Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Steve James returns to his native Chicago to look at a group of ex-cons who have formed an organization dedicated to wiping out the violence that has plagued their streets in THE INTERRUPTERS. By Jason Guerrasio | Photograph by Henny Garfunkel
A typical route for an archetypal, coastal-based independent filmmaker might look something like this. First, one goes to film school, hopefully at either one of the well-known private universities in New York or Los Angeles (Columbia, NYU, USC) with large alumni networks, or at one of the big state schools with laudable programs (Texas at Austin, UCLA). Ideally one makes a killer short that catches the attention and gains the respect of the gatekeepers. These individuals, whether they are agents, sales reps, festival programmers or writers for Filmmaker, may help a new filmmaker get the recognition and reputation within the […]
Laura Israel cut her teeth editing experimental works, commercials and music videos while still a film student at NYU. She shifted her focus from directing to editing, and from cinema to video. By the time she graduated she had formed her own New York City company, Assemblage. Her client list reads like a hipper-than-hip door list: John Lurie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Sonic Youth, New Order, Ed Lachman and especially over the last two decades, her good friend Robert Frank with whom she has been archiving and preserving his film and video work over the past two years. […]
When South Lebanon-born writer-director Rola Nashef started thinking about her film, Detroit Unleaded, there wasn’t much of a film scene in her home state of Michigan, independent or studio. Now, after several years of tax incentives and high-profile productions, she laughs, “I go to restaurants and hear people talking about their scripts.” But Nashef was inspired by Detroit long before the state’s recent production boom. The city didn’t just provide her debut feature’s location, but also its subject matter — specifically, the tales that come out of its Arab-American community. “Living within an Arab immigrant family, dating within the Arab-American […]
“Like a lot of partner dynamics, a healthy amount of arguing begins most of our working situations,” write Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia from Karlovy Vary, where their evocative debut feature, Ok, Enough, Goodbye, is receiving its European premiere. “There is yelling and calling each other names. Then we settle down and begin actually working. Perhaps what makes our process work is the fact that we are completely unafraid to be brutally honest with each other about our opinions regarding each other’s ideas.” Attieh, born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Garcia, from South Texas, met in Texas in an undergrad drawing […]
Before completing Dirty White Boy, his screenplay about the last days of rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard and his relationship with VH1 p.a.-turned-manager Jarred Weisfeld, Brent Hoff had 24 partially written scripts on his hard drive. “One of them was over 200 pages long,” he says. “I came up with lots of ideas, but I never completed them.” But when Hoff heard that producer Todd Hagopian had bought Weisfeld’s life rights along with those of ODB’s mother, he knew that he was the guy to write — and finish — that story. “I worked at VH1,” says Hoff, “and I met […]
In the middle of writing the follow up to his 2009 feature, St. Nick, David Lowery was stuck. “I reached a point in the script where it became very difficult,” Lowery remembers. “I was trying to make it an action movie, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to make the story. So I did what I always do when I’m fed up, which is go for a run.” While jogging, Lowery plucked the seed of a scene from his script — a father talking to his daughter one night — and spun it out into something a little different: […]
Alison Klayman remembers the moment people knew she was really making a movie about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A Brown University graduate, Klayman had moved to Beijing with the intent of learning Mandarin and becoming a documentary filmmaker and journalist. “I bought my first camera there,” she remembers, “and was doing video for hire, trying to get into television.” In 2008 a friend asked her to make a short video to accompany a gallery show of Ai’s New York photography — shots of the artist and the downtown scene taken during his years living there in the 1980s. “My camera […]
“I became a film composer by accident,” admits Gingger Shankar, who was called in one day by a music supervisor to work on some cues for The Passion of the Christ. A vocalist and musician raised in Los Angeles and India, Shankar has performed on stage with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Frank Zappa to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Smashing Pumpkins. But contributing music that would accompany the cinematic image? “I was swimming in the deep end,” she says. Her work on John Debney’s The Passion of the Christ score impressed the folks at the Sundance Composers Lab, and they […]
Sophia Takal is engaged to filmmaker Lawrence Michael Levine and their roommate is actress Kate Lyn Sheil. After the three worked on Levine’s debut feature, Gabi on the Roof in July (Takal played the eponymous lead, and Sheil co-starred), Takal decided to make her own movie, which would explore the theme of jealousy. She cast rising star Sheil as an insecure bookstore clerk, Genevieve; Levine as Sebastian, her intellectually patronizing boyfriend; and herself as Robin, the offbeat, emotionally hungry local girl the couple meet when they rent a country cabin where Sebastian will document for his blog the planting of […]