POLICE MUGSHOTS OF POLITICIAN LARRY CRAIG AS FEATURED IN DIRECTOR KIRBY DICK’S OUTRAGE. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Whether his subjects have been small and personal or large and institutional, documentarian Kirby Dick has always dedicated himself to telling important and often provocative stories. Dick was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1952, graduated from the Film and Video Program at the California Institute of the Arts and subsequently did postgraduate studies at the American Film Institute. He made his directorial debut in 1986 with Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, but afterwards segued into television work, taking eleven years before […]
Over at Filmmaker Videos check out Damon Smith‘s interview with Tilda Swinton about her new film, Julia, which opens today, as well as other revealing thoughts about her career.
Perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning turn in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton and the long, fruitful collaboration she enjoyed with the late Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton has acted recently for David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, and in Andrew Adamson’s Chronicles of Narnia franchise. Her flinty, fearless performance as an alcoholic outlaw in Erick Zonca’s cross-border thriller Julia, however, truly spotlights the impressive range and cool professionalism of this adventurous, one-of-a-kind screen actress. (She also appears in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, which opened last Friday.) We caught up with Swinton in New York to […]
Thanks to Steve Gallagher for alerting me to this YouTube clip in which Michael Masnick gives us a presentation on Trent Reznor’s forward-thinking business models with Nine Inch Nails following the band’s departure from a major label. People talk a lot about Radiohead, but Reznor’s strategies are deeper and more far-reaching and include everything from free distribution, use of the torrent sites as delivery mechanisms, cultivation of fan communities, Creative Commons licenses, remixing and alternate reality games (ARG’s). There are plenty of ideas here we can apply to our own film marketing campaigns.
The Independent Filmmaker Project, which publishes this magazine, welcomed Oscilloscope founder Adam Yauch (also a member of the Beastie Boys) to its board of directors last night with a cocktail reception hosted by Deluxe Laboratories here in New York. The new Deluxe facility is stunning and the reception, which also marked the DVD release of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, was followed by a screening of the film. Attendees included quite a few directors, including Oren Moverman, Todd Rohal, Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden, Ira Sachs, Jenny Livingston, as well as Yauch, the IFP’s Michelle Byrd, and Wendy and Lucy […]
I liked the first trailer for Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ a lot, but some people were mixed on it, thinking it looked too much like conventional horror. I don’t agree — or, perhaps, I like the idea of Von Trier doing an out-and-out horror film — but here’s the second trailer, which has a bit more of a psychological vibe. The film opens in Competition this month at Cannes.
Tied to this weekend’s opening of The Limits of Control, the FilmInFocus site (which, full disclosure, I co-edit) has posted quite a bit of content relating to writer/director Jim Jarmusch and the movie. Below is an excerpt from Lea Rinaldo’s documentary on the making of The Limits of Control. FilmInFocus will be posting sections of this piece, and, having seen the whole thing I can recommend it both as intriguing glimpse into Jarmusch and his production method as well as film in its own right. And, also, I interviewed Jarmusch about the movie’s striking score, which is compiled of tracks […]
Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, which opens this year’s Cannes Film Festival Directors Fortnight, has just premiered online. The film stars Vincent Gallo, newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, Y Tu Mama, Tambien’s Maribel Verdu, Carmen Maura and Klaus Maria Brandauer, and it is posted below.
In our current issue there’s a piece on still cameras used to make movies, and now we’ve got motion picture cameras used to shoot stills. Of course, motion picture cameras have been able to shoot stills for a while, but you wouldn’t expect to see one on a magazine cover. This month, photographer Greg Williams has photographed Megan Fox for the cover of Esquire using the RED ONE camera. From the site: For the first time in Esquire‘s history (and, we imagine, magazine history in general), a cover image was shot as a video. Using the RedONE, a video camera […]
JOHANNES KRISCH AND URSULA STRAUSS IN DIRECTOR GÖTZ SPIELMANN’S REVANCHE. COURTESY JANUS FILMS. Contemporary Austrian cinema has been dominated by the works of its two best known names, Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, but now the name of the prodigiously talented Götz Spielmann can be added to that list. Spielmann was born in 1961 in the town of Wels, but grew up in the country’s capital, Vienna. As a child he was drawn to film and he began writing and directing in his teens; when he was just 17, he had his first film shown on television. Between 1980 and […]