[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Not all, but the majority of short-form works on the Net are gimmicky and instant pleasures — like candy. I am not interested in making candy. I want my works to be a full meal — a story that keeps ringing in your head, something that sticks and stays with you for a very long time. Cinema will falter for a bit but will not die. I believe the new developments are supplementary and not replacements of long-form work. When [co-writer] Maria Topete and I were writing Don’t […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 6:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] As someone who believes in making non-fiction feature films for the big screen, Crude is in many ways a reaction against some of the forces affecting cinema today. From a craft standpoint, Crude is steeped in the traditions of cinema vérité filmmaking that I have embraced throughout my career — it’s a film with a great deal of complexity and nuance, requiring a viewer’s full attention in order to appreciate all that I hope it has to offer. While new forms of distribution are important for independent filmmakers […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] If one postulates that money is the root of all evil, logic dictates that with the collapse of capitalism filmmaking, all other forms of art and expression will represent the forces of good in the universe. Hard times call for hard filmmaking. Being that the forces affecting cinema affect our everyday economic reality, it’s only fitting that our film would herald the global economic meltdown. The death of capitalism is going to mean a very different kind of filmmaking in the near future. Being that money is […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The inventor and venture capitalist Jim Clark and I have been dive buddies for the last 10 years but over the last 35 years of diving we have been witnessing the catastrophic collapse of the reefs and sea-life abundance. Jim and I decided to do something about it by setting up a nonprofit foundation, the Oceanic Preservation Society, to make ocean-based films and photographs to create awareness and inspire change. I have been a photographer for decades, mostly for National Geographic magazine, but I had never made a […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009James Toback’s Tyson screened in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. You can read our story on the film in the Winter issue section.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] What I can remember from very early on in the process of making The Vicious Kind was the desire to shoot my film on film. Specifically 35mm film. Even from the conceptual stage, I latched on to the idea that film would offer the kind of texture that a small, character-driven family story like mine would require. What’s so interesting about making movies today is that the choices of medium are so wide and changing every day. Even seven or eight years ago, if you had anything […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Our movie Mystery Team is the first full-length feature film by DERRICK Comedy, a sketch-comedy group I’ve been a part of for four years now. Our sketch videos have been viewed more than 100 million times online. We never tried to figure out “what plays on the Internet,” and when we did have shorts that became popular, we never tried to figure out what made them popular in terms of universal truths about Internet viewership. We viewed YouTube as a content delivery system and looked at our […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] One of our goals while making Paper Heart was to establish a consistent reality since we would be combining a documentary on love with a loosely scripted love story. [Yi] Charlyne and I felt that most modern romantic films were very formulaic and unrealistic, but hoped that if an audience believed in what they were watching, they would be more affected by it. And with audiences being more familiar than ever with reality-based programming, we knew we had to do a great job to convince them there was […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Dead Snow is in a very direct way the result of cinema today. Even though the premise of the film is based on a idea that I have had for a long time, there wasn’t a better time to release it until now. After we made a debut film, Kill Buljo, we decided to go for the idea for Dead Snow simply because people don’t make these kind of movies any more. Most of the horror films that are released these days are 100 percent merciless, with violence […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:30 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] My approach to telling our story was not influenced by the changes in the way people are beginning to view cinema. Intimacy, and the freedom of the senior students at Charleston High to share their feelings with us, the audience, was paramount. By inviting the students to create their own video diaries, by not seeking to make any editorial points as a filmmaker, courage and cowardice show themselves. The heart of our story — racial feelings and the end, on April 19, 2008, of separate white […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2009