You Wont Miss Me is Ry Russo-Young’s second feature, and her first in Sundance. Orphans, which premiered at SXSW last year, was a Bergman-esque tale of two sisters, now separated, who come together in their parents’ sprawling, snow-bound house to hack emotional pieces out of one another. You Wont Miss Me is very different in style and tone. It uses experimental film techniques – disjointed narrative, a salad of film and video formats – to paint a portrait of one desperate, uncensored, sexy wreck of a young woman named Shelly Brown. Russo-Young invented the character with the film’s star, Stella […]
Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead, starring Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman, will open Slamdance this year. Taglined “Never Trust a Corpse,” it’s a vintage-inspired horror-comedy set in the 18th or 19th-century, structured as a series of drunken recollections on the life of a career grave robber (Monaghan.) The film is produced by and co-stars horror-master Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter, Habit) of the New York production outfit Glass Eye Pix. The team behind ISTD – McQuaid, Fessenden and Scareflix producer Peter Phok — sat down with Filmmaker on the eve of their trip to Park City to reminisce […]
“I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” — Mark Rothko Doesn’t it make sense that every professional artist would have ideas in between mediums, would collaborate across categorical boundaries and make new and different work as their vision expands over their lifetime? It would seem to make perfect sense, but it doesn’t happen as often as it could. This year at Sundance, though, there are several artists who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves “filmmakers” on their tax returns, and who are […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] For me, “story” is the most overused word in the film world these days. I hear actors saying, “I just wanna tell good stories.” I hear producers saying, “I have an intense passion for storytelling.” Jerry Bruckheimer is in some commercial calling himself a storyteller. Maybe he is. I don’t understand when indie movies became synonymous with storytelling. When did this extreme emphasis on narrative take place? As if a movie doesn’t lend itself equally well to being a poem or a painting. But we don’t hear […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Film has always been affected by diverse forces; many times has its near death been foreseen before the arrival of a new media, but today, more than 100 years from the invention of the cinematographer, cinema is still very similar to how it all began: celluloid, light and emotions on the screen with moving images in a dark room. The story of Heart of Time comes from inside the life of a rural community, a simple love story that is developed within the fight and the resistance of […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] I think I might be one of the few filmmakers out there who still cuts on a flatbed. Or rather, if I shoot on film, I cut on film; if I shoot on video, I cut on a computer. I still cut on film for a few reasons (it’s easier on my eyes, the tables are all being given away so I don’t have to compete for an editing space, I like handling the plastic), but most important is work speed. And by speed, I don’t […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] A lot gets tossed around these days about how new technology is changing the nature of storytelling. The ability of the audience to use technology to influence how a story unfolds is considered novel, complete with all the symptoms that characterize a fresh idea with legs. But one look at Nollywood, Nigeria’s grassroots film industry, now the third biggest in the world and the main subject of our film Nollywood Babylon, paints a different picture. Nollywood’s approach emphasizes the immediate: shoot a film in a week, sell it […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] My filmmaking process wasn’t greatly influenced by changing distribution methods. I don’t want to bend toward trends that dictate that a filmmaker’s work be shorter, faster or sexier to watch on an iPod. I’m more than happy to create Web-friendly content for paying clients, but the films that I sink years into developing are not intended to be glanced at during a subway ride by a multitasking teenager. If those are the only eyeballs I can get then I’ll take them but I want audiences to loose/see themselves […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:45 pm — Broadway Centre Cinemas V, Salt Lake City] The conception and the structure of my story were not affected while the execution was. The script was considered a potential flop by all the producers who had read it, so I had to film it on my own, almost without money. Time was the first thing I had to give up. Cinema needs a certain time to be made, but time is money. I’m sure that if I’d had a little more, the execution would have been better.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] It would be great to make a film that would work great for an audience no matter how they saw it…be it on their iPod or laptop or on the big screen or whatever. Ultimately though, I’m pretty old-school. There’s nothing like that communal experience of sitting in a darkened theater with a group of strangers and going on a journey together…one that takes over your senses with its sheer scope and thereby pulls you — hook, line and sinker — into another world. That is an experience […]