Because our Winter, 2009 issue went up online during the Sundance Film Festival, I think some of what’s in it has been slightly overlooked by the blogosphere. One article I want to point you towards is Lance Weiler’s “Virtual Discovery.” It looks at some of the ways that creators are building audiences by embracing collaborative models of marketing and even production. Weiler also discusses the importance of data portability — the ability for filmmakers to take the aggregated info about their audiences from online platform to online platform. Why is this important? From the piece: The real strength of data […]
Fans of Michel Gondry should tune in to HBO tonight, February 15, for “Unnatural Love,” the episode of Flight of the Conchords he directed. Calling the show “pure, unadulterated pleasure,” the newsletter Very Short List writes, “The Conchords, of course, are a New Zealand folk band. But the love interest here is Australian, and that allows for endless, over-the-top Aussie jokes (expect plenty of references to the continent’s criminal past). As for Gondry, his distinctive, dreamlike touch turns both of the episode’s musical numbers into surreal showstoppers.”
Following its Gotham Award and the week of the Spirit Awards, for which its director, Nina Paley, was nominated for the Someone to Watch Award, Sita Sings the Blues scores a Sunday New York Times feature article by Margy Rochlin. In the piece, Rochlin discusses watching the film when it played the San Francisco International Animation Festival and talking with Paley afterwards, a talk that reveals that the film will play on PBS next month. After the final credits rolled, the gangly, curly-haired Ms. Paley bounded onstage and announced, “You’ve all just participated in an illegal act.’ ” Though Ms. […]
CLIVE OWEN AND NAOMI WATTS IN DIRECTOR TOM TYKWER’S THE INTERNATIONAL. COURTESY COLUMBIA PICTURES. German writer-director Tom Tykwer, arguably one of the most exciting auteurs in world cinema, has been immersed in movies since he was a child and always seemed destined to become a director. Born in the town of Wuppertal in 1965, by the age of 11 Tykwer had picked up a Super 8 camera and begun making films. At the age of 14, he got a job at Cinema, the local arthouse theater, where he would stay after hours, repeatedly watching Blade Runner. After completing his compulsory […]
On the main page, Nick Dawson interviews The International director Tom Tykwer, and here they discuss one of my favorite sub-genres: the paranoid thriller. Filmmaker: You’ve said that you’re a movie maniac, so what were you influences for this film? You talked about paranoia and the thrillers of the 70s come to mind, especially those of Alan J. Pakula. Tykwer: Pakula obviously is probably the quintessential filmmaker for what we would call the paranoia drama. Even though it’s not so obviously politically related, even a film like Klute has that vibe where there’s an uncertainty. There’s a feeling that Jane […]
The line up for this year’s New Directors/New Films was announced moments ago. The opening film will be Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka and Lee Daniels’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire is the closing film. The full list of titles are below. ND/NF will be held at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center March 25 – April 5. OPENING NIGHT Amreeka Cherien Dabis, USA/Canada/Kuwait, 2009; 96m Cherien Dabis’s humanist miracle of a first film chronicles the bittersweet adjustment to a multicultural way of life after Muna, a single […]
Hmmm… Comments?
In the last few months I’ve talked a few producers who have been reading Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done, the productivity manual. I read it a couple of years ago and by no means have adopted all of its recommendations. (A couple of things in it — the Two Minute Rule and thinking of the Next Action — are useful.) One problem is that it’s too paper-oriented for me. But in the years since its publication, a number of sites have run with its ideas and come up with systems to integrate them into the Palm Pilot, Blackberry, etc. I […]
Today Courtney Hunt‘s Oscar nominated debut feature, Frozen River, is released on DVD and Blu-Ray. We here at the magazine have been big fans of the film since seeing it at Sundance last year. So we’re holding a small contest for a FREE Blu-Ray disc of the film. The first person to e-mail us the correct answer to the question below will get the disc. (DISCLAIMER: Contest is only available for those living in the U.S.). The answer can be found in our cover story of the film in the Summer, 2008 issue. UPDATE: Well, that was quick. Congrats to […]
The very smart producer Noah Harlan, who has been responsible for many great tips here on the Filmmaker blog, has just launched his own blog, The 401st Blow. For his inaugural post he argues that The Feature Will Never Die. His lede: There is a depression spreading like a virus in the indie film community and I don’t like it. People are watching the rise of new media and see the four horsemen on the horizon. I want to say to filmmakers out there who want to work in long-form narrative: do not despair! You have a future… I’ll look […]