[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The shooting of this movie was insane. We shot three different times over the course of almost two years. The first time we worked with an outline and the actors completely improvising from that outline. The second time we had some scripted scenes, and the third time we went in completely scripted. With all that shooting I had a crazy amount of material to work with, and it was really hard to cut certain scenes that I loved. The hardest decision was because we shot so much, I […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Do I need permission to film that person? In my previous documentaries, the answer was always clear: get a signed release form. But this film was set in a different world: a virtual world called Second Life, populated solely by digital avatars. Was this a game or a place governed by the laws of the real world? To make things more complicated, most “residents” (as the users call themselves) fiercely guard their real identities, adopting fanciful new names, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, even species. Asking for a resident’s […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 21, 9:30 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Our goal in making Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, was to give viewers the experience of a 90-minute deployment. We had no difficult decisions, per se, but we did have important ones. First and foremost, we decided that our cameras would never leave the soldiers. We would not interview generals or diplomats; we would not return to the United States to talk to the families. We would limit ourselves to what the soldiers had access to and nothing more. Finally our film […]
New Frontier Performances and Installations [PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 21, 3:00 pm — New Frontier on Main, Park City] Not filming anything, I developed software that breaks down film as video into its basic primitives — the building blocks of media. I take body signals and sound to reanimate and dematerialize existing media and create film objects and “dream anatomies” of our familiar media body. These computational cinema works are not recorded; they are generated as the viewer experiences the work in real time. The works synchronize with your own body to create new synesthetic experiences.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Big Fan was edited on the biggest, awesomest computer monitor I’ve ever been in a room with. Thirty inches. As big as it was, though, it still wasn’t nearly enough. That 30-inch monitor was just a tease, whetting my appetite to see my movie on something bigger — like 800 inches. A movie screen. I don’t care what the trends are. What massive, fundamental sea changes are taking place within the industry. No filmmaker fantasizes about what their movie will look like projected onto a 1.5 inch iPod […]
[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 […]
[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, 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 […]