Filmmaker Videos
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Inside Michel Gondry’s Home Studio
Fans of Michel Gondry and his latest Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? may enjoy this peak inside his home studio, courtesy of The Creators Project. From his cluttered Brooklyn brownstone, Gondry demonstrates his hand-drawn animation technique with Sharpies and a 16mm Arriflex, which allow him to create “a texture that [he] feels is cinematic.” It is a rather time-consuming, detail-oriented trade that Gondry admits to wielding during his casting courtship of Audrey Tautou for Mood Indigo. He also speaks about his creative decisions behind Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?, and why animation was the necessary format for Noam Chomsky: “It was […]
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First Look: “25 New Faces” Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands’ Uncertain
This year we put Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands on our “25 New Faces” list on the strength of their excellent doc short The Roper but also because of how excited we were at the sneak peek we’d had of Uncertain, their debut feature about a remote “town of outlaws” in Texas. The pair has now started releasing clips from the film, which will be making its world premiere at a winter festival in 2014. The first of these is above, and you can check out more via the Vimeo page of McNicol and Sandilands’ production company, Lucid Inc.
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D.P. Sal Totino on Finding the Edge, and Falling Off
In the latest video in our Craft Truck series, Sal Totino, who was the cinematographer on features like Frost/Nixon, Cinderella Man and The Da Vinci Code, advocates knowing the rules but only in order to break them. Using an apt metaphor of cooking, he says that one could follow a recipe step-by-step or break away and “put a little bit of your soul into it.” Nothing is guaranteed, as Totino cautions, especially not when straying from convention, but you have to know where the edge is — and sometimes fall off — to learn your limits. Watch the full interview here.
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Trailer Watch: Jason Bateman’s Bad Words
The first, red band trailer has been released for Jason Bateman’s directorial debut, Bad Words, which stars Bateman as loathsome, brash 40-year-old Guy Trilby, who gets his kicks by hijacking elementary-aged spelling bees. Bad Words premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up by Focus Features, in one of James Schamus’s final acquisitions for the company he helped found. Co-starring Alison Janney and Kathryn Hahn, Bad Words is slated to hit theaters next March. View the NSFW trailer above.
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“Send Me Your Sexts” is Strange and Provocative New Pay-for-Film Service
“Send Me Your Sexts” is a just-launched, strange new pay-for-film service from director Eileen Yaghoobian (Died Young Stay Pretty). (Video above is NSFW.) Inspired, she says, by The Act of Killing (!) and its use of reenactments, and drawing on her own background in documentary and theater, “Send Me Your Sexts” is both a service and an online video platform featuring original short reenactments of user-submitted sexts. Viewers can check out the steamy videos while sexters can pay Yaghoobian to turn their own digital missives into soft-core online entertainment. From the website: I’m Eileen, a filmmaker and artist who’s convinced […]
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Using Influences to Promote Your Film
When discussing your forthcoming film, citing influences can be a double-edged sword. We are all influenced by other works, and it’s expected that when pitching, or showing a look book, these influences be acknowledged. But you don’t want to seem like you’re relying too much on other filmmakers’ visions, or pretend that you can easily reach the same level of achievement. One filmmaker who I think is revealing his interests in an edifying, engaging way is William Speruzzi, who is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign for “The 3×3 Project.” The project consists of three shorts by three directors […]
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Shocking Video: Celebrities are Ugly!
Here’s a fascinating optical illusion based on the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect.” Simply put, two faces will appear grotesque when the viewer focuses on a cross between them. This discovery won the second prize in the Vision Science Society’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest of 2012, and this video by Matthew B. Thompson using celebrities to illustrate the effect went viral. I’m just catching up with it now, though (courtesy, by the way, of Unscathed Corpse) and am posting it because it truly is a trippy effect. Watch the video above while focusing on the cross in the center.
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Christopher Nolan, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach on the Painters That Inspire Them
The Tate Gallery in London launched a great little series of videos today entitled Film meets Art, in which prominent U.K. directors discuss their appreciation for and how they were influenced by a particular British artist. Above, Christopher Nolan talks about his love of Francis Bacon’s work and how it shaped his rendition of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.Nolan says that Bacon was his favorite artist from a young age, which I find to be very unusual and striking idea. (What kind of a childhood did Nolan have that this was how he saw the world?) Mike Leigh […]
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“I’m Passing the Torch to You”: Lee Daniels Delivers Commencement Speech at Savannah College of Art and Design
Precious and Lee Daniels’ The Butler director Lee Daniels spoke recently at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he received an honorary degree. Towards the end of the clip, Daniels talks about his reasons for making the latter film, which he describes as a father-son love story, and what his own teenaged son thought of it.
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Trailer Watch: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac
The use of Rammstein in a trailer is most often a very bad sign, but somehow it works here in the first — and very NSFW — full-length trailer for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Previously, as Sarah Salovaara noted on this site, Von Trier and co. created a new form of trailer through the staggered release of clips. Today’s release is the more traditional — and to my mind, more effective — one. Abrupt changes in music and tone, a mixture of shooting formats and fantastic moments with Charlotte Gainsbourg create a vibe that’s not unlike a punk version of […]
