Authors — Scott Macaulay
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HAL HARTLEY INTERVIEWS MARTIN DONOVAN AND THE “COLLABORATOR” TEAM
Martin Donovan’s directorial debut, Collaborator, returns to the IFC Center tomorrow for a week-long run before opening Los Angeles on the 20th. It’s also available now on VOD. Here, from the June 18 IFC Center screening is the Q&A with director Hal Hartley interviewing Donovan along with executive producer Ted Hope and actors David Morse and Melissa Auf der Meur. (Hat tip: Truly Free Film.)
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2012 -
LENA DUNHAM REMEMBERS NORA EPHRON
For The New Yorker, Lena Dunham has penned a wonderful remembrance of writer/director Nora Ephron, who passed away this week of leukemia. Not surprisingly, they knew each other and, last year, had become friends. Here’s Dunham on that friendship: …I devoured her prose, her other film offerings, and became a fangirl right along with my mother, aunt, grandmother and every other intelligent woman in the tristate area. Which is why it was so momentous when, in March of 2011, I received a short, perfect e-mail from Ephron, saying she had seen and enjoyed my film and would like to take […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 28, 2012 -
On Aaron Sorkin and Listening to the Internet Girl
TV shows like Aaron Sorkin’s new The Newsroom cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and make. They assemble top-flight talent, from people like its creator to stars like Jeff Daniels to the veteran craftspeople who work below-the-line on each episode. Their marketers are expert, and they have the budgets to match the ambitions of their campaigns. So, it must be somewhat enraging to them that the military precision of the show’s roll-out can be disrupted by a young reporter’s take on a single set of less-than-artful interview responses by Sorkin. I’m referring, of course, to Sorkin’s now-famous “Look […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2012 -
Alma Har’El on her Shia LaBeouf-Starring Sigur Ros Video
Containing the same truthful fusion of fantasy and reality as found in her documentary Bombay Beach, filmmaker Alma Har’el’s latest work is a provocative and dramatically compelling short film for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, made as part of the group’s Mystery Film Eeperiment. For the Project, the band invited a dozen filmmakers to select a track from their new album, Valtari, gave them the same modest budget, and told them to do what they saw in their heads. “The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom,” they wrote on their site. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 26, 2012 -
DIRECTOR KEITH MILLER ON “WELCOME TO PINE HILL”
Keith Miller’s Welcome to Pine Hill is a totally original mixture of gritty, semi-improvised urban drama and freefloating spiritual journey. When I first saw it, I flashed back to J. Hoberman’s take on Carlos Reygadas’s Japon: “handheld Tarkovsky.” The films are very different, but I sensed a similar impulse in Miller’s story of a drug dealer (played here by a revelatory Shannon Harper) attempting to go straight while receiving catastrophic health news. The film plays tomorrow night at BAMcinemaFest. Here’s an interview I did with Miller, previously posted for the film’s Slamdance premiere.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 22, 2012 -
Andrew Neel and Louisa Krause Talk King Kelly
While there have been many films riffing on reality tropes in the last several years, few have been as cleverly conceived and entertainingly executed as Andrew Neel’s debut fiction film, King Kelly. Set in the world of amateur webcam porn, the film depicts a monstrously fascinating Tracy Flick for our oversexualized social media age. Played ferociously by Louisa Krause, Kelly is a high-school student who runs a profitable one-woman porn empire from her suburban bedroom, with her parents none the wiser. Stripping on cam, uploading details of her everyday life and ruling over her chat room with a gonzo glee, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 20, 2012 -
THE NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL SCREENS FILMMAKER MAG FAVORITES
A number of our favorite independent films of the year are screening this week at the Northside Festival, a Brooklyn-based film and music event that gathers a number of film organizations, includuing Filmmaker, to guest curate some of its programming. Filmmaker‘s night is Wednesday, when we screen in its New York premiere Andrew Neel’s wickedly funny King Kelly (pictured) and Jeremiah Zagar & Nathan Caswell’s haunting short, Remains, but there are a number of other favorites dotted throughout the schedule. For example, tonight there’s one of the best documentaries of the year, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Girl Model (presented […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2012 -
BLOOD AND TAKE-OUT: “MISSION CHINESE”
Adele Romanski, producer (The Myth of the American Sleepover) and director (Leave Me Like You Found Me), passed along this link to her latest short production: Mission Chinese, a stylish and bloody revenge fantasy directed by Cole Schreiber and David Parker. The short is a branded-content piece for the New York/San Francisco men’s store, Freeman’s Sporting Club, and is a collaboration between Freeman’s, Mission Chinese (the New York/San Francisco-based restaurant) and Sunday Paper, Schreiber and Parker’s start-up production company, whose work you’ve seen on this site before. It was shot by James Laxton (The Myth of the American Sleepover, Medicine […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2012 -
Todd Solondz on Independent Film, Then and Now
Here’s another clip from my conversation with Dark Horse writer/director Todd Solondz. I asked Solondz to reflect on independent film, then and now, and his own longevity as a purely independent director. In his answer, he discusses, the declining budgets of independent film, television and the seminal nature of The Blair Witch Project. Dark Horse is currently playing at the Angelika Theater in New York.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 9, 2012 -
EVERYNONE WINS GRAND PRIZE AT VIMEO AWARDS
Last night at the NYU Skirball Center, the Vimeo Awards took place and one of the 25 New Faces from 2011, Everynone, were the big winners. For their excellent Symmetry, the video collective of Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III took away both the prize in the Lyrical category and the Grand Prize, which came with an additional $25,000 in prize money. In my profile of Everynone for 25 New Faces last year, I wrote: If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 8, 2012
