Open | Filmmaker Magazine

A NEW HUMANITY

If you only bookmark this blog and don’t regularly check out the main page, click over to Jason Guerrasio’s web-only interview with Alfonso Cuaron, whose Children of Men opened yesterday. Here’s Cuaron in an excerpt: I hope young people will see this film. I mean my generation, we blew it. I think we grew up in a world that was pre-idyllic, and we saw the world collapse in front of us and we tried to believe that it was not our fault, that it was not our responsibility. We felt powerless about the situations as if they were very overwhelming […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 23, 2006

SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES PREMIERES, SPECTRUM, MIDNIGHT AND NEW FRONTIERS LINEUPS

In the second day of lineup announcements for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, titles range from the the already announced opening night film, Brett Morgen‘s Chicago 10, to the closing night film Nelson George‘s Life Support. Other notables include, Craig Brewer‘s Black Snake Moan, Sarah Polley‘s Away from Her (which was already praised at Toronto), Mike White‘s Year of the Dog, and Gregg Araki‘s stoner comedy Smiley Face. Premieres AN AMERICAN CRIME/ USA, Director: Tommy O’Haver; Screenwriters: Tommy O’Haver, Irene TurnerA fictionalized account of the true story of a young girl’s torturous ordeal at the hands of a troubled mother […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 30, 2006

FAMILIAR FACES IN ’07 SUNDANCE SLATE

Chris Smith. George Ratliff. Jeffrey Blitz. David Gordon Green. Jessica Yu. Those are some of the names you will recognize while looking over the 64 films below that were announced today for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival International Film and World Cinema Competitions. The festival will be held Jan. 18-28. Documentary Competition BANISHED (Director: Marco Williams)—This story of three U.S. towns which, in the early 20th century, forced their entire African American populations to leave, explores what—if anything—can be done to repair past racial injustice. World Premiere. CHASING GHOSTS (Director: Lincoln Ruchti)—Twin Galaxies Arcade, Iowa, 1982: the birthplace of mankind’s […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 29, 2006

ALTMAN AT EMERGING PICTURES

Ira Deutchman emailed to tell me about the new blog for his company Emerging Pictures and a post he has up remembering Robert Altman. It’s great and long, a collection of Ira’s memories having worked with Altman on the distribution of a number of his films. When reading I had a hard time picking a section to excerpt. I was strongly tempted to lift the paragraph about Altman and Deutchman smoking a joint that had been found mashed in Altman’s shoe outside the Beekman on the opening day of The Player, but I’ll let you click to that and quote […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2006

SHAREWARE

Back in 1995 producer Ted Hope wrote a seminal piece for Filmmaker entitled “Indie Film is Dead,” in which he listed quite a few reasons why independent filmmaking was getting tougher and tougher. Go back and look at the piece and you’ll see that many of Hope’s industry criticisms hold true today. Here’s one: “The film industry, like all others, mystifies by design. All industries create their own vernacular, keeping the have-nots clouded in confusion. Variety takes this talent to an art form. The neophyte needs a class in how to read the trades, let alone understand them. Where is […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2006

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

There was an excellent piece on Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German in yesterday’s New York Times (Warner Bros. opens the film next month). Channeling the 1940s era of filmmakers like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), Soderbergh has created a film that according to Dave Kehr has the look and feel of old Hollywood. An excerpt: During the production Mr. Soderbergh was committed to remaining as true as possible to the technique of the era. By reproducing the conditions of an actual studio shoot from the late 1940s, he hoped to enter the mind of a filmmaker like Mr. Curtiz, to explore the […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 13, 2006

FUR FLIES

If you link to this blog and bypass the main page, I just want to point you to Peter Bowen’s excellent interview with director Steve Shainberg, whose Fur opens today. An excerpt: Filmmaker: You didn’t want to make the film look like Arbus’s work, but you also cast Nicole Kidman, who doesn’t look like Arbus. Why Kidman? Shainberg: Whenever I see a biopic, no matter how much the person looks like the person they are playing, it just looks like a bad high school play to me. There is no way that Will Smith is going to look like Muhammad […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2006

THE WAY WE WERE

In a post entitled “It Was All So Simple Then,” Mark K-Punk explores “the reality of nostaliga” in a typically wide-ranging essay that skips from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Freud, Thomas Hardy, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Way We Were, Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, Roxy Music, Marvin Hamlisch, Blade Runner, Samuel Beckett, the Wu Tang Clan and Charlie Kaufman. From the opening: The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006

DOES BORAT HAVE LEGS?

Now that Borat has proved that it is worthy of all the hype, many question why it only opened on 800-plus screens. Was Fox cleverly building the word of mouth? Were they scared it could have possibly been a Snakes on a Plane? Variety explores the studio’s thinking. Here’s a little taste: Some close to the comic thesp point to the pic’s amazing $31,607 per-playdate average as a sign the film had enough appeal for a wider release. But some distrib execs point to the still-low awareness of “Borat” — in the latest tracking, which reflects polling from over the […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 7, 2006

WINTER SOLSTICE

Via GreenCine comes this interview with David Gordon Green appearing in The Believer. Here, Green talks about his adolescent video renting habits: “The first movie I rented—and I was a little overwhelmed, so I ended up regretting my choice—but it was an Al Pacino movie called Author! Author! I was debating between that, Ladyhawke, and I Spit on Your Grave, but that last one, I was afraid my sisters would tell my mom I’d rented that. And it was not going to be the kind of appropriate thing to have around the house. But I was glad to see the […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 6, 2006

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