A year ago, I met, fell for and married another filmmaker in three months. We spent the year getting lost in our own world of odd hours, late nights, and bursts of travel–it turns out we are part of a loose tribe of shooters and lovers of the documentary film world. Nowhere has this tribe been more pronounced than at the IFP Labs, where six of the films produced this year involve similar pairs. Some people may cringe at the idea of spending 24/7 with their partner for weeks on end. But to members of our tribe, whose passions often […]
“You’re young, you haven’t done anything, and no one wants to work with you,” our first agent said to us after we graduated film school. He was absolutely right. We were trying to write what we thought were mainstream Hollywood comedies but to our shock, it was hard to get the second screenplay we’d ever written to the biggest comedy stars on the planet. That’s when we decided to write something smaller for two local New York comedians who we thought were hilarious and, more importantly, we thought we could get. Six months later, we had a screenplay about two […]
It was the spring of 2011 and I’d just wrapped an eight-year run as the Film Program Director at the Austin Film Festival. I was looking to produce more when a long time friend, writer/director Kat Candler, came to me with a short script called Hellion. Flash forward to January of 2012 and we’re bringing our six-minute short film Hellion to the Sundance Film Festival. It was truly one of the greatest experiences we’ve had surrounded by an audience that embraced the film. It was a strange experience for me being on what I called “the other side of the badge,” as a […]
Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
I had a lunch meeting with two of my partners on an international co-production. We are planning a South Africa / Canada treaty co-production on a $15m film and planned to meet up at Strategic Partners. Today, we worked on our laptops, smartphones and iPads as we ate sushi on the beautiful Halifax waterfront. After an hour, we hit an obstacle in our work and were uncertain how to proceed. Then later, my Canadian partner started talking to a UK producer who is a good friend I made at TAP, and she had different thoughts. A German producer weighed in […]
Maybe I’m just a delusional film buff, but after a quarter-century of attending the Toronto International Film Festival – now affectionately called TIFF, a less compensatory moniker for Canadians with a complex than the laughably arrogant Toronto Festival of Festivals label of yore – I believe that the event and its component parts echo the unique demographic of this large North American city. The festival’s multiple ethnic and racial sections coexist snugly. More than any other big international film festival, TIFF – proudly uncommercial – is built upon a carefully balanced assortment of heterogeneous cinemas: national and generic, mainstream and esoteric, the spanking new and […]
Another week, another iPhone announcement. I remember when I used to hang on every word as a new iPhone was released. What were the features? When would it be available? When could I order it? I’ve even lined up – twice – just to get it on the first day. In retrospect, does it really make sense to stand in line for several hours waiting for a… phone? But now it’s the sixth “new” iPhone (Original, 3G, 3Gs, 4, 4s, 5) and I find I’m not so enraptured. I don’t need to know immediately whether the camera is any better (see footnote […]
The IFP’s Independent Film Week’s Filmmaker Conference kicked off today, beginning with a case study of Beasts of the Southern Wild and ending with a conversation, moderated by IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente, between producer and Killer Films head Christine Vachon and producer, screenwriter and Focus Features CEO James Schamus. Below are 12 tips from the latter event — advice aimed at producers and, in some cases, anybody else, from two veterans with deep, decades-long roots in the independent community. 1. Consider producing. Christine Vachon and James Schamus are producers, but they both remembered a time when they were not. […]
Start out with a seed of Back to the Future and end up with the atmospheric uneasiness of Memento or Pi. Perhaps it’s not a trajectory that one would normally project, but Easton’s Article fits the bill. Sub the Internet in for the Delorean and information rather than Marty McFly as the passenger, and you begin to pick up the path left by writer/director/producer Tim Connery. He states, “Think if you received an email from a ‘future you’. You could alter a lot of things by just reading one sentence. And in 1997 websites weren’t slick and efficient; the web was still weird and buggy […]
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]