Announced earlier today on indieWIRE, the 67th Venice International Film Festival will open with Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, a thriller set in the world of ballet starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey. The film will screen in competition, debuting Sept. 1 in the Sala Grande, following the opening ceremony. Aronofsky won the Golden Lion at the fest in 2008 for The Wrestler. The Venice Film Festival runs Sept. 1 -11. Fox Searchlight will release Black Swan later this year.
Here’s the second of the New Breed videos on the creative process filmed this year by Sabi Pictures at the Los Angeles Film Festival and presented by Filmmaker and the Workbook Project. Appearing in this episode are filmmaker Julius Onah (one of our “25 New Faces”), filmmaker Jeff Malmberg, actress Trieste Kelly Dunn (another “25 New Face”), director Brett Haley and producer Ted Hope. NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 2 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.
An amazing moment from Spiritualized’s performance at the Iceland Inspires concert. Spiritualized performs Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space at Radio City Music Hall in New York on July 30.
Great post by Ted Hope today, a reprint of the Good Machine “No-Budget Commandments” back from the early days of his and James Schamus’s production company. Go to Ted’s blog to read the full list, but in re-reading them I remembered the deep thinking we all did back then as to what a “no-budget movie” could and should be. There was a feeling that no-budget movies had to be deliberate in their representational strategies, uniting their budgets and artistic visions to produce works that wouldn’t strive for “production value” but instead would make their relative poverty an enabler of a […]
Via Pitchfork comes this video for Broken Bells’ “The Ghost Inside,” directed by Jacob Gentry and starring Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks. As part of their “Director’s Cut” series, they interview today the director of this haunting sci-fi critique of our glamour-obsessed culture. From the interview: Pitchfork: This looks like a pretty big production for a relatively small band like Broken Bells. Jacob Gentry: A lot of people say it looks big and expensive, but it wasn’t by any stretch. The special effects in the video were limited to things that could’ve been done in the late 70s or early 80s. […]
Since her widely acclaimed first feature Devil’s Playground debuted at Sundance in 2002, London native Lucy Walker (one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film that year) has distinguished herself as a resourceful documentarian with a discerning eye for character detail. A study of Amish adolescents sampling the forbidden fruits of the modern world during “rumspringa,” an elective time spent away from the strictures of their traditional religious community, Playground was an insightful, humanizing portrait of a little-seen, faintly understood social milieu. For her follow-up in 2006, Blindsight, Walker again took on an uncommon challenge, trailing a group of […]
Bill Murray doesn’t do many interviews, so even if it wasn’t kind of awesome, Dan Fierman’s interview with the actor in GQ would be a must read. Fierman covers a lot of ground, particularly obsessing over Murray’s sole directing effort, the massively underrated Quick Change, so I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by quoting here the last exchange between the two: Last question. I have to know, because I love this story and want it to be true. There have been stories about you sneaking up behind people in New York City, covering their eyes with your hands, and saying: […]
Select stories from our Summer issue are now available, including this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. (Read the press release here.) You can now read online our interviews with Amir Bar-Lev on his new doc, The Tillman Story; Gaspar Noe talks about his psychedelic look at the afterlife in Enter the Void; we look at the latest innovations in DSLR cameras; and some of our friends give their favorite apps, program and Web services. Plus, Lance Weiler’s Culture Hacker column focuses on transmedia while Anthony Kaufman’s Industry Beat looks at the realities of the Do It With Others […]
It’s tempting to get distracted. It happens to filmmakers all the time. Concern over gear, building audiences, developing social media strategies, new tools, new services. The promise of transmedia (the ability for a story to live beyond a single screen, device or medium) offers such rich storytelling potential. But for some it will become yet another distraction. Case in point: After a recent speaking engagement I was approached by a group of filmmakers. Some were trying to figure out the value of transmedia while others said with a sense of pride that they’d designed the perfect transmedia experience, as if […]
Beginning with the dying moments of a young drug dealer in Tokyo, Gaspar Noé travels deep into our subconscious to explore what happens after we Enter the Void.