Sacramento-born Brie Larson has been acting since the age of 6 and already has a lengthy list of credits including television (United States of Tara), studio films (21 Jump Street, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and independent dramas (Rampart, Greenberg). This summer she appears in three of the best-reviewed independent films of the 2013 festival circuit — James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, and in the lead role that will break her to critics and a wider audience, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12. Larson plays a tough yet compassionate supervisor at a facility for at-risk teens, […]
Orson Welles is reputed to have said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In film school, these limitations are called assignments, and this issue’s Extra Curricular offers an assortment of assignments designed to ignite the creative process. They’re gathered from a group of screenwriters, animators and filmmakers who teach at schools across the country. Assignment #1: Look Hard Mary Sweeney, who teaches a course called “Dreams, the Brain and Storytelling” in the Screenwriting Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, offers this simple but powerful writing assignment, which can be […]
Editor’s Note: The subject of this article, the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, is developed and operated by IFP, also the publisher of Filmmaker. Cantankerousness is a disease that can affect even the smartest among us — back in the day, Socrates protested his ideas shouldn’t be written down, fearing that there was no way the written word could capture the meaning and emotion of the human voice. But instead of honoring the wise old man’s wishes, his young pupil Plato recorded his inspiration’s objections, using the very medium that Socrates was so set on strangling at its […]
For American independents, this year’s Cannes Film Festival felt like the end of an era, especially with the high-profile premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s final film, Behind the Candelabra, playing two decades after sex, lies, and videotape seemed to promise the emergence of a vital American independent film culture. These questions re-emerged not just because Soderbergh has announced that he is retiring from filmmaking, but also because he has been widely critical of a film industry that is increasingly focused on international blockbusters. But the events at this year’s Cannes also raised a number of questions about the role of the […]
Thunder cracks in the distance. Bolts of lightning illuminate the Colorado sky in flashes of pink. A warm breeze touches my skin, and the remnants of last night’s storm roll through our creek-side camp. It’s 2:32 a.m. Shadows scurry back and forth — gathering gear, disassembling tents, making tiny packets of oatmeal, downing instant coffee, fiddling with camera equipment and making last-minute adjustments to backpacks. Silence dominates the darkness, but excitement and nerves percolate palpably below the surface. Thirty minutes later, we gather and begin snaking through the black forest as a unit, guided only by tiny lights, intuition and […]
The impact of digital distribution on the indie film landscape has been vast. First, film titles began to inch up the alphabet toward the letter “A” to get noticed at the top of VOD listings. The latest development: Find a young TV star with a solid online fan base and you’re gold. “I’m seeing more and more films leveraging up-and-coming TV actors that have social media profiles,” says Erick Opeka, senior vice president of digital distribution at Cinedigm Entertainment. “Those audiences can’t wait to consume more product that features their favorite actors. The films come out of nowhere and storm […]
Greeks, if not Greece, persist. In March, the 15th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival presented 76 Greek premieres among its teeming 10 days of attractions, streaming many films across Greece and Cyprus, as well as 520 films in a Market with 55 buyers from around the world. “Here we are again, despite the hardships,” Dimitri Eipides, artistic director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and TDF reflected on opening night. Of its 1999 inaugural, he said, “Audiences were skeptical then. The establishment of an internationally acclaimed institution celebrating the art of documentary was something unheard of in Greece. But […]
We used to classify the filmmakers in each summer issue’s “25 New Faces” by listing their job category under their names, such as “director” or “cinematographer” or “actor.” But we don’t do that anymore, mostly because it’s too difficult. Take this year’s “25” — virtually everyone on the list is some kind of multi-hyphenate. There are two directors of photography on the list, and both are directing their own films — and one has even become a kind of distributor! And those two are by no means the only shooters here. Quite a few of the directors we picked this […]
This article originally appeared in our Summer, 2013 issue. With substantial revenue (sometimes well above 50 percent) coming from exploitation outside of a film’s home country, it is vital that producers know how to target and then structure deals with foreign sales agents. For those beginning to explore international distribution, here are some very basic ideas and concepts about the business of foreign sales to know going in. What is an international sales agent? In simplest terms, an international sales agent is the conduit to your film’s distribution outside of its country of origin. The sales agent will acquire a […]
Stunning black-and-white photos of movie theaters — old-style palaces and tacky multiplexes alike — sit underneath the credits of The Canyons, the 18th feature from veteran director and screenwriter Paul Schrader. Except rather than evoke the majesty of the 20th century’s dominant art form, they depict its collapse. These theaters are guttered, wrecked, their seats torn out, signage empty, neon fixtures torn and dangling from the ceilings. Some of these theaters — vintage single-screen Art Deco houses — are surely no longer viable in the modern era. The demise of the pictured strip-mall multiplexes, however, is most likely the product […]