[New Frontier Performances and Installations] With my artwork, the hardest decision seems to be how much detail I should add to a work. The more detail added, the more fleshed out the work is. Yet by keeping the work simple and only having necessary and particular details, there is more room left for the viewer to bring their past experiences and ideas to the interpretation of the work. This is a fine line I constantly ride with my work, sometimes purposely deviating one way or another to push the boundaries. In my installation Bordertown the combination between highly detailed works […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] The hardest decision was to steer Memories of Overdevelopment into a new direction. The first version of the script was pretty much a synopsis of the novel Memorias del Desarrollo by Edmundo Desnoes. But as shooting and editing started, new ideas emerged. Slowly the film took on a life of its own, with the inclusion of new scenes, characters, sociopolitical angles, animation sequences, etc. The result is a hybrid of the visions of two different generations of Cubans: one born before the Revolution, Edmundo Desnoes, and […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Without a doubt the most difficult decision I made was to trust my instincts. That might seem like an easy thing to do, but given I had never made a movie before (not even a short), it was truly a daily leap of faith. Along the path I encountered many people with years of movie-making experience telling me how I should do it, and if I had listened to them, I probably still wouldn’t have made a movie! In fact, I’d still be trying to raise a larger […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] I had many difficult decisions to make from the conceptual to the production stages of our documentary His & Hers. These decisions were primarily concerning our small budget of €100,000 and my choice to shoot on film. However I think the hardest decision of all was actually to make the film in the first place. In all honesty, the producer actually had to coax me into making it. Okay, I wasn’t exactly kicking and screaming but I definitely needed the push. You see, up until now […]
This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue. In a New York Times piece written last month on the commercial success in 2009 of films aimed at female audiences (Twilight: New Moon, Julie & Julia, The Proposal), critic Manohla Dargis also took note of the relative paucity of female directors in Hollywood. Sure, there’s Kathryn Bigelow, who won many critic’s Best Director awards with The Hurt Locker, and there are Nora Ephron, Ann Fletcher and a few others but, for the most part, wrote Dargis, “Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision I made in making Family Affair was to ask my father the question, “Why?” When my father was arrested, I was 10 years old. It wouldn’t be until much later in life that I’d come to comprehend the full magnitude of the crimes he committed against my sisters. For reasons I once could not understand, my sisters had maintained a relationship with my father almost immediately following his release from prison. In November of 2002, my sisters invited me to spend Thanksgiving with them in […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 6:45 pm — Broadway Centre Cineams, Salt Lake City] Casting the central role of Ruby was really tough. In my mind Ruby was a scary mix of too young and too sexy, even in her appearance. I wanted to create a tension and innocence of youth conflicting with too much skin. I wanted someone from Newfoundland, someone wild, messy, damaged and young. I wanted her to have physical flaws, like maybe not perfect teeth, something physical that would put a definite wall between herself and her dreams of stardom. Shawn loved Tatiana and wanted her […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] Never a truer word. We had a scene — it was my favorite in the film. It was one of those scenes which didn’t necessarily drive the film on a plot level but was essential to the feel and the magic. Like everything, it was shot in a huge rush. When it came to the editing, we tried everything to make it work, but eventually we had to admit: It was bad. There was no way the scene was going to cut it. There was no way […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] For Lourdes the hardest decision was whether to make the film at all. This decision was so hard because I found the subject very ambivalent and difficult to treat. I wanted to tell a story like a fairytale but I didn’t want to make a naive film. I wanted to question religion and faith but I also really wanted to know and learn more about both without, on the other hand, being too soft with the Catholic Church. I wanted to make a film in Lourdes that […]