[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Well my first impulse is to list the obvious: casting woes, scheduling conflicts, clashes over time and locations, cherished scenes that ended up getting cut in editing, and the like. But the overall feeling I’m left with on the other side of the freefall that was directing my first film is that the hard decisions weren’t all that hard. One hears so much about the rigors/horrors of filmmaking, and as a fairly suggestible person when facing the unknown, I was kind of prepared for the worst. But the […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The documentary project A Small Act follows five main characters through two interlocking storylines, but we only had one camera. We were constantly forced to decide which story, and which character within the story, to follow. There was one day in particular that we absolutely needed to be in three places at once, which was impossible of course. We were filming three Kenyan students as they competed for a life-changing scholarship. The students had taken a national exam and the exam score determined their scholarship eligibility. If they […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The hardest decision I had to make was to completely scrap the first cut of the film, start from scratch and completely redo a year and a half of work. After I turned in the film I was still not satisfied, but my investors didn’t want to give me more time or money. There were two choices: wash my hands of it or take drastic measures and defy the will of my investors to go over budget and over schedule. I had no idea if I would succeed […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 6:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision we had to make actually happened prior to shooting. During 2007, my team and I had been commissioned to write a horror-comedy script. We had been working on the script for many months and actually had the budget to make it. At this moment, we were on the verge of going to our bosses and trying to figure out how we could take leave of absences from our jobs to go film this movie in the late summer. At the time I was working […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 11:30 am — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Our film was a slow burn. It took eight months for the true story to emerge. The last two-thirds of the film unfold over the course of one incredible week. Our toughest decisions came in the editing room, trying to distill the most exhilarating, unsettling and ultimately revelatory week of our lives into an hour and a half.
[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 […]
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 […]
Over at MovieCityNews, David Poland posts Larry Gross’s thoughts on three Sundance films he’s seen. One of them — Mark Ruffalo’s — we haven’t. A key graph is below, but read the whole article at the link. The film makes a dizzying and largely successful turn toward social commentary and religious allegory, always done with a mixture of realism and dark humor worthy of some of the most interesting movies written by Paddy Chayefsky, like Network and Altered States. That has me doubly excited to see this.
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 […]
According to Variety, Paramount has acquired worldwide rights to Davis Guggenheim and Participant Media‘s doc Waiting For Superman. The film, which premieres at Sundance on Friday, examines the public education crisis in the U.S. This is Guggenheim’s second go around with Paramount, his Oscar winning doc An Inconvenient Truth was released through Paramount Vantage.