It was the spring of 2011 and I’d just wrapped an eight-year run as the Film Program Director at the Austin Film Festival. I was looking to produce more when a long time friend, writer/director Kat Candler, came to me with a short script called Hellion. Flash forward to January of 2012 and we’re bringing our six-minute short film Hellion to the Sundance Film Festival. It was truly one of the greatest experiences we’ve had surrounded by an audience that embraced the film. It was a strange experience for me being on what I called “the other side of the badge,” as a […]
Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
Rock “documentaries” are self-serving films that fawn over their subjects so their record companies can move more product. The typical rock doc strings together concert highlights with studio clips and innocuous musician quotes that add up to a fun, but facile movie. The L.A. band 30 Seconds To Mars turns this formula upside-down in Artifact, which enjoyed its world premiere at TIFF on Friday. Actor/musician Jared Leto’s band wants to leave their record label, EMI, when multimillionaire British tycoon Guy Hands devours the ailing company and sues 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million. Artifact tells their battle as they struggle to […]
I had a lunch meeting with two of my partners on an international co-production. We are planning a South Africa / Canada treaty co-production on a $15m film and planned to meet up at Strategic Partners. Today, we worked on our laptops, smartphones and iPads as we ate sushi on the beautiful Halifax waterfront. After an hour, we hit an obstacle in our work and were uncertain how to proceed. Then later, my Canadian partner started talking to a UK producer who is a good friend I made at TAP, and she had different thoughts. A German producer weighed in […]
Keynote speeches from IFP’s Filmmaker Conference–taking place during Independent Film Week–will be premiering on IFP’s new YouTube channel. The live video stream can be accessed here. Keynotes streamed live include: James Schamus (CEO of Focus Features) & Christine Vachon (Producer, Killer Films) – Sunday, September 16th @ 4PMET JC Chandor (Director, Margin Call) – Monday, September 17th @ 10AM ET Michel Reilhac (Transmedia Producer) – Wednesday, September 19th @ 10AM ET Orlando Bagwell (the Ford Foundation) – Thursday, September 20th @ 10AM ET To get reminders of these events, as well as new videos about filmmaking every Tuesday and Thursday, subscribe to IFP Digital.
If this were a personal ad, it would read: 2 SWF ISO BAP for a LTR. Translation: Two sharp-witted filmmakers in search of bad-ass producer for a long-term relationship. See, my writing partner Devon Kirkpatrick and I wrote a script called Brooklyn Flee, it’s in the Emerging Narratives Program at Film Week, and we are looking for a producer. In our script, the two lead characters meet on Craigslist — not in the “Women seeking Women” section, but the “For Sale” section. (No, neither of them are for sale. Wrong movie.) They are two girls living in Brooklyn in their […]
Another week, another iPhone announcement. I remember when I used to hang on every word as a new iPhone was released. What were the features? When would it be available? When could I order it? I’ve even lined up – twice – just to get it on the first day. In retrospect, does it really make sense to stand in line for several hours waiting for a… phone? But now it’s the sixth “new” iPhone (Original, 3G, 3Gs, 4, 4s, 5) and I find I’m not so enraptured. I don’t need to know immediately whether the camera is any better (see footnote […]
The IFP’s Independent Film Week’s Filmmaker Conference kicked off today, beginning with a case study of Beasts of the Southern Wild and ending with a conversation, moderated by IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente, between producer and Killer Films head Christine Vachon and producer, screenwriter and Focus Features CEO James Schamus. Below are 12 tips from the latter event — advice aimed at producers and, in some cases, anybody else, from two veterans with deep, decades-long roots in the independent community. 1. Consider producing. Christine Vachon and James Schamus are producers, but they both remembered a time when they were not. […]
I strongly suspect that the great folks behind IFP’s Independent Film Week did not inform the Emerging Narrative participants ahead of time of what exactly would be happening at orientation because they feared that then none of us would show up. (I probably would have begged off in some sort of pathetic plausible manner.) Whatever sort of social, mingling thing I envisioned did not materialize. Instead, the bulk of orientation consisted of all the Emerging Narrative participants taking turns standing at the front of the amphitheater, speaking into a microphone, and delivering our two-minute project pitch. Yes, this was ostensibly […]
Ruba Nadda, whose Cairo Time captured Best Canadian Feature in 2009, returns to TIFF with Inescapable. Both star leading man Alexander Siddig and are set in the Middle East. However, Inescapable is anything but a charming romance, but rather a fast-paced political thriller set in the most dangerous country in the world, Syria. When he learns that his daughter has gone missing in Syria, Adib (Siddig) leaves his comfy business in Toronto to track her down in Syria. Turns out that the Syrian government has abducted Adib’s journalist daughter and that a shady Canadian diplomat (Joshua Jackson) knows more about it […]