Filmmaking

RISK VS. REWARD

Screen Daily today runs a must-read edited excerpt of financier Ben Waisbren’s recent remarks in Berlin about film financing, the credit markets, slate deals, and the movie business overall. Here’s how they intro his piece: “In a prescient speech more than a month ago in Berlin, financier Ben Waisbren talked of impending calamity for the US wave of slate financing – banks won’t touch such mega-deals again until there is more transparency and a better alignment of investor and studio interests.”

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2008 Filmmaking
ASIA ASCENDANT

Asia Argento — the writer, director and actor — has been justly celebrated this week by Nathan Lee in the Village Voice on the occasion of her starring role in Olivier Assayas’s latest thriller, Boarding Gate. Lee calls her “not only the most fearless actor of her generation, but also one of the most intelligent and commanding,” an assessment with which I concur. His piece is hard to excerpt, so I suggest you simply go to the link and read the whole thing. Also look for Travis Crawford’s piece on Mother of Tears, her father Dario’s latest feature in which […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008 Filmmaking
SUNDANCE CHANNEL FOR SALE?

In her Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke links to and comments on a Bloomberg.com report that states that the Sundance Channel is for sale and that Cablevision, which already owns the IFC, may be a potential buyer. From Andy Fixmer’s Bloomberg report: The Sundance Channel, the cable network built around Robert Redford’s annual film festival, is for sale and Cablevision Systems Corp. may be the eventual buyer, according to Pali Research. Owners General Electric Co., CBS Corp. and Redford are seeking $400 million to $500 million for the channel, which has 26 million subscribers, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008 Filmmaking
CLOONEY’S CUP RUNNETH OVER

I had a business meeting last week in which there was an honest discussion about whether the “Two Girls, One Cup” phenomenon was played out or not. I’ll say no more. Apparently, though, it has not, as the internet meme has crossed over into the old-media world of Esquire magazine. Karina Longworth reports over at SpoutBlog: I’m fairly certain Cary Grant was never asked by an interviewer to watch internet scat porn so that his word-for-word reaction could be printed in a major magazine, but poor George Clooney lives in a different time. Presumably because there’s very little new to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008 Filmmaking
SELF DIAGNOSIS

Over at his DIY Filmmaker blog, Sujewa Ekanayake posts a long interview with Barry Jenkins (pictured) about his Medicine for Melancholy, one of the real discoveries (and a film I very much liked) out of SXSW. He talks about Godard, being inspired by Claire Denis’s Vendredi Soir, and whether Medicine for Melancholy is, in Sujewa’s words, “the Barack Obama of indie films.” Here’s his response to the latter — specifically, whether or not his film can “cross over” from the typical “multi-ethnic but largely white” base of indie film to reach more diverse audiences. “The Barack Obama of indie films.” […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2008 Filmmaking
THE LILLIPUT REACHES ITS GOAL AT INDIEGOGO

The social marketplace site, IndieGoGo, has announced the first film to reach its funding goal on the site. Titled, The Lilliput, filmmaker Minna Zielonka-Packer raised $10,000 through the site and will use the proceeds to film a sneak peak of the film. Here’s the synopsis of the film from the site: An American filmmaker travels to Poland to make a film about Gombin, the town her father was born in, as a memorial to him and to the Holocaust. Poland 2008 is a country of contradictions where the invisible torture of the past meets the hope of the future. To […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Mar 19, 2008 Filmmaking
ALL EYES ON DOCS

Let me start off by saying I’m not a fan of award shows. And in no way am I speaking for the magazine, I personally don’t like them. How you can rate films (or music, or anything in the arts for that matter) is just beyond me. But there’s one thing that an award show can do if done right and that’s bring a community together. That’s what the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors did last night in New York City. Created by filmmaker AJ Schnack and Stranger Than Fiction founder Thom Powers (and sponsored by IndiePix), this celebration of non-fiction […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Mar 19, 2008 Filmmaking
UNICORN TIMES

The Film Panel Notetaker has an interview up with filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff, who is bringing a retrospective of her short films to the Boston Underground Film Festival this weekend. She is also beginning work on her first feature, Unicorns, which she hopes to begin shooting this summer. Here’s Meyerhoff answering the question of what made her want to be a filmmaker: I originally thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, something totally not in the arts at all. Then I went school at Brown and started taking film classes. I started with film theory, kind of more on an […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2008 Filmmaking
LAUGHING AT THE APOCALYPSE

I haven’t seen Doomsday yet, but I want to — I loved Neil Marshall’s Descent, and despite the 28 Days Later meets Resident Evil meets Road Warrior mix-and-match vibe of the trailer, I can’t believe this director doesn’t deliver something interesting with this new film. Filmmaker contributor Travis Crawford, who has seen the film and sent the below in an email, corroborates my feelings that Doomsday may offer more than people are giving it credit for. From Crawford: I felt that it was a very self-knowing, vintage Verhoeven-esque PARODY of the ultra-violent futuristic action thrillers from which it admittedly derives […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008 Filmmaking
SXSW REWOUND

As David Hudson wrote at GreenCine, there’s a leisurely paced quality to SXSW that creates a general sense of conviviality among not just its filmmaker attendees but also its journalists. Like Hudson, I still have several films to write about, and I’ll to get these thoughts online sometime soon. But, in the meantime, there’s this really nice video by Mike Hedge that I post below. He’s created a hypnotic montage of his own festival moments, including some that I shared. SXSW 2008 from mikehedge on Vimeo.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008 Filmmaking

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