[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] With Black Dynamite, we wanted to make a blaxploitation movie that was as close to a 1974 blaxploitation movie as you could make in 2009. We wanted to emphasize humor, but we didn’t want to go too far outside of the strict boundaries of the genre. For us, the humor comes out in how anachronistic it all is. Everything is exposed; the clunky structure of the plots, the huge tonal shifts that can occur within a scene from one moment to another, and the desire to please […]
Unlike other films playing in our three-part look at crossover artists at Sundance, The Cove is not playing in New Frontier, but in the Documentary Competition, and that’s despite its director’s non-traditional background. Louie Psihoyos was one of the world’s top-ranked photographers, a staff member at National Geographic who had traveled the world taking portraits of the world’s most famous people and abstract concepts (you try photographing “science.”) He was also an avid diver who witnessed year by year the physical destruction of the world’s oceans. He and his friend Jim Clarke, founder of Netscape and WebMD, decided to form […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Perhaps I am a romantic, but I like to imagine El General being watched in a dark packed theater with an expecting audience. It isn’t only a question of scale, but of ritual. I like the ritual of going to the movies and giving oneself completely over to a film for two hours. I like the collective experience of sitting in a theater full of strangers with all eyes on a screen and hearing someone laugh across the room or someone sniffle in the seat behind me. I […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 2:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] When I was younger, my uncle told me about growing up in China during World War II, and, after a carpetbombing, seeing people emerge from a theater destroyed only seconds before. People were missing limbs, they were bleeding, searching for their friends or relatives or dates. I found it fascinating that people still went to the movies when there was the possibility that you might get blown up. Though I guess at that time you could probably have gotten blown up anywhere, so why not get blown […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Although technology may have shortened the average person’s patience over the past few years I believe that storytelling should never rush to keep up. It is true that we live in an increasingly fast culture. Our communication demands that our lives be summed up with only as much information as will fit on a Facebook profile. We don’t invite, we e-vite. We don’t talk, we type. And we quit sharing and started blogging. Don’t get me wrong. Many of these things are totally cool. But I think that […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Not all, but the majority of short-form works on the Net are gimmicky and instant pleasures — like candy. I am not interested in making candy. I want my works to be a full meal — a story that keeps ringing in your head, something that sticks and stays with you for a very long time. Cinema will falter for a bit but will not die. I believe the new developments are supplementary and not replacements of long-form work. When [co-writer] Maria Topete and I were writing Don’t […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 6:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] As someone who believes in making non-fiction feature films for the big screen, Crude is in many ways a reaction against some of the forces affecting cinema today. From a craft standpoint, Crude is steeped in the traditions of cinema vérité filmmaking that I have embraced throughout my career — it’s a film with a great deal of complexity and nuance, requiring a viewer’s full attention in order to appreciate all that I hope it has to offer. While new forms of distribution are important for independent filmmakers […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] If one postulates that money is the root of all evil, logic dictates that with the collapse of capitalism filmmaking, all other forms of art and expression will represent the forces of good in the universe. Hard times call for hard filmmaking. Being that the forces affecting cinema affect our everyday economic reality, it’s only fitting that our film would herald the global economic meltdown. The death of capitalism is going to mean a very different kind of filmmaking in the near future. Being that money is […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The inventor and venture capitalist Jim Clark and I have been dive buddies for the last 10 years but over the last 35 years of diving we have been witnessing the catastrophic collapse of the reefs and sea-life abundance. Jim and I decided to do something about it by setting up a nonprofit foundation, the Oceanic Preservation Society, to make ocean-based films and photographs to create awareness and inspire change. I have been a photographer for decades, mostly for National Geographic magazine, but I had never made a […]
James Toback’s Tyson screened in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. You can read our story on the film in the Winter issue section.