Sundance Responses

“ART & COPY” director, Doug Pray

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Art & Copy is a movie about advertising, creativity, and the innate human urge we have to communicate – whether it’s painting on cave walls or selling canned spaghetti. What makes this documentary a reflection of its times may be simply that people are finding my characters to be inspirational, at a time when many documentaries– for a lot of very good reasons– are depressing, and losing their audiences a result. Maybe times are changing, and people are ready to be less cynical. (Even about advertising…?)

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“THE MISSING PERSON” writer-director, Noah Buschell

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] For me, “story” is the most overused word in the film world these days. I hear actors saying, “I just wanna tell good stories.” I hear producers saying, “I have an intense passion for storytelling.” Jerry Bruckheimer is in some commercial calling himself a storyteller. Maybe he is. I don’t understand when indie movies became synonymous with storytelling. When did this extreme emphasis on narrative take place? As if a movie doesn’t lend itself equally well to being a poem or a painting. But we don’t hear […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN” director-producer, Kevin Willmott

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] We made a conscious effort to fight against the issues of Internet and nonarthouse distribution. All those avenues are exciting and interesting in many ways, however, no one seems to be writing any checks for them. I still believe that most filmmakers make a film to be shown in a theater. We felt our story was cinematic in scale and because of the importance of the history involved, we needed to try to reach as large an audience as possible. I still think that is through […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“HEART OF TIME” writer-director, Alberto Cortés

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Film has always been affected by diverse forces; many times has its near death been foreseen before the arrival of a new media, but today, more than 100 years from the invention of the cinematographer, cinema is still very similar to how it all began: celluloid, light and emotions on the screen with moving images in a dark room. The story of Heart of Time comes from inside the life of a rural community, a simple love story that is developed within the fight and the resistance of […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“AFGHAN STAR” director, Havana Marking

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] Afghan Star is a documentary about a TV show of the same name. It’s a powerful TV format we all know — a version of Pop Idol — but in a country that most of us don’t: Afghanistan. With the backdrop of warfare and Taliban repression (they banned music and used to impale TVs on spikes) you certainly wouldn’t expect to find a TV music talent contest. But Afghan Star: The Series is now one of the most potent forces of change the country has. You […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 8, 2009 Sundance Responses
“BOY INTERRUPTED” director, Dana Perry

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The story of my film, Boy Interrupted, was not affected much by recently changing digital technology. If anything, the film is a throwback to conventional documentary filmmaking; straightforward chronological storytelling – no tricks. Authenticity was our guide. The goal was to tell the story of my son Evan’s bipolar illness and suicide in as factual a manner as possible, with home movies and first-hand interviews bearing witness to our experience as a family. I love the self-contained and mostly humorous videos I see on YouTube and Facebook and […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 8, 2009 Sundance Responses
“IT MIGHT GET LOUD” director, David Guggenheim

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 am — Temple Theatre, Park City] The hardest thing about making documentaries is finding a story inside your material — it’s just so much harder than scripted material. And so what you find are a lot of documentaries that are written in advance; that is to say that the filmmaker knew what he or she wanted to say before beginning shooting. So you feel a kind of steering going on, and therefore a falseness. The other extreme is that you see documentaries that have no story at all. The filmmaker saw something interesting, they […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 8, 2009 Sundance Responses
“JOHNNY MAD DOG” writer-director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 8:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Johnny Mad Dog is based on a novel by Emmanuel Dongala. At first, I wrote a faithful adaptation of the book following the same narrative construction, which was centered on two main characters: Johnny, a 15-year-old child soldier, and Laokolé, a 13-year-old girl who runs away with her family. They are in the same situation in the last days of a civil war in Africa. The same unit of time, place and space. Two roads which cross paths, two different points of view, two destinies. Once this […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 8, 2009 Sundance Responses
“MARY AND MAX” writer-director-designer, Adam Elliot

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 15, 6:00 & 9:30 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] My producer and I make clay-animated biographies (or “clayographies” as I like to call them). As with all my films, my latest stop-motion animation, Mary and Max, has a simple plot and the structure is nothing too elaborate or terribly clever. I used to shudder at the thought of calling them formulaic but in many ways they are. My aim as a writer-director is to create a rich and engaging story and then tell it well. I do not obsess over plot and structure and I […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 8, 2009 Sundance Responses
“FROZEN RIVER” writer-director, Courtney Hunt

Ten percent more money wouldn’t have made that big a difference, but 10 percent more preproduction time would have helped. Our funding showed up so late in the game that nothing could be nailed down until two weeks before we started shooting. Casting and location scouting was last minute. Luckily my producers and crew were intrepid so we just marched on. Rehearsal with actors was minimal. I met most of the people in the smaller roles for the first time on the day they arrived on the set. The only thing that saved us was the script. The time spent […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2008 Sundance Responses

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