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For many people, making a film seems like an impossibility. However, for those who do get their first feature in the bag, there’s no guarantee that making a second will be any easier. Todd Rohal is a case in point. He attracted buzz for his debut, The Guatemalan Handshake, which won Best Film at Slamdance in 2006 and earned him a spot on Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list that same year. However the success of Handshake, a beautiful and stunningly original cinematic vision which Rohal describes as a hybrid of Kentucky Fried Movie and Days of Heaven, did not directly […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Redstone Cinemas 8] We were really surprised by the extraordinarily wacky and absurdist humor of early filmmakers. Our documentary, These Amazing Shadows, focuses on the National Film Registry, so naturally we immersed ourselves in the incredible diversity of the 550 films on the list (Hollywood classics, avant-garde, documentaries, animation, home movies, silents and more). What quickly jumped out was that Monty Python, Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld have nothing on early filmmakers. Let’s just take two silent films as examples (I know some of you are thinking, “Silent films are boring!” but come […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 6:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre] A few years after I wrote the first draft of the script, I read a news story in the local Japanese newspaper where the police were investigating a series of cases where the suspect or murderer would find and stalk his victims through online suicide websites/chat rooms and message boards. I found this coincidence completely shocking and surprising — I could not believe the similarities between the film and what was really happening. It’s creepy…
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 8:30 pm — Library Centre Theatre] “Surprises,” wow. There were many in developing the story. Discovering this unique sport of women’s powerlifting and how big it is in South Texas was a wonderful surprise for us. We also had no idea that Texas had a mandatory and competitive “One Act” theater arts program. That program gave us an opportunity to survey a broad range of teenager talent, but more importantly, it is turning out graduates who are truly interested in storytelling and were eager to get involved in either script workshops or actual production. As […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 5;30 pm — Library Center Theatre] The biggest surprise, which is always the biggest surprise for me when I make a movie, is what things stay the same and what feels different. It’s never what I expect. Terri is the biggest story I have yet tried to tell, in size and scope, and it took more people, more money, more everything to make. Though it was great that people got paid, it was still tight in the ways that were familiar; there wasn’t money to be wasted and time was as precious as it always is, […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre] The biggest surprise was that I made it at all. I had been very ambivalent about making another documentary under any circumstances, certainly not one that would be dealing with such painful subject matter. The idea to make We Were Here came from a younger boyfriend, also a filmmaker, who hadn’t lived through those years, but had heard me speak many times of my experiences in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. I probably wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, but once the idea came up, it made […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre] The biggest surprise for me in the making of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was that we actually got brands and companies to not only agree to be in the film, but to actually pay for it. I called hundreds of companies and had hundreds of doors slammed in my face. I had people tell me how they’d “get reamed,” “be a laughing stock” or “never work again” if they took part in the movie. But every once in a while we’d get someone who would actually call back […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV] Making The Bengali Detective was an incredibly intense period of filmmaking. I and my small team had no idea where our detective and his investigations would lead us. Each client brought their own revelations and twisting storyline. We had a central character die during the production, a subject who discovered her husband was sleeping with her brother’s wife. There was a poor grieving mother who then became a suspect in a triple murder case. And our hero detective turned up one day to greet us in a silver-and-gold […]
Although any cinephile worth his salt knows that movie watching is but a fleeting experience, few comprehend that it may be one they won’t be able to repeat. The studios who produce films aren’t museums — they’re in the business of protecting their own assets, not our cinematic history. Without intervention, scenes, moments and entire back catalogues might be lost to the inevitabilities of decay. Sundance newcomers Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton’s These Amazing Shadows tells the story of the National Film Registry, a government-appointed body that each year adds another 25 films it deems “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 8:30 pm — Prospect Square Theatre] Our biggest surprise with Kaboom had to be the crazy standing ovation we got at our Cannes Premiere. I was in the Grand Palais, literally the hugest movie theatre I’ve ever seen, with five young actors from the cast, producers, crew, etc., all dressed up in our tuxes and the girls in these stunning gowns and we were all totally intimidated and terrified. I’d warned the actors that films often get booed in Cannes, even ones by major directors like Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, etc., so we were petrified. One […]