Filmmaker Videos
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Stanley Kubrick Behind the Scenes of Full Metal Jacket
Vivian Kubrick shot a reported 18 hours of footage while on the set of her father’s Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket. Though Ms. Kubrick eventually abandoned her documentary project, bits and bobs of the footage surfaced in comprehensive collections such as Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. A condensed version of the behind-the-scenes action is now available on YouTube, featuring Kubrick directing Matthew Modine and the gallery of extras during the “this is my rifle, this is my gun” sequence alike. The clips also provide insight into Kubrick’s on-set personality, which — at least, here — does not appear quite as […]
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Trailer Watch: Ti West’s The Sacrament
The Sacrament, Ti West’s found footage horror film, tracks an innocuous visit gone awry. Kentucker Audley, Joe Swanberg and AJ Bowen star as a coterie of photographers who visit Audley’s sister, played by Amy Seimetz, on the Eden Parish commune, where she has lived since completing her rehab program. Turns out the place isn’t as forgiving as Audley and co. suspected. The Sacrament hits theaters on May 1, and you can watch the red band trailer above.
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Zero Point: An Interactive Documentary Made For Oculus Rift
Zero Point, a meta-documentary about the virtual reality industry, is about to remove the popular practice of 3D filmmaking from theaters. Founded by Oscar-nominated director Danfung Dennis, the tech company Condition One has created the first film to be viewed with Oculus Rift, those nifty goggles made for 3D gaming. The virtual reality headset will allow the viewer to control the visuals through movement — effectively positioning the audience as a character, or even a real-time cinematographer, in the film. Condition One plans to project Zero Point on “the inside of an imaginary sphere, surrounding a viewer with an [Oculus] Rift headset,” according […]
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Michel Gondry’s Low-Budget Taxi Driver Remake
Swede: to remake a film with limited resources, cheap effects and obsolete technology, as per Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The idiosyncratic Frenchman put his own concept to the test with his low-budget re-imagining of Taxi Driver. Upon watching the short, screenwriter Paul Schrader had this much to say: “I always maintained Taxi Driver should never [have a] sequel or [be] remade. Michel Gondry is making me rethink this position.” With Schrader recently dismissing talk of a Lars Von Trier Taxi Driver remake, now is the time to revisit Gondry’s version.
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Trailer Watch: Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love
At times, independent film can be a homogenous place for women. Since the Lena Dunham boom, tastemakers obsessively concern themselves with tales of 20-something perpetual adolescents, jobless and adrift in Brooklyn, looking for love in all the wrong places. Not so much a tonic as a blast of originality, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love announced the arrival of one of the most assured and exciting young filmmakers in recent memory when it premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Though the film’s narrative may not seem entirely unfamiliar — we’re still coming of age in Brooklyn, experimenting sexually — Hittman’s atmospheric […]
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What Difference Does It Make: A Film about Making Music
And now for our feature presentation… the folks at Red Bull have posted online What Difference Does it Make: A Film about Making Music. It’s an energetic mash-up of the events occurring during Red Bull Music Academy’s festival last year in New York, and it contains moments from Brian Eno, James Murphy, Van Dyke Parks, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Philip Glass, Steven O’Malley and many more.
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“I Am a Ukrainian, and This Needs to Go Viral.”
“I am a Ukrainian, and this needs to go viral,” is the message in this video from a protestor in Ukraine, currently in the midst of violent government repression. As reported by Deborah Stambler in the Huffington Post, the video was “put together” by filmmaker Ben Moses, who is currently at work on a documentary, A Whisper to a Roar, about democracy activists around the world. The video, posted several days ago, has indeed gone viral, attracting almost one million views on YouTube. According to Stambler, there are some who dub it a hoax (one YouTube commenter accuses it of […]
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Trailer Watch: Tom Hardy in Locke
The UK trailer for the Tom Hardy one man show Locke just dropped ahead of its April 25th U.S. release. Written and directed by Steven Knight (the screenwriter behind Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things), the film plots the unravelling of Ivan Locke over the course of a singular drive home from Birmingham to London. Well-received upon its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the constrained character study conveys dynamism despite its four door setting.
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Watch Agnès Varda’s 1976 Short Film Plaisir d’Amour en Iran
Barely five minutes long, Agnès Varda’s 1976 short Plaisir d’Amour en Iran finds a breadth of emotion in its surroundings. Shot in Esfehan at the Shah Masjed, Varda conveys the blossoming relationship between a French tourist (Valérie Mairesse) and an Iranian (Ali Raffi) across narration, dialogue and, most effectively, architecture. It’s a transported exercise indigenous to its original time and place (France, Rive Gauche/Nouvelle Vague) that proves visuals and words can do their finest work as distinct properties. Read more at UbuWeb.
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Trailer Watch: Lance Bangs’ Slint Doc, Breadcrumb Trail
Epochal post-rock pioneers Slint are the subjects of a new documentary, Breadcrumb Trail, by Lance Bangs. In 1991, the Louisville-based band made the now-classic Spiderland for Touch and Go and, just before its release, promptly disbanded. In the years since, the album has remained enormously influential, making its mark on math rock, post-hardcore and various other sub-genres with out-of-date critical sobriquets. As Ron Kretsch notes at Dangerous Minds, one thing pops out of this trailer: these guys were young when they laid down this thing! “So, how’d YOU change the world before you finished school?” he asks. Here’s director Bangs […]
