Issues
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The Last Mile
In the battle between big telecoms and tech companies over the issue of net neutrality, independent filmmakers are inevitably going to be collateral damage. While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hasn’t yet gone forward with plans to allow Internet Service Providers to charge websites for faster service, the current proposals suggest that challenging times are ahead for media makers and companies who use the Web, with potentially higher costs and increased barriers to entry. As Jamie Wilkinson, CEO of digital distribution platform VHX questions, “As the market gets more crowded, will the prices be driven up?” Without the deep pockets […]
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Maine Course
Ready for a big change, back in 1997, I packed up my L.A. apartment, loaded the cat into a pet carrier and hopped on a flight to the East Coast. It was May, and I was joining the team at the Maine Photographic Workshops for the summer to help edit a new publication devoted to toy camera photography. The Workshops were a major advocate of the Diana and the Holga, cheap plastic cameras used by amateurs and pros alike to create unpredictable, often stunning, black-and-white photos. In the tiny plane between Boston and Portland, I tried to ignore my BlackBerry’s […]
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Note This! How to Successfully — and Thankfully — Receive Notes on Your Film or Screenplay
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” – Bernard Malamud “Relax and take notes, while I take tokes.” – Notorious B.I.G. I was once at a work-in-progress screening of an independent film for which we were asked to give notes. It was a long cut, and we’d all come out in the rain. After the screening, the director sat by himself near us. When someone addressed him directly, he […]
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Irregular Beats: Roberto Minervini on Stop the Pounding Heart
The third film in Roberto Minervini’s “Texas trilogy,” Stop the Pounding Heart, is his first to get American distribution. His debut feature, 2011’s The Passage, followed a terminally ill woman driving through the state in search of a faith healer, while the following year’s Low Tide focused on a mother and her solitary son in small-town Texas. The three films are realized by Minervini in collaboration with his cast, non-actors whose characters and story lines are drawn from their own life experiences. Sara Carlson was a supporting player in The Passage, while Colby Trichell had a bull riding scene in […]
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Separate Bedrooms
In conversation below with fellow writer/director Todd Solondz, Ira Sachs calls his latest work,Love is Strange, “a middle-aged film” — not because it’s focused on midlife issues, but because “it has perspective on both what youth felt like as well as what aging can lead to.” That’s a beautiful formulation by Sachs on this warm and generous New York movie that charms by unexpectedly opening its perspective across both neighborhoods and generations. Love is Strange opens with a flurry of activity as two older gay men — a music teacher (Alfred Molina) and painter (John Lithgow) — take advantage of […]
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Memories of Underdevelopment
With a few exceptions, independent movies are rarely developed like studio-produced ones. Certainly for ultra-low and micro-budget independents, the process is much less formal and far less cash-infused. Multiple paid rewrites until a script shines; thinking through all the creative and logistical problems with top-line producers before firing up the camera; packaging the right combination of talent and money that works best for the material at hand — studios and larger production companies have salaried executives responsible for this undeniably crucial work. But in the independent world, when overtaxed producers perform these tasks, it can be unreliable in its timeline […]
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Dispatches from Cannes and LAFF
Cannes Film Festival 2014 by Aaron Hillis Ken Loach. Olivier Assayas. Atom Egoyan. The Dardenne Brothers. The world’s most prestigious film festival may have asked the first-ever female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion, for 1993’s The Piano) to head up the jury, but Cannes’ main competition was disappointingly chock-full of the usual suspects, i.e., older, white male auteurs on a return visit. At least this year’s top honor went to Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose three-hour-plus drama Winter Sleep will be released stateside in time for awards season. The characteristically Chekhovian, uncharacteristically talky epic stars Haluk Bilginer as a […]
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The Power of the Purse
At their fourth floor office in Gowanus, Brooklyn, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin are preparing for the release of their second documentary feature, Citizen Koch. Outside their window is the neighborhood’s famous polluted canal but also a new Whole Foods that wasn’t there just one year ago. Gowanus, with its Superfund cleanup site, is a “neighborhood in transition,” but one that urban planners and TEDx speakers hope will be gentrification done right, retaining artists, artisans and small businesses amidst the fancy restaurants and incoming homeowners. A recent New York Times profile said Gowanus “seems poised to exist as an […]
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Phantom Rides
Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s mesmerizing Manakamana is the kind of film that pushes us to confront the basic reasons we go to the cinema in the first place — and what compels us to stay and stare at a screen for two hours. Most of us go to be transported in one way or another; Spray and Velez’s film certainly delivers in this respect, both literally and figuratively. Set entirely within a cable car floating above the Nepali jungle, the camera trained on visitors journeying to a mountaintop temple, the film never stops moving. It’s an action movie about […]
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Rewriting with Rapid Prototyping
In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be in Australia traveling the country with a small plush connected toy named Lyka. A robot scientist with a big heart, Lyka is from another planet decimated by climate change. Sent to Earth in a last desperate attempt to save her home, she relies on students to help her travel the globe. Together, the students and Lyka explore Earth as they search for insight that prevents her planet from dying. At its core, Lyka’s Adventure mixes purposeful storytelling and play. The project strives to teach 21st-century skills by utilizing collaborative problem solving, rapid prototyping, […]
