[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] With any independent film there is a point where limited budget requires hacking off a limb or two to get to the finish line. But in the case of Splice, which stars a humanoid creature, there was a price tag associated with removing body parts (it was a costly special effect). Much of my time in post was spent deciding what visual effects shots could be deleted to lower the budget. At the time it felt like death from a thousand cuts, but as is often the case […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] My biggest challenge was daring to make this documentary, which from the very beginning was almost an impossible idea. On one hand, we set out to retell Pablo Escobar’s story, not as yet another gangster film, which it isn’t despite popular perception, but as an intricate political thriller. On the other hand, we challenged the longstanding belief in Colombia that violence and hate pass from generation to generation. The intellectual challenges behind these two ideas were actually more difficult than getting Escobar’s son back into Colombia […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] 7 Days (director, Daniel Grou) To show or not the murdered girl on screen. One of the reasons it was difficult was because in order to show her, I had to figure out how she would look. In other words, what the murderer/rapist had done to her. It troubled and pained me to go there. Also, I was concerned with the impact the image would have on the viewer. I wanted it to be a shocking, upsetting image. A disturbing one. I was worried that it might […]
The filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman work together in New York as Supermarche, and are prolific producers of music videos, commercials and feature films (Opus Jazz: NY Export, premiering on PBS this Spring, is their latest.) They also share an office with Schulman’s younger brother, Yaniv. One day Yaniv got an email from an eight-year-old girl who wanted to paint a picture of one of his photographs (a production still from Opus Jazz that had run in the newspaper.) Egged on by his brother and Henry, Yaniv said yes, and instigated an intense correspondence not only with the girl […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] The summer decision to actually get started, to set the date for Homewrecker, was the most difficult on this project, so we did the only responsible thing: We had somebody else make it. Another project that seemed to be on the verge of total funding fell through for us in June. On June 25, we met and had the same conversation we’ve had each summer for years: Are we or are we not going to make a movie this summer? A childhood friend in Singapore, Todd McDonald, […]
[New Frontier Performances and Installations] With my artwork, the hardest decision seems to be how much detail I should add to a work. The more detail added, the more fleshed out the work is. Yet by keeping the work simple and only having necessary and particular details, there is more room left for the viewer to bring their past experiences and ideas to the interpretation of the work. This is a fine line I constantly ride with my work, sometimes purposely deviating one way or another to push the boundaries. In my installation Bordertown the combination between highly detailed works […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] The hardest decision was to steer Memories of Overdevelopment into a new direction. The first version of the script was pretty much a synopsis of the novel Memorias del Desarrollo by Edmundo Desnoes. But as shooting and editing started, new ideas emerged. Slowly the film took on a life of its own, with the inclusion of new scenes, characters, sociopolitical angles, animation sequences, etc. The result is a hybrid of the visions of two different generations of Cubans: one born before the Revolution, Edmundo Desnoes, and […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Without a doubt the most difficult decision I made was to trust my instincts. That might seem like an easy thing to do, but given I had never made a movie before (not even a short), it was truly a daily leap of faith. Along the path I encountered many people with years of movie-making experience telling me how I should do it, and if I had listened to them, I probably still wouldn’t have made a movie! In fact, I’d still be trying to raise a larger […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] I had many difficult decisions to make from the conceptual to the production stages of our documentary His & Hers. These decisions were primarily concerning our small budget of €100,000 and my choice to shoot on film. However I think the hardest decision of all was actually to make the film in the first place. In all honesty, the producer actually had to coax me into making it. Okay, I wasn’t exactly kicking and screaming but I definitely needed the push. You see, up until now […]