Open | Filmmaker Magazine

A SUNDANCE INDUCTION: PRODUCER RON SIMONS BLOGS FROM THE FESTIVAL

Producer Ron Simons is blogging from Sundance with his first feature, Tanya Hamilton’s Competition title, Night Catches Us (pictured). Here’s his second post. Well I am here! The journey was not without its complications, but I’m here. While the flight to SLC was not delayed (actually arrived 15 minutes early), there were a number of disgruntled passengers sharing the flight with me. While I was uncomfortably sleeping (having slept only an hour and a half last night due to packing), another poor soul was suffering across the aisle from me. Apparently the gray haired gentleman boarded the non-stop from JFK […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 22, 2010

“ANIMAL KINGDOM” | writer-director, David Michod

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010

“PLEASE GIVE”‘s NICOLE HOLOFCENER | By Jason Guerrasio

This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue. In a New York Times piece written last month on the commercial success in 2009 of films aimed at female audiences (Twilight: New Moon, Julie & Julia, The Proposal), critic Manohla Dargis also took note of the relative paucity of female directors in Hollywood. Sure, there’s Kathryn Bigelow, who won many critic’s Best Director awards with The Hurt Locker, and there are Nora Ephron, Ann Fletcher and a few others but, for the most part, wrote Dargis, “Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010

“DADDY LONGLEGS” | co-writers-directors, Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie

[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 […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010

“MY PERESTROIKA’”S ROBIN HESSMAN | By Alicia Van Couvering

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 […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2010

ASTRA TAYLOR ON INTERNET SERFDOM

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 […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2010

Jon Amiel, Creation

The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel’s Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany’s real life spouse Jennifer Connelly), decides to finally tackle writing a book on his nascent theory of Evolution. Haunted by visions of his recently deceased daughter and the notion that he may permanently alter man’s conception of the […]

by Brandon Harris on Jan 20, 2010

D.P. ED LACHMAN ON THE MAKING OF HOWL

Here’s the great director of photography Ed Lachman on the roots of his career and the making of Sundance’s Opening Night film, Howl.

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010

THE NEW YORK TIMES COVERS DIY DISTRIBUTION

I just caught up with this Manohla Dargis piece from the New York Times published on the 14th. What she writes about — the DIY and hybrid distribution distribution strategies espoused by Peter Broderick and Jon Reiss as well as the current discussion about transmedia — will be familiar to readers of Filmmaker, but it’s still interesting to see them covered now in the Times. From the piece, titled “Declaration of Indies: Just Sell it Yourself!”: The new D.I.Y. world is open-source in vibe and often execution. Participants refer to one another in conversation and on their Web sites and […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2010

Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbash, Sweet Grass

An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who travel mostly on foot with three thousand sheep over a two hundred mile Montana expanse that cuts across the seemingly unending Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. Without the use of voiceover narration or title cards, the film allows you to soak in […]

by Brandon Harris on Jan 6, 2010

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