[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Due to the daunting forces affecting independent cinema today, the tragedy that has become specialty distributors’ monumental struggle to find audiences, my instinct while directing Lymelife was to constantly push the envelope in every single scene we shot. If that meant tossing my written words out the window, so be it. I was determined to deliver a brutally honest and unsentimental depiction of an American family going through crisis in the late ’70s, a time of emotional and economic change which turns out to be relevant today. I […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:30 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] With Reporter (and my other films), I have done my best to ignore and avoid the modern forces that encourage the shrinking (and consequent speeding up) of cinematic storytelling. I just don’t see the good in trying to satiate the racing human mind and its desperate and diminishing attention span. I try instead to suffuse my films with the qualities of life and art that I most cherish but seem increasingly endangered: subtlety, silence, stillness, tenderness, sincerity and a spaciousness that allows the viewer (hopefully) to experience some […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] The factor affecting cinema today most relevant to Grace is the prevalence of the filmmaking community’s faith in the shortcut. There’s an idea that we can make movies by checklist, that the way to write a successful script is by formula, and the way to make a successful film is by gimmickry or spectacle — that we just need to get in front of a camera and our computers will figure out the rest later. With Grace, we resisted that and put total faith in footwork. We just […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] I think a lot about the small, small screens getting attention these days: iPods, cell phones, YouTube and MySpace. I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about the many strangers around the world, sitting in front of their Web cams, reaching out through their video yelps. I’m amazed by the matter-of-fact placement of their bodies in front of their computers, squarely there, waiting, presenting themselves, as if in front of a firing squad of voyeuristic strangers that may love them or shoot them. I obsess […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Our film is the story of a man born in 1919 as told by his daughters, who were born in the late 1970s. William Kunstler was a radical civil rights lawyer who took part in many of the major activist and social movements from 1960 to 1994. But we didn’t make this film for the people who lived through that history with him. We made it for younger generations. This is a film about legacy, about looking at your parents’ lives and deciding what to take from their […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] The Killing Room was never consciously shaped by any changes in the collective structures of other films today. However any filmmaker is influenced by what he or she sees around in film, movies, books and life. I do believe that there is a collective consciousness that breezes through many films as far as technique or structural choices are concerned. As for technique and execution, for a while now, the Hollywood films that have made the most impact on me have been those that attempt to make their […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] My story was shaped by the only force affecting cinema today that really counts: the financing aspect. I’m a Third World filmmaker with no private income, no friends in high places and no godfathers in the filmmaking world. The three notions that have guided me in this five-year journey, from Carmo’s conception through to being selected for Sundance, are: strategy, strategy and strategy.What choice did I have? So before I could even consider desired visual approach, casting possibilities, prospective budgeting levels, etc., I decided that my debut feature […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] It would be great to make a film that would work great for an audience no matter how they saw it…be it on their iPod or laptop or on the big screen or whatever. Ultimately though, I’m pretty old-school. There’s nothing like that communal experience of sitting in a darkened theater with a group of strangers and going on a journey together…one that takes over your senses with its sheer scope and thereby pulls you — hook, line and sinker — into another world. That is an experience […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:45 pm — Broadway Centre Cinemas V, Salt Lake City] The conception and the structure of my story were not affected while the execution was. The script was considered a potential flop by all the producers who had read it, so I had to film it on my own, almost without money. Time was the first thing I had to give up. Cinema needs a certain time to be made, but time is money. I’m sure that if I’d had a little more, the execution would have been better.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] I think everything affected the film from Obama to YouTube to my hopes of making a movie without thinking too much. I tried to just run with ideas, people, locations and not be so self-conscious this time around. I was very proud of Orphans (my first film) but in a way You Wont Miss Me was a reaction to making such a restrained movie. This time I wanted to make a movie that could only be made RIGHT NOW. That would scream of the times that […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009