Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Jafar Panahi Speaks in Favor of the Iran Deal
Jafar Panahi has succeeded in making three features since being sentenced from filmmaking for 20 years, and now he’s contributed a brief video statement to We Support Iran Deal, a self-described group of “Iran’s pro-democracy & human rights activists, prominent artists, & cultural figures.” A full translation can be found here.
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Watch: Mel Brooks on Working with Orson Welles
In this short interview snippet, Mel Brooks holds forth about his experience working with Orson Welles on History of the World, Part I. What did Welles intend to spend his fee on? 100 Cuban cigars and Sevruga caviur – not Beluga, since Sevruga was good enough and half the price.
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Watch: How to Shoot a Road Movie
The road movie is a frequently tread subgenre, rife with comedic, episodic and dramatic potential. It can also pose a challenge for those seeking a varied mise-en-scene, and in this deconstruction of Dominga Sotomayor’s Thursday Till Sunday, Kevin B. Lee looks at the 83 ways in which the characters are framed in their rather contained environment. It’s a good primer on how to read a scene’s construction, and, from a directorial stand point, how to keep a static environment fresh.
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Watch: Edward Norton Introduces Fight Club
In this brief introduction to a screening of Fight Club at Locarno, Edward Norton recalls that the film premiered to boos at the Venice Film Festival in 1999, a far cry from its assured cult status at this point. He then goes on to compare the film’s initially poor reception to what it must’ve been like to watch Rossellini’s Rome, Open City one year after the end of World War II, as something too raw and recent to process. The comparison’s probably ill-advised, but there you go.
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Trailer Watch: Todd Haynes’ Carol
Here’s the first teaser for Todd Haynes’ Carol, the Cannes hit starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as star crossed lovers in 1950s Manhattan. Conveyed through glimpses and gestures, the trailer boasts the characteristically stunning cinematography of Ed Lachman and Haynes’ deliberate direction. Carol opens from The Weinstein Company on November 30.
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Watch: “A Conversation. With Walter Murch”
This year, the legendary Walter Murch received a “Vision Award — Nescens” from the just-completed Locarno Film Festival, and this neat short film was presumably made to accompany the presentation. Director Niccolò Castelli places Murch in a warehouse very much like Harry Caul’s setup in The Conversation. Murch plays with previously recorded analogue tape of him talking about how we’re introduced to the concept of music while in the womb, then talks about the process and history of the manipulations he just executed on the Revox. It’s a typical combination of Murch’s trademark bigger-picture thinking and acute technical knowledge.
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Trailer Watch and Poster: Jafar Panahi’s Taxi
Here’s the US trailer and poster for Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the third film the Iranian director has made despite an official 20-year-ban on him making movies. Behind the wheel, Panahi criss-crosses Tehran, picking up passengers whose interactions with him again blur the line between fact and fiction. The film will be playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival before in opening in New York on October 2, with limited national release to follow. A current list of scheduled playdates and more information from distributor Kino Lorber can be found here. You can also check out two scenes from the film we posted […]
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Aerial Los Angeles and “Droning for Good”
Filmmaker Ian Wood has posted his second overhead exploration of Los Angeles — its neighborhoods, landmarks, people and vistas. His footage is beautifully operated, color-corrected and edited, and amidst recent controversy over drone filmmaking comes with, on Wood’s Vimeo page, his personal rulebook for urban drone shooting: Droning For Good With all the controversy about drones, it’s important to remember that they can be (and often are) used responsibly. As with many emerging technologies, the laws struggle to keep up and we must employ a common sense approach to their use that is respectful to community, safety and the law. […]
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Trailer Watch: DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation
“Remix culture applied to cinema” — that’s the elevator pitch for DJ Spooky’s latest release, Rebirth of a Nation, a multimedia work that uses remixing, original scoring and various DJ techniques to interrogate D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation. Collapsing the three hour film into an hour of sound and image, DJ Spooky’s project critically analyzes the film’s legacy on both film grammar and the depiction of race in the more than a century since. Originally commissioned by the Spoleto Festival, Rebirth of a Nation has been performed around the world and is now available on CD, with […]
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Trailer Watch: John Magary’s The Mend
Hilarious, confrontational and compellingly disorienting, John Magary’s The Mend is one of the most striking independent films of the past couple of years. A SXSW ’14 standout, it reaches theaters this week with a run at the IFC Center in New York. Check out the trailer for this comedy of dysfunctional siblings and lost weekends, and return later this week for more on the film.
