Filmmaking

TRIBECA: ALLEN RETURNS TO NYC WITH WHATEVER WORKS

The Tribeca Film Festival opens its eight year with the world premiere of Woody Allen‘s Whatever Works, marking his return to NYC after a four film absence. Screening earlier this evening at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan (though Allen did show up, sadly he did not introduce the film or do a Q&A afterwards), Allen’s latest work can hardly match his earlier ones shot in his beloved city, so we won’t even go there, instead he constructs an entertaining, conventional (for Allen’s standards) comedy about an eccentric named Boris (Larry David) who describes himself as a “Nobel Prize-worthy thinker” with a […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 22, 2009 Filmmaking
DO FILM FESTIVALS MAKE YOU HAPPY?

Over at The New Breed, which is a section of the Workbook Project, a number of filmmakers are engaging in an interesting virtual video panel that discusses the issue of managing expections while traversing the festival circuit. There’s been a lot of talk recently about how film festivals are the new theatrical for many filmmakers whose work will not otherwise see the darkened inside of a movie theater. But is just showing your film at a festival enough? What about a deal? Or about networking? And should one worry about all of these things or simply visit festivals with an […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2009 Filmmaking
JAMES FRANCO, CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM!!!

FilmInFocus has nabbed an exclusive excerpt of The Room Before and After, a Wholphin Original Short that appears in its entirety on the new Wholphin #8, which has just been released. The concept: the same room is trashed three times by three different actors, each of whom bring their own destructive style and inner backstory to the process. Part One, excerpted here, stars James Franco, recently seen in Milk and Pineapple Express. There’s also an interview between Dave Eggers and Franco, in which Franco discusses some of his performance’s art-world inspirations. An excerpt: Wholphin: No, that was great, that was […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2009 Filmmaking
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS OF 2009?

In the current issue of Filmmaker we feature an excerpt for Scott Kirsner’s new book, Fans, Friends and Followers. Now, HDFilmTools.com has produced a conversation with Scott in which he discusses some of the macro trends affecting production, distribution and audience consumption in our business right now. Part One is here, and you can follow the links for Part Two and Part Three.

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2009 Filmmaking
Spring Issue Online

Select stories for the Spring issue are now online. Check out our interview with Steven Soderbergh who talks about his latest low budget project, The Girlfriend Experience. Plus, a Q&A with the film’s star, Sasha Grey. Darius Marder talks about his hypnotic treasure hunting debut doc, Loot. And Olivier Assayas chats about his latest film, Summer Hours. Also, in Jon Reiss‘s latest instalment he looks at DIY Web marketing. We highlight the filmmakers using still cameras to make their movies. And Esther B. Robinson walks us through what’s needed to do to make that next credit card-financed film. And don’t […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 20, 2009 Filmmaking
CATALOGUING THE WOES OF INDIES ABROAD

In addition to all of challenging economic factors, one adversary indie film has had in the last year is the press. Gone are the puff pieces about filmmakers “making it” by gambling their mortgage on their indie film and then scoring big. Those human interest-type stories have faded away in the last year as the financing of the indie sector itself became the story. There’s not a lot new in Lauren A.E. Schuker’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Indie Films Suffer Dropoff in Rights Sales,” but when it comes to independent film foreign sales, the piece impressively catalogues all the bad […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009 Filmmaking
J.G. BALLARD’S WAY OF LIFE

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present. That’s J.G. Ballard from his prose poem, “What I Believe” (1984), as quoted in Mark Dery’s February essay in the L.A. Weekly on Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, the author’s memoir, currently out in the U.K. For […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009 Filmmaking
MICHAEL JACKSON GOES BACK IN TIME

This strange blog post is part Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, part MAD magazine, but really, it’s just an excuse for me to learn a new word: “pareidolia.” According to Wikipedia, the term “describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.” “Hoax or pareidolia?” is what Derren Brown asks about the kookily enjoyable internet meme that proposes that Michael Jackson somehow moonwalked in time back to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009 Filmmaking
J.G. BALLARD, 1930 – 2009

J.G. Ballard, the British writer whose long career aimed to, in his own words, graph “the psychology of the future,” died this weekend in England after a long illness. Throughout his many published works Ballard, in dispassionate, sometimes clinical prose, philosophized about the changes that technology, social changes or the decaying environment are having on our desires as well as our own conceptions of what it means to be human. His characters are typically scientists of their own disorder, cooly observing the ways in which their psychologies are being redrawn by forces they are only beginning to understand. In Ballard’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009 Filmmaking
TWO FAVORITES — FROWNLAND, ROBBED — IN L.A.

Mark Olsen has a new L.A. Times column called “Indie Focus,” and this notice of its inauguration gives me an opportunity to plug yet again two of my favorite movies of last year: Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. The two films are double-billing in L.A., and Olsen devotes his debut column to the films and their filmmakers, Ronnie Bronstein and Josh Safdie, respectively. (The films play Thursday through Saturday at the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater.) Olsen interviews both filmmakers separately and gets some choice quotes from each. From Safdie, about his film’s “accidental” creation: “At times, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2009 Filmmaking

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