Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Reel Distribution Politik of The Interview
The year’s most fascinating entertainment story gets even more so today, as the Seth Rogen/James Franco North Korea-baiting The Interview becomes available for online rental and purchase via YouTube, Google Play and Sony’s own site, with a limited theatrical release occurring tomorrow. (As I post this, Sony’s site just reveals the film’s poster art.) Only days after issuing a statement saying the studio “had no plans” to release the film, it has suddenly become the poster child for the day-and-date exhibition of a studio release — a distribution strategy the theater chains have been balking at for years. From Todd […]
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Ten Oscar-Worthy 2014 Documentary Favorites
Serving as the director of programming for this year’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival meant I watched way too many nonfiction films in 2014, some filled with stunning artistry, others with cringe-worthy talking heads. And since the Academy doc committee’s shortlist had me both cheering (Last Days in Vietnam! Tales of the Grim Sleeper!) and scratching my head (Citizen Koch? Really?) I thought I’d compile my own wish-it-were-this list for Oscar 2015. So here, in alphabetical order, are my 10 Doc Picks — only two of which overlap with the Oscar documentary shortlist — from the 134 submitted for Oscar […]
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Watch: Sean Price Williams’ Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff
Last week, Robert Greene posted a “virtually unseen” mid-length documentary, shot and edited by Sean Price Williams in 1998, entitled Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff. Three years before the cinematographer’s first official credit, and nine years before his quasi-breakthrough with Frownland, the 16mm film presages the close-ups and striking compositions that earned Williams some of the best notices of his career with this year’s Listen Up Philip. And it’s pretty entertaining, as well.
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“I Don’t Know If Camus Would Have Approved”: Five Questions for Far From Men Director David Oelhoffen
David Oelhoffen’s latest film, Far From Men, is based on Albert Camus’ short story “The Guest.” Set during the Algerian War and shot in the manner of a Western, the film features a French and Arabic-speaking Viggo Mortensen as Daru, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria required, against his will, to transport murderous prisoner Mohamed (Reda Kateb) to meet his justice. The two men must confront their own morality and each other against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. The powerful film recently played at the Marrakech International Film Festival, near where the film was shot. Mortensen received a career tribute award for the […]
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How to Find a Producer for Your Independent Film
“How do I find a producer?” It’s a question asked by many first-time independent writer/directors, and there’s good reason this seemingly simple query is so vexing. Screenwriters selling commercial screenplays and directors seeking employment on Hollywood pictures are guided by standard, usually market-based protocols. But it’s not so easy for budding independent auteurs — those without agents, managers or box-office track records. For them, partnering with a producer is as much about building a personal relationship as scoring a business transaction. At least, that’s what a number of producers interviewed here likened it to. Mary Jane Skalski (Very Good Girls, […]
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2014: The Year in Movers, Shakers and Standout Scenes
Last year I skirted around the issue of a Top 10 list by highlighting my 10 favorite scenes of the year, my logic hovering somewhere above “What is an effective film, if not the sum of its parts?” This year, I’m not so sure that axiom stands. Whether or not you regard it as the masterpiece it may or may not be, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has unimpeachably proved to be *the* film of 2014. I was fortunate it enough to see it in its best possible setting: front row at the Paramount Theater at SXSW, where a sizable chunk of the audience was hometown cast and crew. […]
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The Strange Dream: Pitching Your Film at the CPH:FORUM
CPH:DOX is like a strange dream. That dream where you wake up and everyone understands that artistically motivated documentaires have a place, have meaning, are celebrated. And frankly the weirder the better. The pitch forum at this Copenhagen-based documentary festival is no exception. Coming up on its fourth year, it is the home of the eccentric doc sibling. The one that confounds and delights, and maybe has broadcast potential, but maybe could also play in an art gallery. In its beautiful peculiarity, the CPH:DOX forum stands out strongly from most of the other pitch forums that abound on the documentary […]
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10 Tips and Observations on Pitching Documentaries from the IDFA Forum
The 27th annual International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is one of the largest and most prestigious documentary film festivals in the world. Beyond being just a festival, though, for the past 22 years IDFA has hosted a networking and business-oriented pitch session, the IDFA Forum, where selected documentary filmmakers have an opportunity to meet with an array of commissioning editors from around the world (with a high concentration of European broadcasters, naturally). Over the course of nearly three full days, commissioners sit around small round tables or in a large auditorium arena and weigh in on project pitches while […]
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Watch: Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore on Safe and Far From Heaven
Christmas cometh early now that the formerly out of print masterclass Safe is available from the Criterion Collection. To promote its release, director Todd Haynes sat down with star Julianne Moore to discuss the film’s forebears in female alienation (Red Desert, Jeanne Dielman, and DeLillo’s White Noise), as well as its unexpected Sirkian underpinnings. Moore also talks Safe‘s larger context, as a harbinger of the ’90s independent film boom, and how her first collaboration with Haynes ultimately defined the trajectory of her career.
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Somewhere I’m Not: An Interview with Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
I saw a number of startlingly good films in 2014, but nothing shook me quite like a picture I saw at BAMcinemaFest this past summer. The film was Ellie Lumme, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s debut…debut what, exactly? Clocking in at 42 minutes, the film’s runtime frustrates typical designations – is it a featurette? A quasi-feature? A long short film? Perhaps we should just call it a medium. A medium seems most appropriate, as the film is a ghost story — albeit, as Vishnevetsky has cheekily explained, a ghost story sans ghost. (This description is, in fact, perfectly appropriate, and if you read […]
