryan Kravetz and Eunice Bae dressed a corner of a room with a few boxes of medical-looking equipment, hung a curtain […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“THE OATH” | director, Laura Poitras

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:30 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] There is a scene in The Oath when I ask Abu Jandal if he would have participated in the 9/11 attacks if Osama bin Laden had asked him to participate. He answered my question (I don’t want to reveal his response), and the next day he asked me to delete it. I decided to include both his answer and his request to delete it in the film. In the process of editing the film, we held work-in-progress screenings and some people questioned the ethics of including his answer […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“BRODERTOWN” | Tracey Snelling

[New Frontier Performances and Installations] With my artwork, the hardest decision seems to be how much detail I should add to a work. The more detail added, the more fleshed out the work is. Yet by keeping the work simple and only having necessary and particular details, there is more room left for the viewer to bring their past experiences and ideas to the interpretation of the work. This is a fine line I constantly ride with my work, sometimes purposely deviating one way or another to push the boundaries. In my installation Bordertown the combination between highly detailed works […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“HOMEWRECKER” | co-writers-directors, Todd Barnes & Brad Barnes

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] The summer decision to actually get started, to set the date for Homewrecker, was the most difficult on this project, so we did the only responsible thing: We had somebody else make it. Another project that seemed to be on the verge of total funding fell through for us in June. On June 25, we met and had the same conversation we’ve had each summer for years: Are we or are we not going to make a movie this summer? A childhood friend in Singapore, Todd McDonald, […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“ANIMAL KINGDOM” | writer-director, David Michod

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“HIS & HERS” | director, Ken Wardrop

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] I had many difficult decisions to make from the conceptual to the production stages of our documentary His & Hers. These decisions were primarily concerning our small budget of €100,000 and my choice to shoot on film. However I think the hardest decision of all was actually to make the film in the first place. In all honesty, the producer actually had to coax me into making it. Okay, I wasn’t exactly kicking and screaming but I definitely needed the push. You see, up until now […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010

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