Screenwriting
Filmmaking - Screenwriting
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Exclusive Script Extracts and Storyboards from Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux
Courtesy of writer/director Carlos Reygadas, below are the script and storyboards from two sequences from Post Tenebras Lux, which opens at Film Forum today. The first sequence is the sauna scene, in which the film’s two central characters, played by Adolfo Jiménez Castro and Nathalia Acevedo, visit a swingers sauna in France, and the second is the closing sequence of the film. 10. Cave. Camera hand held and on tripod. To be determined whether real steam or fake smoke. Juan, Esther and extras. (French). 1. Series of fixed shots of naked people in a steam bath with red light. […]
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Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
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“How Do You Get Anybody to See It?” Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver and 21st Century Filmmaking
Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan. Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched […]
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Uneasy Does It: The Comedic Filmmaking of Issa Rae
“My name is J, and I’m awkward and black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right.” So says the title character in the pilot episode of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, one of YouTube’s biggest Web series that’s spawned two seasons and a major career. Issa Rae, 28, is the creator and lead actress of the series (commonly referred to as ABG), which has millions of views and legions of fans, including Pharrell Williams, now an executive producer on the series, and Shonda Rhimes, who has added Rae’s forthcoming […]
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Five Questions with Sunlight Jr. Director Laurie Collyer
While the lives of the working class are not the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of, they are at the heart of Laurie Collyer’s new film, Sunlight Jr. Starring Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon as a couple dealing with an unexpected pregnancy while trying to survive on minimum wage jobs, Sunlight Jr. premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend where it is sure to stir up a conversation about what it means to be numbered among the working poor in American society today. Filmmaker: Although income inequality and poverty is one of the biggest issues facing America right now, […]
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Second Annual NYU Purple List Announced
Last year, in order to spotlight the talents emerging from NYU’s graduate film program, students Ash Bhalla and Shandor Garrison created the Purple List, the university’s answer to the Blacklist. The notable success of the 2012 Purple List was Shaka King’s stoner comedy Newlyweeds, which premiered this January at Sundance and was picked up for distribution by Phase 4 Films. The 2013 list was announced this morning, and was chosen by a panel of judges including Sundance Labs’ Rachel Chanoff, IFP’s Amy Dotson, actor Peter Dinklage, filmmaker Karyn Kusama and cinematographer Andrij Parekh. The scripts honored by the 2013 Purple […]
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Second-Time Director: Jane Weinstock and The Moment
“Complexity” is a word that Jane Weinstock likes to use when describing her ideal movie, and it’s certainly an attribute that could be applied to her own work. “I crave it as an audience member. I think people are contradictory, and I like that kind of psychological realism,” she says. The same word is an apt description for her own pathway into the director’s chair, especially for her most recent film, The Moment. It was a fulfilling journey for the filmmaker, but one she also calls “a really long struggle.” Weinstock has had a varied career, having gotten her start […]
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Snitch’s Ric Roman Waugh: From Stuntman to Writer/Director
There is no one set way to progress to the role of writer/director, but now — when all it takes to make your own movie is having a DSLR and a Kickstarter account — the story of Ric Roman Waugh’s rise stands out. The son of an old school Hollywood stuntman, Waugh took a path similar to those directors who emerged in Tinseltown’s golden age: learn a craft (writer, editor, production designer, etc.), and then move up through the ranks until you’ve earned the right to have your name on the back of that canvas chair. Waugh followed in his father’s […]
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Five Questions with Celeste & Jesse Forever Writer/Actress Rashida Jones
You’re most likely to know Rashida Jones as part of the great cast of the award-winning TV series Parks and Recreation (though she says she’s often recognized for her small role in Freaks & Geeks), but Jones is more than just a talented performer. She’s a dynamic and versatile artist alternating between acting and writing (not just for the screen either!), and in the case of last year’s Celeste & Jesse Forever, both. Her first screenwriting credit has acquired a lot of notice, and we were able to pick her brain a little in the midst of her success, which […]
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Daniel Schechter, Supporting Characters
A genuine meditation on male friendship, the absurdities of indie moviedom and many different kinds of loyalty, Daniel Schechter’s Supporting Characters, a surprise hit at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, sneaks up on you, its seeming limitations becoming its strengths over the course of its easy-going 87 minutes. Despite being shot in a fashion that recalls a comedy you might find on FX, Supporting Characters maintains an old-fashioned, craftsman-like quality about it; it’s written with feeling and humor that rings with truth, offering us characters whose lives are as complicated and full of ambiguity as our own. Alex Karpovsky and newcomer Tarik Lowe have […]
