Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club
Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has had a curiously diverse career so far, going from the flamboyant coming-of-age dramedy C.R.A.Z.Y. to the historical romance of Young Victoria. The connective tissue between those two movies is that they are both period pieces, and so Vallee is presumably bringing a keen sense of the times to Dallas Buyers Club, a mid-198os AIDS drama starring Matthew McConaughey as a dying Texan electrician infected with the virus who helped others in a similarly grave situation gain access to medicines yet to be approved by the FDA. This is yet another film that firmly repositions McConaughey as […]
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Destin Daniel Cretton, Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and the Cast Talk Short Term 12
Winner of the 2013 SXSW Narrative Grand Jury Prize, Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 is the entirely successful feature expansion of the writer/director’s excellent 2009 short about counselors and youth at a residential facility for at-risk teens. Flipping the gender of his protagonist from the short to the feature, Short Term 12 stars Brie Larson (a recent Actor winner at the Locarno Film Festival) as a savvy counselor whose spirit hasn’t yet been crushed by the bureaucrats above her. Of course, she’s challenged, not just by troubled teenagers but also by life changes and self-worth issues, the latter stemming from […]
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Trailer Watch: Tim Sutton’s Memphis
Here’s a look at Memphis, Tim Sutton’s follow-up to Pavilion which has been developed in tandem with the Venice Biennale Film College, as one of the first three projects to emerge from the program’s first year. The film, which shot in the early part of the summer in the city of its title, has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, and via The Dissolve we have a trailer for the film. It looks gorgeous and the story about a Memphis-based musician who is “surrounded by beautiful women, legendary musicians, a stone-cold-hustler, a righteous preacher, and a […]
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Watch Online: The Safdie Brothers’ Solid Gold
Josh and Benny Safdie’s latest street film, Solid Gold, is currently being featured on Kentucker Audley’s newly revamped No Budge website, where it is among a number of good short films being rolled out. (Surveyor, the awesome anti-Western by 2013 “25 New Face” Scott Blake, is upcoming on the site in September.) In the short, Benny plays a gold-painted street performer who seems rather ill-suited to his particular line of work. Go to the Red Bucket Films page on Vimeo for more of the Safdies’ work.
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Now Online: 25 New Face Ian Harnarine’s Doubles With Slight Pepper
At the DCTV short film panel I hosted a few weeks ago, I was chatting with Ian Harnarine, one of our 25 New Faces of 2012, and 2011 New Face Jason Sondhi, who runs Short of the Week and Staff Picks at Vimeo. So I’m wondering if it’s a coincidence that Harnarine’s excellent Trinidad-set family drama Doubles with Slight Pepper (the feature version of which is in IFP’s Emerging Storytellers program next month) has just debuted on Vimeo (where it’s a Staff Pick, naturally) and is the current pick on Short of the Week. Either way, make sure to check […]
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Werner Herzog’s Texting and Driving Doc From One Second To The Next
Werner Herzog turned 70 last year, but he’s certainly not slowing down and indeed he seems to be more prolific than ever. The latest film he’s made is surprising, to say the least: a short, 35-minute PSA doc to support the It Can Wait campaign against texting and driving. Interestingly, there’s absolutely no mention of Herzog on the site, and it’s only when you start watching From One Second To The Next that you find out who the man behind it is…
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Gordon Willis on Lighting Marlon Brando in The Godfather
Gordon Willis is one of the truly great cinematographers of the second half of the 20th century, the man responsible for shooting everything from Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather to such lesser-known (but also brilliantly lensed) movies such as Hal Ashby’s The Landlord and Alan Arkin’s Little Murders. In the second of our ongoing series of exclusive Craft Truck videos, Willis talks about the approach he took to lighting Marlon Brando in the iconic opening scene of The Godfather.
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Trailer Watch: Spike Jonze’s Her
Four years after 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze returns with his fourth feature, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a reclusive writer who develops an ever closer bond with the personalized operating system, “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), tailored to take care of all his needs. Featuring a strong female supporting cast that includes Amy Adams, Rooney Mara and Olivia Wilde, Her is the first feature from an original screenplay by Jonze and it will be interesting to see what a film fully constructed in his mind looks like. In this trailer, Her appears sweet and touching, but I’m […]
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Jamie Stuart Goes Backstage Baby with Jay Z
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart went backstage on Mark Romanek’s Picasso Baby shoot and created this short video capturing the lines, gear and space leading up to the rap artist’s performance art event. Glimpses include Marina Abramovic, Judd Apatow, Jim Jarmusch, Alan Cumming and others. Check it out above.
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Jay Z’s Picasso Baby, directed by Mark Romanek
Here’s Mark Romanek’s first music video in a decade or so, a capturing of Jay Z’s recent performance art event at Pace Gallery, where he performed the single “Picasso Baby” for six hours straight. Shot by 25 New Face Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene), it features an all-star cast of participatory spectators, including, first and foremost, artist Marina Abramovic, whose own The Artist is Present performance it was clearly inspired by. Others include Judd Apatow, Adam Driver, Jim Jarmusch, Marilyn Minter, Rose Lee Goldberg, Fab Five Freddy, Rosie Perez (dancing!), George Condo, Jemima Kirke, Alan Cumming and Radical […]
