Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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DAVID LOWERY, ROONEY MARA SET TO TEAM ON NEW PICTURE
David Lowery, one of Filmmaker’s 2011 “25 New Faces,” is set to direct a new, “contemporary western” that teams him with three others from our annual talent survey. As announced by Deadline, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is set to star Rooney Mara (picked for our 2009 list) and will be produced by a team including Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen (from our 2006 list). Ben Foster and Casey Affleck are also attached; James Johnston, Toby Halbrooks, Amy Kaufman also produce; and the pic is repped by WME Global. Evolution Independent’s Cassian Elwes is putting together the financing. Lowery’s Pioneer […]
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Story Hack: Beta, Part 2
In just under eight hours, the first hackathon dedicated exclusively to narrative transmedia gets underway at Lincoln Center; here’s Part 1 about what it is and who’s sponsoring it. There are seven teams of four, so 28 participants total, and if the other groups are anything like my team U.S. Maple, they’re all already feeling tired and well worked. I’ve written sample bibles and transmedia proposals before, as evidence of my versatility as a writer and ability to work in transmedia, but I’ve never finished an actual project. So this Story Hack is my first chance to develop something cross-platform beyond […]
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WHAT PRIVACY?
If you thought that the cyber privacy war was over with the defeat of the MPAA-promoted Senate’s PIPA and the House’s SOPA bills late last year, think again. A new House bill (H.R. 3523), dubbed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), was passed on April 26th. It will expand the ability of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to read your emails and share them with other federal agencies as well as private companies. It faces an uncertain future in the Senate and the Obama administration has threatened to veto it. The Electronic […]
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“UNA NOCHE” TAKES THREE AT TRIBECA AWARDS
The Tribeca Film Festival announced the winners of its world cinema awards for narrative and documentary, and Lucy Mulloy’s Cuba-set drama Una Noche was a recurring presence among the prize winners. Una Noche‘s male leads, Dariel Arrechada and Javier Nuñez Florian, shared the Best Actor prize, the film’s d.p.’s, Trevor Forrest and Shlomo Godder, took Best Cinematography for their gorgeous visuals on the film, and Mulloy herself won Best New Narrative Director. In presenting the latter award, the jury — largely made up of actors, including Camilla Belle, Whoopi Goldberg and Leelee Sobieski — gave the following comments: “Lucy Mulloy’s […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #107
Second #5029, 83:49 “Now it’s dark,” Frank has said previously, like some incantation, and now it really is dark. Jeffrey, his back to the camera, is practically swallowed up alive by the blackness, as Frank inhales whatever it is that unleashes his id. There is a flashlight, the dome light of the Charger, and the very small light in the distance that give shape and depth of space to the frame. For the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan the coherent, unified self is an illusion, a fragile thing constructed gradually during an infant’s Mirror Stage, a stage when the ego […]
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LETHEM TALKS MUMBLECORE AND MORE AT SIFF
I’ve always connected with the work of Jonathan Lethem. I’m a fan of his novels and all, but I especially look at his criticism because his reference points are invariably the same as mine. We’re both big Philip K. Dick fans, he ended a novel (Fortress of Solitude) with an extended celebration of one of my favorite albums (Another Green World), and when he wrote an essay on his formative books and albums as a teenager, our lists were like dopplegangers. He also just wrote a book about Talking Heads Fear of Music, and his Promiscuous Materials project let independent […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “REDLEGS”
Over the last year Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris has been making his first feature, Redlegs, and it receives a sneak preview next Thursday at Brooklyn’s reRun, sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council. It then opens for a week on May 25 at that same venue. Check out the trailer below. (There’s also a Tumblr blog, where Harris is promising “goofy, poignant and otherwise unmissable stuff.”)
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Elles — A Hammer to Nail Review
Elles is being distributed by Kino Lorber and opens theatrically in NYC and LA on April 27, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. In Elles, the new film by Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska, Juliette Binoche plays a journalist writing an article for French Elle on young women who finance their education (and more realistically, their apartments, clothing, and lifestyles) through prostitution. But forget the pimps and hookers of the movie underworld. The world in Elles isn’t one of coercion or strung out desperation, but of choices. It’s softcore social criticism, far less interested in systemic injustice than in the strange forces that […]
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Copy That: On the Transformative Effects of Independent Film Production
You don’t have to be British royalty to find a cure for a speech impediment through film. High school senior Daniel Altman wrote the below account of his work on an independent feature as his college essay. It was subsequently published on the Stuttering Foundation website, where it has attracted thousands of hits, and Altman has been accepted at his top choice school for the Fall. We’re reprinting it, with permission, because it’s a great reminder that the practice of filmmaking brings many rewards, many of which often go unsung. — Editors I stutter. I stutter like Porky Pig. Sometimes […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #106
Second #4982, 83:02 This frame comes from perhaps the most difficult scene to watch—without flinching or looking away—in Blue Velvet. Frank, getting warmed up for his violent gender-bending abuse of Jeffrey, assaults what is beneath Dorothy’s robe. The viewer is trapped in the backseat with Jeffrey, sutured into his point of view. Jeffrey, who is unable to decipher the meaning of Frank. On one level, Blue Velvet is a post-apocalyptic film, where what has been destroyed is not just buildings but meaning itself. In Brian Evenson’s new novel Immobility, the main character—a paralyzed-from-the-waste-down man named Horkai—considers the devastated landscape as […]
