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At a Sundance press breakfast this morning IFC Films announced a partnership with SXSW in which five films screening at the festival will be available simultaneously on IFC’s on-demand platform. The films include Joe Swanberg’s premiering Alexander the Last as well as our Filmmaker mag cover film Medicine for Melancholy, which will return to the festival for a special screening. Attending the event was Steven Soderbergh, who spoke about independent filmmakers’ need to “let go of the fantasy” that their film will receive a conventional theatrical release in this tough climate. He also quipped that the Festival Direct program appealed […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 11:30 am — Library Center Theatre, Park City] A lot came into play when writing Everything Strange and New. I feel it’s paramount for the success of an indie film to be responsive to circumstances, and I tried to consider as many of those circumstances as possible during the film’s conception. First and foremost, I feel that there is a distinct lack of innovation in the current crop of American indie films, and I wanted to make a film that could stand on higher ground than the off-Hollywood material that is so pervasive. It was […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 2:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I’m known far and wide as a contrarian. Perhaps that’s a justified accusation. For in approaching my new film, the American Spectrum selection Once More With Feeling, I consciously elected to honor a very fine, very touching and very entertaining script by celebrating old-school filmmaking trappings within our very limited budget, though we did shoot in HD, a method I found to be more time-consuming and no less costly than shooting on film (but those are issues for a different article). Once More With Feeling is both […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] We set out to make a feature-length documentary DIRT! The Movie inspired by the book Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth written by William Bryant Logan. When we started out on this project we were thinking of either a four-part television series or a feature-length documentary for theatrical release. We could either explore the subject as a topic as the book had done, or with a more traditional film narrative — in our case, telling the story of dirt and humans from dirt’s point of view. My […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court is the flagship film for a three-year Audience Engagement Campaign intended to get people around the world involved in international justice. While I was filming over two years across four continents in six languages, media possibilities exploded. So from the very beginning producer Paco de Onís, editor Peter Kinoy and I were thinking about how to create educational modules for the Web and adapt digital technologies for human-rights work. The result is that we and our Skylight Pictures Audience […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 5:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] While attending Sundance with my two short films, Populi and Pan with Us, I found myself bored with the majority of low-budget independent feature films, particularly their third acts. I didn’t know what specifically caused the redundant patterns in the scripts but I expected more originality from things that carry the qualifier “independent.” Never having given any thought to making feature films before (or narrative works of any kind for that matter), I came home with a bug up my butt and wrote something that I hoped […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] It’s very hard to begin creating a story with a defined set of rules. It has to come from the gut and has to be truthful. David Brind, the writer of Dare, and I set out to tell a story within the format of a full-length film. It started out as a 15-minute, first-year film-school project that left us with a distinct “What happens next?” feeling. We’ve spent the last four years turning it into a feature. Dare is a story about the need to take chances when […]
While some in the industry are at Sundance and others are preparing for the inauguration, the folks at SAG, according to a post on the Digital Media Law blog, are engaged in knock down cage fight. Check the account of the proceedings at the link.
Greg Mottola’s Adventureland screened in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. You can read our story on the film in the Winter issue section.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Big Fan was edited on the biggest, awesomest computer monitor I’ve ever been in a room with. Thirty inches. As big as it was, though, it still wasn’t nearly enough. That 30-inch monitor was just a tease, whetting my appetite to see my movie on something bigger — like 800 inches. A movie screen. I don’t care what the trends are. What massive, fundamental sea changes are taking place within the industry. No filmmaker fantasizes about what their movie will look like projected onto a 1.5 inch iPod […]