Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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A DIY DATE WITH “MR. SADMAN”
A few years ago I took part in the IFP Narrative Labs with a feature I wrote and directed called Mr. Sadman, about a 1990 Saddam Hussein double who loses his job and moves to Los Angeles to start his life over — a satire about what it truly means to become American. We had a brief, almost nonexistent festival run and then regrouped and thought about next steps. Every now and then we’d get an inquiry from a distributor or sales agent, but in the end nothing really ever made sense for either us or them. “No stars” plus […]
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Second Life
For Miranda July’s second feature film, THE FUTURE, the performance artist and director mixes humor, fantasy and psychodrama to explore the anxieties of adulthood.
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A WALK THROUGH THE 2011 SXSW TRADE SHOW
Here’s another SXSW iPod Touch video, this one featuring some of the vendors attending the 2011 SXSW Trade Show. (This year, the Austin festival mashed film, interactive and music into a single trade event.) A Fed-bashing indie film; a new social network for creators; indie film and a new location-based app; and “fun” fake IDs (for some, a necessity in Austin). Watch. Featured in this clip: the Techsmith suite of products; the New York Film Academy; MyCube; Locaii; Acts of Sharing; The Imaginary University; Spotzen; Fedora; Evri; Designica; Silver Circle.
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SXSW BLOG: “SOUND IT OUT” DIRECTOR JEANIE FINLAY, PART 2
Sell out crowds, nifty accents and Ipiddles I’m waiting to board my flight home to the U.K. It’s been an amazing week at SXSW and I am delighted the way my film SOUND IT OUT has been received. I imagined that I would send regular blog updates to Filmmaker but it’s ust not the kind of festival where there is a spare five minutes in the day. Each day we vowed to get bed early and have some decent sleep and each night we’ve ended up at the 24 hour Cafe Magnolia for late night snacking and putting the world […]
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“TEENAGE” WILDLIFE
Matt Wolf, one of our 25 New Faces of 2008, and author and critic Jon Savage are collaborating on a feature doc, Teenage, based on Savage’s 2007 book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. Although it may seem that being a teenager is an ahistorical fact of life, Savage’s book detailed the cultural creation of the teenage class, tracing its relationship to art, political movements, and the rise of consumer culture. Their feature will bring this all to life with, as their new teaser trailer exhibits, archival footage, an evocative voiceover by Jena Malone, and music by Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox. […]
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SXSW BLOG: “BOB AND THE MONSTER” DIRECTOR KEIRDA BAHRUTH, PART 3
Too early: March 19th — Southwest Airlines back to Los Angeles. My husband and daughter are to my right (I’m an aisle girl). I’m almost too tired to blog. That’s a ridiculous statement, isn’t it? Too tired to blog? The word “blogging” hardly seems to infer any effort on its behalf. Blog. Okay, enough of that. Back to the point, SXSW, right? Right. It was amazing, in every sense of the word’s overuse. I loved it. The rest of the week I spent hanging out with other filmmakers and then musicians as they rolled into town. We screened the film […]
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A FINAL REPORT ON SXSW INTERACTIVE 2011
My mind wasn’t blown this year. No Zeitgeist-nailing speaker convinced me that the world was about to change. Nor was there a high-profile washout, a speaker whose on-stage fail created its own newsworthy drama. I’m talking about SXSW Interactive, the mammoth convention/trade show/meet-up/party spot that crowds the stage with the more homespun SXSW Film in Austin each year. This was my fifth SXSW, and, a couple of years ago, in the midst of the indie film depression, I realized something. The positive energy, the feeding frenzy, the dollars — most of it was over on the interactive side. The kind […]
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SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF: NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS
The late Sam Fuller, master of low-budget westerns and over-the-top psychosexual dramas, famously expressed to an adoring Godard the following overly quoted opinion of cinema (but it’s relevant here): “Film is like a battleground…Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In one word, emotion.” From the evidence on screen at this 40th edition of New York City’s New Directors/New Films (March 23-April 3) — I must admit, my favorite New York movie event, given that, theoretically, the choices are early works with edge — films built around long takes and a high ratio of long shots (Winter Vacation, Gromozeka, and Attenberg, for example) […]
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“ATTACK THE BLOCK” AND MORE NEW SXSW AUDIENCE AWARDS
SXSW has announced three final awards for its 2011 edition. Here are the audience awards for its 24 Beats per Second, Lone Star States and Midnight sections. Austin, Texas – March 19, 2011 – The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival announced additional Audience Award-winners today from the Lone Star States, 24 Beats Per Second and Midnight categories. Audience Award results for all categories were certified by the accounting firm of Maxwell Locke & Ritter. For the 2011 SXSW Film Festival, 140 features, consisting of 66 World Premieres, 15 North American Premieres and 15 U.S. Premieres, were selected […]
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Breaking Down Ed Burns’ $9,000 Shooting Budget
While procrastinating working yesterday, I was following Ed Burns’ Twitter stream, in which he detailed the no-budget nature of his latest film, Newlyweds. With a shooting budget of $9,000, Burns worked with a three-person crew, shot on the Canon 5D (which he owns), had the actors wear their own clothes and do their own hair and make up, and worked without lights (except an occasional china ball) and sound mixer (the actors wore lavs). Tweeted Burns, “Sound is important but don’t let it slow you down. The Italian Neo-realists didn’t and they made some pretty great films…. No disrespect to […]
