Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Emir Kusturica on City Building and a New Renaissance
Fresh off an Ecuadorian tour with his No Smoking Orchestra, the twice-awarded Palme d’Or director Emir Kusturica flew to Morocco for the closest thing he can get to downtime. As President of the Jury of the 11th annual Marrakech International Film Festival, Kusturica got to enjoy one of his favorite pastimes, absorbing a dozen or so independent films from around the world in a week. His second time at the festival, the auteur was honored with the Golden Star award in 2009 for his outstanding career. While he spent most of the festival behind the scenes, apart from presenting a […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #57
Second #2679, 44:39 The full and furious roar of Frank. The camera has just completed a somehow menacing lateral tracking shot passing very close behind Dorothy’s back. Frank, having deeply inhaled from the mask (as if to prepare himself for the performance that he—Dennis Hopper, not Frank—is about to deliver) is now contorted with fury and sorrow. And something else: terror. Terror, perhaps, for something he has summoned. Poem #259, stanzas two and three, from The Dream Songs, by John Berryman, goes like this: When worst it got, you went away I charge you and we will wonder over this […]
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KICKSTARTER: “LEAVE ME LIKE YOU FOUND ME”
Producer Adele Romanski (The Myth of the American Sleepover, The Freebie) is stepping into the director’s chair with Leave Me Like You Found Me, and she is raising post-production funds on Kickstarter. You can read our interview with Adele about Myth this past summer and check out her Kickstarter video below. From the Kickstarter page: A few years back while on a camping trip in California, I had the idea to shoot a film in a national park. The idea was to try and capture something small and intimate and beautiful within the backdrop of something vast and expansive and […]
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2011 IN FILM: A DISASTER ODYSSEY
For many supposedly serious cinema folk, there is no secret pleasure more pleasurable than the disaster film. What makes the genre so familiar – predictable plotlines, one-dimensional characters and an ever-present threat that only kills the people who deserve it – is also what makes it so damn fun. In the late ’90s, people cheered when the alien spaceship blew up American monuments. A full decade after September 11th, it’s still hard to imagine that happening now. During the past decade, disaster films have become more serious, less The Towering Inferno and more District 9, but it is only in the […]
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FOUR TITLES ADDED TO 2012 SUNDANCE SLATE
Four titles have been added to the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Listed below, these films join latecomers in recent years like Miranda July‘s The Future and Lisa Cholodenko‘s The Kids Are All Right. We’re certain these filmmakers would be more than happy with just an ounce of the critical and box office praise those two films got (or any of this year’s Sundance entries for that matter). The 2012 Sundance Film Festival will take place Jan. 19-29. Find all the previous news so far on the fest here. PREMIERES Predisposed / U.S.A. (Directors & Screenwriters: Philip Dorling, Ron Nyswaner) — […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Terry Gilliam
“Billy Wilder once said that there are only two things aging directors can’t avoid…awards and haemorroids [sic]. I’ll stick with just the awards for the moment, please.” So says a recent Facebook post from the brain behind some of the greatest films of the last century, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Brazil to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Yes, Terry Gilliam has joined Facebook, as an experiment to promote his latest venture, the short film The Wholly Family, about Italian Pulcinella figurines coming to life inside a small boy’s imagination. (I highly recommend following his status updates). […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #56
Second #56, 43:52 The implied violence before the explicit violence, as the patterns and objects of Dorothy’s apartment have settled into a merciless, strict formalism. The fact of Dorothy’s bare leg, the tenderness of her foot upon the carpeting, sets a machine in motion somewhere. In his monumental, multi-volume work Rising Up and Rising Down, William T. Vollmann explains his reasons for exploring violence in such calculus-like detail: “I wanted to find a base point beneath which we couldn’t go—the ‘floor’ of evil. I could then note that the fall would not be bottomless. I might hit it and die […]
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THE OCCUPY ZEITGEIST IN 2011 CINEMA
1. A sense of outsideness. Buildings turned inside out on 9-11, and people outside in the streets of Manhattan. The mind, outside of itself with disbelief. The brutal and temporary restoration of the natural world in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. Located a block from the World Trade Center, Zuccotti Park, terribly damaged on 9-11 and slowly restored, would become the locus of the Occupy Movement. Encampments. Tents. The incongruous sight of camping gear in urban spaces and beneath the shadows of skyscrapers, in a forest of steel and concrete and glass. It is not films […]
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Bryce Dallas Howard Directors Canon EOS C300 Short
Here is a just-posted short science-fiction film, When You Find Me, directed by Bryce Dallas Howard and produced by Ron Howard. It’s short on Canon’s new EOS C300 camera. As Koo notes over at No Film School, the short was inspired by a photograph submitted as part of Canon’s Project Imagination contest.
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DID YOU KEEP YOUR 2011 FILMMAKING NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION?
This year on January 1 I posted what become one of our best-trafficked posts of the year: a list of suggested New Year’s Resolutions for filmmakers. This year I thought I’d do a similar post… but I’m not sure I can improve upon last year’s list. So, I thought I’d ask you, our readers, to contribute. Did you make a filmmaking New Year’s Resolution for 2011, either from my list or one of your own? If so, did you keep it? If not, why? If you did, how did it work out? And, finally, do you have a New Year’s […]
