Directing

Filmmaking - Directing

Michael Clayton Director Tony Gilroy

TOM WILKINSON AND GEORGE CLOONEY IN TONY GILROY’S MICHAEL CLAYTON. COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES. As a Hollywood screenwriter, Tony Gilroy has brought an insistent energy and intelligence to the projects he has worked on, so it was a totally logical step that he should progress to becoming a director. New York native Gilroy grew up with writing and the movies in his veins, as he is the son of Frank D. Gilroy, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer and filmmaker, possibly best known for writing The Only Game in Town (1970), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty. Gilroy Jr. debuted with the […]

By Nick Dawson on Oct 5, 2007 Directing
Winter Chill

In 2005 indie director Larry Fessenden was troubled by the state of the world—specifically, by our leaders’ callow response to the threat of global warming. So he did what he does best: He made a horror movie. The Last Winter, about a skeleton crew of oil-dredge workers afflicted by madness and other disturbing phenomena in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, revisits some of the tropes in Fessenden’s spooky 2001 feature Wendigo, including a fearsome, shape-shifting deer-spirit. The film was overlooked when it premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, later acquired by IFC First Take (releases September 19), and recently […]

By Damon Smith on Sep 18, 2007 Directing
Jeff Garlin on I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With

Jeff Garlin may be best known as Larry David’s right hand man on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there’s more to this Second City alum than his deadpan humor. Along with doing stand up and developing new TV shows when Curb isn’t taping, he’s also been trying to get his feature films made. His first is I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With, which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival to rave reviews and then suddenly lost its momentum and collected dust for over a year until finding distribution through IFC Film’s First Take banner and The Weinstein Company. […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Sep 4, 2007 Directing
Cannes ’07: Wong Kar-wai on My Blueberry Nights

It’s a rainy mid-day in late August — the wetness welcome, following an intolerably hot week, even by New York City summer standards. At night during that unpleasant spell the postmodern auteur Wong Kar-wai — the master of lush visuals and unpredictable soundtracks, the absolute perfectionist concerned with memory, loss, loneliness, and the subjectivity of time — had been shooting scenes downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, on SoHo’s funky Grand Street, for My Blueberry Nights, his first movie in English and the out-of-competition opening night presentation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (The Weinstein Company will release the […]

By Jason Guerrasio on May 15, 2007 Directing
Andrea Arnold on Red Road

Andrea Arnold’s beautifully crafted first feature, Red Road, the follow-up to her Oscar-winning short film, Wasp, was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in telling the story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), an alienated Glasgow policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks on surveillance monitors. One day, she notices a man behaving unusually and, becoming fixated on him, crosses a line. Stepping out from behind her monitors, she follows him towards the dangerous housing project called Red Road… Why is she so obsessed with this figure, a man she first glimpses as a shadow, almost a […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 12, 2007 Directing
Susanne Bier on After the Wedding

The marriage ceremony in Danish director Susanne Bier’s haunting After the Wedding, penned by frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen and one of this year’s five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, greatly alters more lives than those of the young heiress bride, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and her betrothed. Indeed, the film could be entitled Before, During, and After the Wedding. Anna’s father, burly, big-bucks exec Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), invites Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an expat Dane whose energy is totally tied up with the orphanage for street children he works at in Bombay, but who is reluctantly in […]

By Howard Feinstein on Mar 30, 2007 Directing
Battle Tested

300 COURTESY WARNER BROS. Zack Snyder brings Frank Miller’s ultraviolent graphic novel, 300, to life with amazing special effects and non-stop action. It’s been two years since Sin City introduced audiences to the world of Frank Miller. Under the direction of Robert Rodriguez, who shot actors using blue screen technology and then added the computer-generated backgrounds in post, Miller’s graphic novel made it to celluloid as a depraved trio of vignettes that both updated film noir and pointed towards a new way of making motion pictures. Now director Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), employing the same production method […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Mar 9, 2007 Directing
David Kaplan, Year of the Fish

YEAR OF THE FISH. This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. A veteran of Sundance with his short films — including the cryptic, menacing fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood (starring Christina Ricci and Quentin Crisp!), Little Suck-A-Thumb, and The Frog King — which are regularly shown to film students as examples of exemplary short-form filmmaking, David Kaplan returns to the festival with his first feature, Year of the Fish. At once a singular New York immigrant story, as well as a re-imagining of the fairy tale (Kaplan’s real-world, adult conception of children’s stories can bring to […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2007 Directing
A New Humanity

CLIVE OWEN AND JULIANNE MOORE IN CHILDREN OF MEN. Set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest picture, Children of Men, takes place in a bleak England where it’s been 19 years since the last baby was born. Mankind’s future seems grim, and most of the world has devolved into anarchy. Random security checks and bombings have become an everyday occurrence as Great Britain franticly tries to protect its island from illegal immigrants. Theo, played by Clive Owen, spends his days in a drunken haze, often escaping the city to smoke pot with his old hippie-friend Jasper (Michael Caine) in the country. […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Dec 22, 2006 Directing
Holy War

The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.” Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. LEVI IN HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S JESUS CAMP. This is just one of many provocative moments that give Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s latest documentary its haunting power. As enthralling as the religious rallies it reveals, Jesus Camp […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Sep 21, 2006 Directing

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