How do you interview the filmmaker whose work has meant more to you than any others’? Paul Thomas Anderson is, for me, the best and most important director of his generation, the only person I know of who not only invites but actually earns comparison with Martin Scorsese. Like Scorsese, Anderson is a voracious film scholar whose movies both honor traditions and shatter them; also like Scorsese, he’s a committed chronicler of 20th-century American history whose perspective is consistently deeper, broader, and more original than just about anyone else’s. He’s also the best director of actors since Elia Kazan – […]
The filming of Boyhood, shot over 12 years, posed some unexpected challenges in post-production. At a recent meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group, First Assistant Editor Mike Saenz explained the difficulties of the editing process, made more complicated by changes in technology that occurred over that 12-year period. Begun as what Saenz called “an indie side project” by director Richard Linklater, Boyhood was originally edited using Final Cut 3, as they couldn’t afford to rent an Avid system for 12 years. A couple of years into the project, they switched to Avid Xpress, a lower-end system from Avid. They […]
After attending the inaugural edition in 2001, English actor Jeremy Irons returned to the Marrakech International Film Festival on Saturday night to receive a career tribute award. The Academy Award-winning star greeted fans at the fest’s opening film The Theory of Everything and accepted his award before the screening The Imitation Game the following night. The festival opened with two films about geniuses, and Irons himself plays a mathematician in the upcoming The Man Who Knew Infinity, across from Dev Patel as the famed Ramanujan. Irons has come a long way since his entry into the Hollywood elite with 1981’s […]
Glen Keane made me want to make movies. As a head animator at Disney from the 1970s until just a few years ago, when he left to create his own company, Keane created iconic characters like Ariel, Aladdin, and Tarzan, plus gorgeously drawn animals like the bear in The Fox and the Hound and the eagle Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under. But what held me spellbound was the moment when the Beast — his character — and James Baxter’s Belle walked into the computer-animated ballroom during the title song of Beauty and the Beast: I’d never seen anything like that before, and I […]
The world’s oldest profession proves stressful and arduous in The Foxy Merkins, director Madeleine Olnek’s follow-up to her zany “fish out of water” black-and-white debut Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. By having much of her work featured at the Sundance Film Festival throughout the past 10 years, Olnek has developed a prominent voice in the queer filmmaking community, and The Foxy Merkins finds her once again working with some familiar faces (Dennis Davis, Alex Karpovsky, Lisa Haas and Jackie Monahan) and locations. The film is a buddy comedy for an underserved audience, observing the misadventures of Margaret (Haas) and Jo (Monahan), two New York-based lesbian hustlers often found hopelessly hooking […]
Few modern photographers have covered as much of the planet as Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. For several decades, he travelled the continents to document major events shaping history: genocide, war, starvation, and exodus. Deeply affected by the intense trauma he witnessed, he put down his camera. He picked it up again for Genesis, a hugely ambitious project dedicated to the earth’s beauty, where he photographed areas of the planet untouched by humans. Filmmaker Wim Wenders joined forces with Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado to co-direct this intimate portrait of one our greatest living artists. The film won the Special Prize in the Un Certain Regard section […]
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a frightening new film that finds the horror in the familial, opens Friday in theaters and on demand, almost a year after its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Focusing on a mother and son terrorized by a lanky, ghost-like creature who originates from a withered pop-up book, Kent’s film does quite a lot with limited resources. Incorporating stop-motion animation, stylized lighting, and an effective use of sound, debuting Australian filmmaker Kent has a deft sense of control — a husband who dies in a car crash as he drives his pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth is pretty hefty stuff. […]
A year and a half ago the Tribeca Film Institute launched the TFI Sandbox, an online resource for documentary transmedia projects with connections to the New Media Fund and other real-world resources. Since then the Sandbox has helped produce some amazing work, such as Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s Hollow, and last week the site received an upgrade, which you can check out here. The new Sandbox, essentially a more robust version of the previous iteration, features everything from introductory information for those just testing the waters of interactive nonfiction to specific funding, technology, and festival/distribution resources for those at work on […]
Ted Hope — producer, Good Machine co-founder, and now CEO of Fandor — is no tongue-tied wallflower in the independent film community. Indeed, his passionate commentary, counsel and editorializing on topics ranging from net neutrality to making better films to a “systems reboot” of the independent film economy seem to be everywhere these days. But while his website, Twitter account and frequent speeches at industry events may make it seem that his opinions have been enabled — or at least turbo-charged — by this current social media age, he has, in fact, been lobbing list-driven rhetorical broadsides for years. (Don’t […]
After 25 years, the wait is over for Twin Peaks fans. David Lynch and Mark Frost have announced a return to the mythical town coming in 2016 to Showtime. The show is often credited for having paved the way for the golden age of television today, when many TV programs rival cinema for compelling stories. Through the episodic medium of television, Lynch was able to create a multi-layered world full of rich stories, diving deep into the lives of its characters. The season will pick up in the present day and bring back many of the show’s iconic roles. Shortly […]