Filmmaker Jamie Stuart, who is working on an article upcoming for Filmmaker, met Michel Gondry recently at New York’s Regency Hotel. The picture at left is the result of that meeting, which Stuart explains below: “I thought this was one of those ideas so obvious and so attuned to the subject that I became paranoid somebody was going to beat me to it. Photo Booth is basically gimmick software that comes with all new Macs — and it seems everybody plays around with it for maybe 5 minutes, then they forget about it. When I met Michel recently to discuss […]
Over at The Daily Reel I’ve been following the online mystery of Lonelygirl15. Today, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has near the final word on the subject. Homeschooler Bree is actually a “twentyish” actress named Jessica Rose and “the masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker.” The real mystery now is whether Bree’s fanatical cyber audience will love her as much as she morphs into a purely fictional character in whatever future projects her creators have planned for her.
If you’re in NYC tomorrow night, here’s news of a panel event sponsored by the IFP which is free to readers of the Filmmaker blog. And also take note of next week’s Independent Film Week promotion, in which tickets to a bunch of NYC independent theaters are discounted to only $6. IFP and The New York Times present a Special TimesTalks Panel with Independent Filmmakers FREE for Friends of Filmmaker Magazine! “COMING OF AGE ON SCREEN” Don’t miss this conversation with independent filmmakers whose own rites of passage inspired their films and captured an era. Moderated by David Carr, New […]
The Paris Review has scored the first published interview with Laura Albert, the “woman who was JT LeRoy.” There’s only a small excerpt on the website from Nathaniel Rich’s interview with Albert, which I’ve quoted in its entirety below. To read the rest, we’ll have to pick up the magazine. The quote below details that “Eureka!” moment in which a young Albert developed a strategy that she would finetune in later years. From the interview: INTERVIEWER: Did you have many friends at school—kids your own age? LAURA ALBERT: I was friends with all the nerd guys. And the popular kids […]
I’ve vowed not to link to James Ponsoldt’s blog too much since I produced his feature Off the Black, but he’s a prolific writer who is frequently posting pieces that are interesting and useful enough to other filmmakers. So, here I’m busting my conflict-of-interest self-censorship to note his comments on shrinking Tim Orr’s widescreen compositions to 1:1.35 for our video transfer: On Tim’s off-days, he and I met at Technicolor to begin the color-timing process (for video/DVD) with the brilliant MIKE UNDERWOOD. Mike’s a colorist, and worked with Tim on both “All the Real Girls” and “Undertow.” The two of […]
Via Brian Newman’s blog this movie trailer timed to the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail. Historical point of reference: Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 video, Television Delivers People.
Here’s Bob Dylan’s new music video, “When the Deal Goes Down,” directed by Capote helmer Bennett Miller and starring Scarlett Johannson.
The Toronto Film Festival doesn’t start until later this week, but already its new doc blog is off to a great start. It’s both an online destination to update yourself on festival news as well as a place for Festival filmmakers to write about everything from the making of their films to other films at the festival they’ve been compelled by. There are a bunch of great pieces already up. Here, for example, is Sophie Fiennes on her Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a three-part documentary in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes films by such favorite directors as Hitchcock, Lynch and Tarkovsky: […]
Sujewa Ekanayake emailed with a couple of good links. The first is Alison Wilmore’s piece on IFC.com detailing three filmmakers — Ekanayake plus Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and Lance Weiler (Head Trauma — who have gone the self-distribution route. “September may be the month self-distribution comes into its own,” she writes. And then there’s Ekanayake’s interview with Michael Tully on the eve of his Cocaine Angels New York premiere. Check them out and support these filmmakers as their films get released this month.
The album of the year — Scott Walker’s The Drift — now has an amazing, sepulchral music video to go along with it. It’s late, I’m tired, so I’m just going to quote from Pitchfork: Animator/Tomato-associate Graham Wood has assembled an appropriately eerie, nightmarish mindfuck of a video for Scott Walker’s “Jesse”, from this year’s Best New Music’d The Drift. The piece, which recalls both Stanley Donwood’s work with Radiohead circa OK Computer and the storied 4AD aesthetic, features familiar symbols and pictograms (smiley face, generic man and woman, cross) a-Drift in a kaleidoscope of dissolving lines, patterns, and textures. […]