[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 6:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision we had to make actually happened prior to shooting. During 2007, my team and I had been commissioned to write a horror-comedy script. We had been working on the script for many months and actually had the budget to make it. At this moment, we were on the verge of going to our bosses and trying to figure out how we could take leave of absences from our jobs to go film this movie in the late summer. At the time I was working […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:30 am — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Our film was a slow burn. It took eight months for the true story to emerge. The last two-thirds of the film unfold over the course of one incredible week. Our toughest decisions came in the editing room, trying to distill the most exhilarating, unsettling and ultimately revelatory week of our lives into an hour and a half.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 8:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Jeesh, the amount of decisions that go into making a movie… the words “the amount” are so heavy because the list is heavy, breathing is a decision, but to quantify them seems like the scariest task with such a daunting overhead. Of course the best decisions are the ones that you don’t have to make but are forced into. During Daddy Longlegs, we were so preoccupied with constantly providing stimuli from the writing process all the way through editing: for ourselves, for the actors, the non-actors, the […]
Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika is a documentary that shows modern-day Russia from the inside out. Five Russian adults reveal their personal histories through interviews and home movies, talking us through their childhood in school together during the die-hard communist Brezhnev years of the 1970s, through Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, and, finally, the coups, oligarchs and wealth transfers that are shaping Russia today. Borya and Lyuba, a married couple, teach history at School #57, which their teenage son also attends, and the film begins in their modest apartment, the same one Borya grew up in. Olga, the prettiest girl […]
Over at MovieCityNews, David Poland posts Larry Gross’s thoughts on three Sundance films he’s seen. One of them — Mark Ruffalo’s — we haven’t. A key graph is below, but read the whole article at the link. The film makes a dizzying and largely successful turn toward social commentary and religious allegory, always done with a mixture of realism and dark humor worthy of some of the most interesting movies written by Paddy Chayefsky, like Network and Altered States. That has me doubly excited to see this.
Okay, I promised Sundance posts only for the duration of the festival… but that was before I got grounded in Phoenix. I hope to make it to Sundance tonight, but the weather is not being hospitable. In the meantime, I started reading on the plane the new issue of The Baffler, a beautifully produced journal of arts and ideas that is taking a valiant stand against the technocratic pressures that are dumbing down print journalism. In fact, that process is partially the subject of documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor’s “Serfing the Net,” an essay in which she argues that the ideologies […]
According to Variety, Paramount has acquired worldwide rights to Davis Guggenheim and Participant Media‘s doc Waiting For Superman. The film, which premieres at Sundance on Friday, examines the public education crisis in the U.S. This is Guggenheim’s second go around with Paramount, his Oscar winning doc An Inconvenient Truth was released through Paramount Vantage.
[New Frontier Performances and Installations] When it comes to shooting one is faced with endless decisions. I make them like when playing a computer game or making music — really quick and without too much thinking. I make up my mind really fast just so I won’t lose my cool with my crew. Afterward I think, “What the hell was that decision?” But then in retrospect it usually works out well. Instinct is the only thing an artist can truly trust when it comes to those decisions. If the vision is clear then instinct will follow.
When I was first approached to blog for Filmmaker, I thought: “I’m too new at this to say anything anyone would want to read.” It turns out that my naiveté and fresh perspective are the very things that Scott was looking for. So here goes… My name is Ron Simons (commonly misspelled Simon or Simmons), and I’m producer of the film Night Catches Us, which premieres in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2010. I am new to the field of indie films as a producer as this is my first film. What a trip so far! At every stage of […]
I’m trying to keep the blog Sundance/Park City/Slamdance-focused for the next ten days, but I want to take note of the new New York film tax incentive regulations proposed in Governor Patterson’s new budget. From Georg Szalai’s article in the Hollywood Reporter: New York film and TV industry executives on Tuesday lauded Gov. David Paterson’s budget proposal that includes $420 million per year in state money for the continuation of a 30% tax credit for productions in the Empire State through 2014. The governor’s 2010-11 budget proposal calls for spending cuts in various areas but for production incentives worth $420 […]