Authors — Tina Poppy
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Biggest Challenge, Best Lesson: I Believe in Unicorns Director Leah Meyerhoff
Filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff is perhaps as well known for her film collective, Film Fatales, as for her first feature film, I Believe in Unicorns, which premiered at Sundance in 2014. Filmmaker did an extensive profile of the Film Fatales last year, and as gender parity in the film industry moves to the forefront of industry news, the Fatales has seen a dramatic increase in its members and activities that has kept Meyerhoff busy. Meanwhile, she prepares for the debut of Unicorns at the IFC Center on May 29th. The film will screen theatrically in New York, Los Angeles and San […]
by Tina Poppy on May 27, 2015 -
“There are Medium and Little-Sized Movies about People, and There are Big Movies About Robots”: Helen Hunt on Ride
As an actress, Helen Hunt has thrived in the entertainment industry for over four decades. She’s won an Oscar, Golden Globe Awards and Primetime Emmys. She has succeeded on a large scale as both a film and a television actress, which is no small feat considering that, until recently, film and television actors have been largely kept in distinct and relatively immutable categories. Hunt has been directing for years, too, from episodes of Mad About You to her first feature film in 2007, Then She Found Me. But not until her latest effort, Ride, has she taken it upon herself […]
by Tina Poppy on Apr 29, 2015 -
“Everyone Wants to Think Their Child could be President”: Morgan Krantz on Babysitter
Writer/director Morgan Krantz’s first feature Babysitter was accepted into SXSW as a work in progress, so Krantz was working on it until the very week it premiered. “It was hot off the presses, and suddenly it was on the big screen at the Ritz,” he says. Babysitter revolves around a teenage boy and his relationships with the women in his life: his Wiccan babysitter, his mom who’s using him as a pawn in her divorce from his father, and the druggie girl he has a crush on in school. As an indie drama that invites conversation about topics like feminism […]
by Tina Poppy on Mar 24, 2015 -
“We Live in an Attention Economy”: Eugene Kotlyarenko on A Wonderful Cloud
Within two minutes of talking to Eugene Kotlyarenko, separated in physical distance by about a mile, yet connected by phone via his marketing company’s office thousands of miles away in New York, we are discussing near-fatal car crashes and how a life-threatening experience can make a few seconds can feel like an eternity. Kotlyarenko was shooting an Interpol music video recently (he starred as the “sleazy guy” in a behind-the-scenes of a porn shoot). On the way home, his car spun out on a cloverleaf freeway entrance. “I literally felt like I was stuck in a time vortex,” he says. […]
by Tina Poppy on Mar 13, 2015 -
Biggest Challenge, Best Lesson: Five Nights in Maine Writer/Director Maris Curran
When I first speak to filmmaker Maris Curran on the phone, I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my parked car about two months after breaking both my arms in a bicycle accident. The accident occurred as I was pulling my bike over to the side of the road in order to phone the editor of this publication to discuss some column ideas I had about the business of filmmaking. I missed that meeting, of course, and since the accident, my mind has been almost singularly focused on the psychological impact of tragic accidents. Since that can get a bit […]
by Tina Poppy on Jan 6, 2015 -
Building the Message Machine: Takeaways from the Film Independent Film Forum
The Film Independent Forum held October 24 – 26 in Los Angeles focused heavily on beginnings and endings of the filmmaking process, largely leaving technical details and production needs aside. The panelists agreed: a successful film requires beginning with the end in mind. What is your film about, and who is your audience? How can you start building your audience at the ideas phase, and how can you continue to engage that audience throughout the process of making and distributing your film? In developing a project, producer Lisa Cortés (Precious, The Woodsman) said it’s important for producers to ask themselves, […]
by Tina Poppy on Nov 7, 2014
