Sundance Features
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Sundance Announces Groundbreaking Transparency Project at #ArtistServices Workshop
Data — it’s the most coveted property in independent film. While studios base their greenlight decisions on finely-honed models derived from the financial performance of numerous other pictures, many independent filmmakers perilously based investor pitches and distribution decisions on anecdotes and hearsay. What used to be simple extrapolation (“If that film grossed X, it probably did Y on home video”) has become a near impossible exercise in the age of digital distribution, in which paltry box-office returns hide “the real numbers” — a dizzying matrix of VOD stats, download figures, Netflix license fees and more and more obscure sub-categories of […]
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Five Questions for Welcome to Leith Directors Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker
Documentary has a rich history of films by filmmakers who must honestly engage subjects with odious views. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker stumbled across one such fellow in Craig Cobb, a white supremacist with a devious and possibly quite legal plan to produce a white power enclave in the American heartland. Premiering at Sundance in the Documentary Competition, their Welcome to Leith chronicles the story of the town of Leith against Cobb but also, implicitly, their own story of engaging their subject — who says he’s available for Skype interviews after the premiere. Welcome to Leith premieres Monday, […]
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At Sundance Producers Brunch, Mark and Jay Duplass Offer Ten Pieces of Advice for Making Movies Today
Keynote speakers at today’s Producers Brunch at the Sundance Film Festival, independent powerhouses Jay and Mark Duplass issued a passionate and witty call to all the producers in the jam-packed house: keep making small movies. At an event that saw their own producing partner, Stephanie Langhoff, receive the Sundance Institute Red Crown Producers Award, they told producers to learn from their own decision to stay invested in the independent sector after receiving a measure of larger Hollywood success. Along with Sundance Dramatic Competition entry The Bronze, which Langhoff produced, the Duplass Brothers have, as executive producers,two other productions at the […]
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Five Questions for Director Crystal Moselle of the Sundance Doc Competition Premiere, The Wolfpack
We all grow up with our own peculiar “kid logic,” a warped worldview shaped by the limits of our childhoods. We think our parents are normal. We think everyone is like us. But we know there are things beyond our own experience — countries we’ve never visited, people we’ve never met — and we build images of those places in our minds. Then, we grow up, and if we’re lucky, we get to go somewhere. We visit those countries, and meet those people. Gradually, the reality of new experience replaces the pictures we had painted with our imagination. We learn […]
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Five Questions for Rick Alverson of Sundance NEXT Premiere, Entertainment
Let’s all be inspired by Rick Alverson and agree to ban the very concept of “sympathetic character” from our movie-viewing brain. We’re all fixated on this idea, that we have to “like” characters and “connect” to them. Instead, let’s just decide to be interested in watching what is put before us, and let’s let ourselves enjoy having our expectations for how we want to feel while we’re sitting in a movie theatre get subverted once in a while. Alverson — a musician as well as a filmmaker — has made three feature films before this, his latest, Entertainment. Each one […]
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“Reality is Not, I Believe, a Fixed Entity…”: Michael Madsen on Alien Encounter Doc, The Visit
As a conceptual artist Michael Madsen doesn’t so much create nonfiction films as craft mind-blowing experiences, introducing even the most jaded of us docu-philes to people and places we’d no idea even existed. (Prior to IDFA 2010 I, for one, never knew about Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility Onkalo, the subject of Madsen’s Into Eternity and an underground cavern the size of a large city set for completion in the 22nd century.) In his latest The Visit the Danish director turns his attention and limitless imagination towards mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligent life. With the help of expert guides […]
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Adam Salky On His Sarah Silverman-Starring Sundance Addiction Drama, I Smile Back
Based on Amy Koppelman’s book published by the independent press Two Dollar Radio — a book depicting the destructive despair of a housewife spiraling into drugs and bad sex — I Smile Back is being touted here at Sundance as the feature dramatic debut of Sarah Silverman, the comedian whose shocking riffs are always delivered with an unnerving sweetness and sexy demeanor. Attempting to channel — or perhaps remold — Silverman’s persona to the demands of the novel (adapted by Koppelman and Paige Dylan) is Adam Salky, who returns to Sundance following his debut picture, Dare. I Smile Back premieres […]
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Five Questions for Western Directors Bill and Turner Ross
“Ravishing cinema verite” is how the Sundance catalog describes the work of Bill and Turner Ross, whose elegiac American portraits crackle with a lovely lo-fi buzz. Following their New Orleans-set music travelogue Tchoupitoulas, the brothers immerse themselves here in Western within a world considerably tougher — two towns on either side of the Mexican border grappling with the sudden onslaught of cartel violence. Below, we ask them about incorporating that criminal storyline into their film and sticking with the same camera for three pictures. Western premieres today in the Documentary Competition of the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Your documentaries have […]
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Sundance 2015: The Bronze, The Summer of Sangaile and Finders Keepers
If you’re feeling generous, you might pat the programmers on the back for trying their luck with a raunchy comedy like The Bronze in one of the opening night slots of the Sundance Film Festival. But if you’re feeling frank, you may just go ahead and call this overlong Olympic satire from first time director Bryan Buckley for what it is: a solid, third tier effort. Co-writer Melissa Rauch stars as Hope Ann Gregory, some kind of Kerri Strug has-been who spends her days snorting pills and masturbating in her father’s basement to a languishing VHS tape of her bronze victory decades prior. When she […]
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Writer/Director Jon Watts on His Sundance Midnight Premiere, Cop Car
From set, the production executive was on the phone. “There are 10-year-olds saying the word ‘motherfucker!’ she said with concern. Would an “R” rating still ensue? None of us were sure, but we spent plenty of time on conference calls with lawyers trying to figure it out. So, then, when writer/director Jon Watts says below that ten-year-olds saying “the f-word… is a really big deal,” I know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen Cop Car yet, so I don’t know whether his tyro f-bombs made the final cut. Regardless, though, I love adult movies about kids that are really […]
