Interviews
Interviews
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Shooting with a RED EPIC in Indonesia: Interview with David Kruta
Cinematographer David Kruta spent a week in Indonesia this February shooting footage for the SurfAid charity to use in their promotional and educational campaigns. He took with him a RED EPIC, and says that the goal was to “bring a cinematic approach” to something that would be more often shot in a documentary style. Filmmaker: How did the project come about? Kruta: The director, Michael Lawrence, is a good friend of mine and I’ve done five or six projects with him. He said he had a shoot in Indonesia, and that he was going there to revisit the places he photographed after […]
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Rama Burshtein on Fill the Void
There are few more unlikely and inspiring filmmaking success stories than that of Rama Burshtein. The 46-year-old New York City-born, Israel-based writer/director of Fill the Void had previously made handful of films specifically aimed at Jewish Orthodox audiences, but had defined herself primarily as a mother and a wife. Now she has become the first Israeli Orthodox woman to direct a film intended for those outside the Orthodox community. After going through the Sundance Screenwriting Labs, Burshtein’s debut feature had a remarkable festival run last year, world premiering without much fanfare at the Jerusalem Film Festival but then going on to play at Venice (where […]
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Bobbito Garcia on Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball
By some estimates, over half a million people play pick-up basketball in the playgrounds of New York each year. In Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, filmmakers and pick-up basketball enthusiasts Bobbito Garcia and Kevin Couliau set out to create the most comprehensive document of New York City’s summer, outdoor pick-up basketball scene by visiting 180 courts throughout all five of the city’s boroughs. Shot in a breakneck 75 summer days during 2011, their debut documentary has an immediacy and intimacy that speaks to its homemade vibe, even amongst former and current NBA players like Kenny Anderson and Brandon Jennings, […]
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“Lack of Access Made Us More Artful:” Alex Gibney on We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
As a documentary subject, WikiLeaks couldn’t be in better hands than those of Alex Gibney. The Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side, whose other films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Mea Maxima Culpa, has displayed an ongoing interest in exposing corruptions of power. WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website responsible for the largest leaks of classified documents in history, was founded on the same principle. Yet it is surprising that We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks explores the decline of the organization as it became a victim of its own beliefs. The documentary explores the […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking from James Franco
There’s a trend in actor-turned-director helmed films at Cannes this year, an impeccable direction of the people on screen. You can tell there’s a sense of trust and cohesive goal to create something great. One of the clearest examples of this is James Franco’s new feature film, As I Lay Dying, based on the great American classic by William Faulkner, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. The vivid characters have come to life on the big screen through Franco’s split-screen filmmaking, led by […]
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Street Views: a Conversation with James Nares and His Cinematic Ode to New York
In James Nares’s 1976 film Pendulum, a large metal sphere swings ominously from a bridge in a desolate TriBeCa street. We watch with unease as the ball, viewed from multiple positions, traces a giant arc, pulling on the cable, which emits a low rhythmic groan on the soundtrack. This tense, hypnotic Super-8 film, which transforms a forlorn streetscape into existential theater, offers a strange love-letter to a city (at that moment) riddled with danger and alive with artistic possibility. Pendulum was made several years after Nares’s arrival in New York at age 21 from his native England. The city’s been […]
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Kim Ki-Duk on Pieta
Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the […]
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Julianne Moore: Cinema’s Modest Chameleon
Julianne Moore makes it terribly easy to like her. Her remarkable consistency has helped her remain a stellar screen presence for more than two decades. Her transformative abilities have morphed her into everything from a troubled hypochondriac (Safe) and a maternal porn star (Boogie Nights) to a 1950s housewife (Far From Heaven) and one half of a loving lesbian couple (The Kids Are All Right). And her singular, nature-defying beauty has continued to land her fashion cover shoots at the age of 52. All of this springs to mind when Moore greets an eager parade of press while promoting her new […]
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Turning the Internet Green: The FX Protest
Over the past few months it’s been hard to miss the green icons showing up on Twitter and other social media in support of the FX Protest, an event that happened at this year’s Oscar ceremony to protest ongoing problems in the VFX industry. While movies continue to make great use of visual effects, the companies that create these effects are being financially stressed and are going out of business. To find out more about what’s been going on in the VFX industry, we spoke to Michael Scott, a VFX compositor who has been working in the industry for the […]
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Crowdfunding a Transmedia Phenomenon: Director Nicolás Alcalá on The Cosmonaut
With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation of Lánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent. The Cosmonaut will be available to watch for free on Saturday on the film’s website; the DVD, theatrical […]
