Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Paul Dano And Stoya Trailer Flatscreen
One way to break into directing has always been to find a young, unsigned band and offer to do a music video. A new way: make a trailer for a book. These days, there are more and more trailers for books, and many of them take the form of short films. All you need is one hot independent film actor (Paul Dano) and one hip crossover porn star (Stoya). Case in point: the mumblecore-meets-porno stylings for Adam Wilson’s debut novel Flatscreen, forthcoming from Harper Perennial. Wilson is the Associate Editor of the New York Egoist, a blogger for BlackBook Magazine, […]
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Kirsten Sheridan and the Factory: Assembling Ireland’s Actors
Talk to Kirsten Sheridan, director of August Rush and her latest Dollhouse (pictured and premiering in the Panorama section of the 2012 Berlinale) about The Factory, the collective she co-founded with fellow filmmakers John Carney (Once) and Lance Daly (Kisses), and it soon becomes apparent that Ireland’s recent financial woes have done little to dampen Dublin’s DIY spirit. If anything the collapse has, ironically, helped artists, Sheridan theorizes, by making their outsized dreams affordable. Indeed, in a thriving economy just meeting the rent on a space big enough to house everything from production studios, to a fully equipped camera department […]
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POST ‘DANCE EUPHORIA
I’m back and armed with memories of the moments my life got changed. Will you indulge me as I address the highlights? I’ll actually focus on one day, because during this day there was an odd series of highlights that scrambled my grey matter and re-made me into a whole – new – guy. January – twenty – seventh was an early morning because I was invited to sit on a Cinema Café panel moderated by John Nein, with fellow filmmakers Benh Zeitlin and Marialy Rivas. Ben made Beasts of the Southern Wild, which literally jumped inside my left ventricle […]
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The Dish & The Spoon — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Dish & The Spoon world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. It opens theatrically at the reRun Gastropub in NYC on Friday, February 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official Facebook page to learn more.) Alison Bagnall’s The Dish & The Spoon opens with a distraught young woman named Rose (played by Greta Gerwig) hastily driving an old, large Mercedes station wagon into the rainy sprawl of an off-season Delaware beach town. When her cell phone rings, she only hesitates for a moment before throwing it out the window onto the highway. This act — equal parts defiant, hostile, […]
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Director Micha X. Peled on Bitter Seeds
Monsanto, the agriculture biotech company maligned in such docs as Food, Inc. and King Corn, found renewed opposition this month with the launch of an online petition gone viral called “Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto.” The petition protests the president’s 2009 appointment of the company’s former VP, Michael Taylor, to the position of senior advisor to the FDA. That this years-late call to action has inspired more than 380,000 signatures attests to the toxicity of this particular marriage between government and a multinational corporation. If you’ll remember, Monsanto is the company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange, both of […]
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SXSW ANNOUNCES MIDNIGHTER AND SHORTS PROGRAMS
SXSW announced today the lineups for their Midnighters and Shorts programs. The Midnighters section pulls together a batch of genre-heavy world premieres, including Spanish found-footage horror sequel [REC] ³ GENESIS and dark comedy Girls Against Boys, as well as proven festival favorites V/H/S and John Dies at the End. The shorts program meanwhile is as extensive as ever, featuring 135 selections including works from James M. Johnson, Jeremiah Zagar, Bill Plympton, Dustin Guy Defa, and Josh and Benny Safdie (who present their Sundance Jury Prize winner The Black Balloon.) The full lineups: MIDNIGHTERS Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – provocative after-dark […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #77
Second #3619, 60:19 See shot 9 from the previous post (#76). Frank, here, is someone caught between the hipsterism of the 1940s and the 1990s, his Pabst Blue Ribbon signifying the working man’s authenticity as opposed to the soft, foreign Heineken, the baby-faced college boy’s beer. And yet Frank aspires to suaveness in his soft nightclub shirt and beer poured into a glass, not drunk out of a bottle. Frank is a slave to a fixed idea. When he watches Dorothy on the stage, what does he really see? What if there’s something in Dorothy that’s only available to him, […]
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HOW WILL YOU WATCH “RETURN”?
I love seeing movies in the cinema. I love being smaller than the screen, the sounds. I love giant action movies that are meant to overwhelm you with their sensations, and I also love films where the story is about smaller topics in everyday life (which, of course, also overwhelm you with their sensations). I love going to the movies with other people, but I also love going by myself and being a stranger in a crowd. Either way, part of what is sexy about the cinema is feeling yourself brought together with people you don’t know, having a common […]
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INTERVIEWING MALDIVES PRESIDENT MOHAMED NASHEED
While at the Toronto Film Festival this year I interviewed Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and director Jon Shenk about their climate change doc, The Island President. The film is focused entirely on Nasheed’s efforts combating climate change and greenhouse emissions, showing how his stewardship of the environmentally fragile island state can be a model for others looking to enact more progressive policies. One question I had while watching the doc was how well his environmental activism played at home. The domestic policies of the Maldives are largely absent from the doc. Today, reports the BBC, Nasheed has resigned amidst widespread […]
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“BOOSTER,” “PAVILION” HEAD TO SXSW VIA KICKSTARTER
I’ve added some new projects to Filmmaker‘s curated Kickstarter page, including two IFP Narrative Lab projects selected for premieres at SXSW in March. The first is Tim Sutton’s gorgeous Pavilion, an eerie tale of adolescence that is breathtakingly shot and hauntingly directed. (It also has one of the most gorgeous websites around.) The second is Matt Ruskin’s intense character-based thriller Booster. Both films are well on their way to completion but are short the final finishing funds that will allow them to make their premiere dates. And, of course, both have some decent rewards. For $750, Sutton will give a […]
