The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Director David Slade on His First Shoot

Filmmaker Paul Stone has launched a great online interview series, “My First Shoot,” which features filmmakers talking about their first time on set as directors. What’s particularly interesting about it is the perspective the passing of time affords. These aren’t directors talking about the shoots they wrapped last week. No, in many cases these are experienced directors reflecting back, pulling from their memory banks, and constructing lessons that can only be gained by the perspective continued practice provides. An example is provided by the latest interviewee, Twilight Saga: Eclipse director David Slade. I interviewed Slade for Filmmaker during the Sundance…  Read more

Harmony Korine in the Paris Review, World/Life Boundaries, H.P. Lovecraft, Coding, Film Locations and More: Sunday Links

On the rerelease of his collage novel, A Crackup at the Race Riots, Harmony Korine is interviewed by Christopher Higgs at the Paris Review. Here, Korine describes the process that created the book 15 years ago: At that point in my life I had no idea how to contain my ideas. The creative process was more explosive for me. And I didn’t have a filter, and I didn’t try to filter anything, as much as just try to get stuff down. So, I would just write everywhere. I would wake up in the morning and hear a conversation on the…  Read more

The Kids from Kids, Savages, the Internet, Screenwriting, Soderbergh, Mellow Pages and More: Sunday Links

For Narratively, Carolyn Rothstein revisits the kids from Kids, 20 years later, in “Legends Never Die.” Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are stars, Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter have passed away, and the others are living their lives in diverse and at times unexpected ways. As her interviewees tell it, Kids was not just about people but a city: The kids say the film was accurate, except for the most fantastical stuff. There’s no denying they weren’t sober during filming. Even the scene with Javier Nunez, at fourteen, by far the youngest of the skate crew, and three other little…  Read more

Hope, Soderbergh, Bowie, Hannah, Bolano and Glass (Google and Ira): Sunday Morning Links

The San Francisco International Film Festival is underway, the first under the San Francisco Film Society’s new head, Ted Hope. In an interview with Casey Burchby at the San Francisco Weekly, Hope tells the story of his move from producing in New York to running the organization in the Bay Area and how it reflects his own evolving ideas on independent media in the 21st century. I especially like this quote about how artists can rethink their process in a time of plenty. Emphasis added below: Burchby: I wanted to connect your vision for the SF Film Society to the…  Read more

Six Questions Apple Needs to Answer in 2013

Apple has enabled cottage industries of graphic designers, musicians and, increasingly, Apple bloggers. As someone who uses Apple products, and who owns a bit of Apple stock, I follow the company pretty closely. So, I’m reading all the tech and finance blogs, with their pre-earnings chatter about Tim Cook’s ouster (not happening), dividend hikes (probably happening), and spaceship campus cost overruns (definitely happening). But as someone who wants to see the company grow because its products are evolving, here are the six Apple questions I’d like guidance on. Forget the Apple TV, where’s the Apple TV SDK? The iPhone has…  Read more

Failure, Brian Eno, the Vanishing Gallery Show and More: Sunday Links

At Vulture, Jerry Saltz bemoans the “Death of the Gallery Show,” particularly the effect new ways of seeing and purchasing art are having on the discourse around art itself: Gallery shows: light of my life, fire of my eyes. I love and long for them. I see maybe 30 a week, every week of the year. Much of what I know about contemporary art I learned from hanging around artists and from going to galleries. Bad shows teach me as much as good ones. A great thing about galleries—especially for someone who spends most of his time alone at a…  Read more

Kickstarter Tax Implications, Veronica Mars, SFX and a Tragic Dimension: Sunday Morning Links

Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks at SXSW Interactive have been posted at Wired’s Beyond the Beyond blog. It’s a long talk on the aesthetic and moral dimensions of disruption, an emergent Southwest and the tackiness of 3D figurines. An excerpt: And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. Like: “If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?” Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical. Because when you say a thing like that at SouthBy: “Oh, we’re here to make the…  Read more

Wayne Coyne on “Paul is Dead”

Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne appeared as a guest DJ on the All Things Considered radio show and podcast recently, speaking about his band’s own songs and their influences in a great interview that began with a startling track: “Strawberry Fields,” by the Beatles. Okay, it’s a fantastic song, but what startled me was Coyne’s reasons for selecting it. Coyne describes listening to the track as a kid, discovering the so-called “Paul is Dead” conspiracy and having the song’s final words, “I buried Paul” “seared into” his brain: “What a strange, strange way to end any record by any weirdo…  Read more

Remembering Roger Ebert, 1942 – 2013

“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet…” — Alain De Botton I hadn’t recalled my dank childhood basement in quite some time, but the room, with its wicker furniture, orange-ish carpet and large, wood-panelled Sony TV, came flooding back last week upon reading of the sad passing of film critic Roger Ebert, just one day after he posted a “leave of presence,” a slowing-down that was still more active than the combined work of two men these days. It was in that basement that I’d faithfully watch…  Read more

What’s In My Instapaper: Game of Thrones, Bitcoin, Video Game Death, Chloe Sevigny and More

Here are my weekly Sunday morning links. A sophisticated discussion of videogames and violence is contained in Adi Robertson’s “Death is Dead: How Modern Videogame Designers Killed Danger” at the Verge. The article quotes David Cage, whose Beyond: Two Souls is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, proclaiming, “If the character doesn’t hold a gun, designers don’t even know what to do.” That leads to a discussion about the relationship of death to videogame narrative: But unlike Cage, most of the writers giving talks at GDC don’t come into a game with complete control. They’re brought on to…  Read more