Returning to work again with director Shaka King (Newlyweeds) is cinematographer Daniel Patterson, who lenses the director’s Sundance short, Mulignans. Mulignans? From the Sundance catalog: mulignan(s) /moo.lin.yan(s)/ n. 1. Italian-American slang for a black man. Derived from Italian dialect word for “eggplant.” See also: moolie. Source: Urban Dictionary and pretty much every mob movie ever. Called “four minutes of biting, vicious satire” by Filmmaker‘s Sarah Salovaara, Muligans was shot in one day and is one long scene. Below, Patterson discusses how he made that happen. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What […]
Appearing in Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list back in 2004 after their home run of a short, Gowanus, Brooklyn, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have had what, from the outside, looks like one of the steadiest careers in American independent film. While others from that list struggle to make their second or third films, Boden and Fleck have moved from feature to feature, first turning that short into a well-received debut starring Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson), essaying the life of an immigrant baseball player in Sugar for HBO; and then adapting Ned Vizzini’s acclaimed memoir It’s Kind of a Funny […]
My name is Michael T. Vollmann; I am the director of the Sundance short The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers and this is my first trip to Sundance — I have absolutely no idea what to expect! I hear there are mountains involved, mega enormous celebrity sightings and maybe even a grab bag. My filmmaking partner Chris James Thompson (producer on The 414s) has been to Sundance once before, working on a film called The Pool — a 2007 Sundance award winner directed by Chris Smith and edited by Barry Poltermann. Chris and Barry have been important mentors for us, […]
Do you have to miserable to be funny? That’s the question asked by Kevin Pollak’s, Misery Loves Comedy, screening at Sundance as a Special Event. And, appropriately for a film containing 50 interviews of funny people ranging from Jimmy Fallon and Judd Apatow to Penn Jillette and Lewis Black, cinematographer Adam McDaid’s job was to work quickly, make the people look good and allow their stories to come through transparently. Below, he talks about all of that as well as what to do when faced with a wall of sun-lit windows. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]
Are you one to meet your heroes? By reading, watching, listening to their work, do you feel a connection to them? Or are they enigmas whose mysteries you need to crack? In the world of contemporary letters, few figures loom as large as David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling, wickedly funny, fiercely observant works grappled with both the necessity and near impossibility of sincere, non-ironic expression in the age of commodified mass media and a meaningless public discourse. In essays about punctuation and cruise ships, tennis stars and cooked lobsters, and in stories and novels including his protean cultural phenomenon, Infinite […]
With Charles Poekel’s charmingly melancholy debut, Christmas, Again, the independent film maxim “write what you know” gains a corollary: “write what you can learn.” For his tale of a withdrawn Christmas tree salesmen just trying to get through the season, again, Poekel gained knowledge of his protagonist’s trade by opening and operating his own stand in Greenpoint — a job he’s still doing five years later. Defiantly non-melodramatic and with the well-worn feel of a ’70s New York character study, Christmas, Again has both poetry and an unprepossessing air. In other words, it’s a perfect holiday visitor. Christmas, Again premiered […]
This week on the show, we interviewed photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, Lyric Cabral. She, along with her co-director David Felix Sutcliffe, is premiering her feature-length film (T)ERROR at Sundance this year in the U.S. Documentary category. (T)ERROR is billed as “the first film to document on camera a covert counterterrorism sting,” but the documentary has been in the works for over a decade. Lyric came across the film’s subject, an FBI informant, when she was only 19, but knew she was too young to tackle the story then. Lyric talks about the uncomfortable situations she’s found herself in as a […]
This year’s Art House Convergence (AHC), the organization’s 10th annual event, drew 500 delegates from art house cinemas, film festivals, and film distributors to Midway, UT to discuss the state of independent film exhibition in the United States. Over the course of the organization’s first decade, the AHC has grown from a small gathering of two dozen non-profit cinemas seeking new ways to support independent film while building sustainable business models for their theaters into something of a full-blown trade organization. Now it represents the interests of hundreds of theaters (and helps incubate the development of a similar organization for […]
As part of our lead-up to the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, yesterday we published producer Mynette Louie’s advice for Sundance newcomers. Today we’re following up with eight suggestions from veterans of the ’14 and ’13 editions. Read on for advice, much of which you should take and some you will hope you don’t have to… — SM Ana Lily Amirpour (director, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night): The day I arrived at Sundance I got terrible news that my production designer Sergio De La Vega passed away in a sudden tragic accident. So that night we were drinking at […]
Just to remind everyone what a bellwether of LGBT cinema it is — last year’s Sundance Film Festival brought us the U.S. (and often World) premieres of such exciting LGBT films of 2014 as Love Is Strange, Stranger By The Lake, Lilting, To Be Takei, The Skeleton Twins and the Oscar-shortlisted The Case Against 8 just to mention a few. So basically you can expect that many of the films listed below will become the hits of 2015! This year’s festival runs January 22- February 1 in Park City, Utah. Nearly 120 films will be shown (selected from amongst the […]