Poor Tobe Hooper. It’s got to be tough to be best known for movies made over 40 years ago and desperate enough for a paycheck to make something like Djinn, the first movie I saw at this year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival and perhaps the most astoundingly inane motion picture I’ll see all year. “Rosemary’s Baby meets The Shining in an ominously empty residential tower halfway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi” is apparently a pitch that gets you $9 million from ImageNation, the Abu Dhabi-based film finance outfit to make a rote and clumsy and predictable horror movie, with waves […]
In 1979, Jeremy Irons was in the middle of shooting the British TV drama, Brideshead Revisited when the show’s technicians went on strike. No one knew if or when the show would continue, so Irons talked to director Karol Reisz about filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman the following March. “[Reisz] was going out on a big limb to allow the studio to use me,” Irons recalls, “because I was a nobody.” Irons would become a household name for playing a stiff upper lipped Englishman because of Brideshead , but this past weekend in Toronto he showed a funny, candid and insightful side […]
Technology tipping points – when something goes from the unusual to the commonplace – can happen with unexpected rapidity. Has 4K reached a tipping point, and if so what aspect of 4K? Acquisition, production, distribution, or all three? If you’re shooting a film today, should you be shooting in 4K? The answer to these questions is complicated by cost, complexity and the long-term shelf-life of your project. Today, a convincing argument can be made for shooting in either 4K (future proof) or HD (cost effective and most people won’t see the difference). One thing seems for certain; we will be […]
If any one moment encapsulated the fervor for U.S. independent cinema among the young cinephiles of Wroclaw (pronounced Vrot-swof, by the way), it arrived at around 11:00 PM on my final night of attendance at the 4th edition of the city’s American Film Festival (22-27 Oct, 2013). I was strolling back to my hotel in the company of Killer Films honcho Christine Vachon and Tennessee-based producer Ashley Maynor when a lissome young Polish fellow with rosy cheeks, Kurt Cobain hair, and a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Hipsters Don’t Wear Frames’ suddenly appeared. With a shallowness of breath that suggested he’d […]
Peter Suschitzky has photographed films for John Boorman, Ken Russell and most notably David Cronenberg, but the 72-year-old d.p. still prepares each film with the written word. “It begins with a careful reading of the screenplay,” he says in a polite English accent over the phone from London, “trying to get a feel for, subconsciously, what’s in that script.” Suschitzky is giving interviews to promote, Evolution, TIFF’s celebration of hometown boy and horror master, Cronenberg. Evolution launches Hallowe’en week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto with a multimedia exhibition of celebrating Cronenberg’s five-decade career that began long before […]
In this second part of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we cover script development, locations and the difficulty of casting a small ensemble feature. AfterDeath is a psychological thriller/horror movie currently in post-production and was co-directed by Medinger and Robin Schmidt. While Medinger and Schmidt have both been working in video and film for the past decade, this is their first feature film. The first part of the interview, which covers the journey to find the story for the movie, can be read here: Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1) AfterDeath […]
The following is a guest post by writer/director Deb Shoval, whose debut feature AWOL participated in the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs. Nine months ago, I sat down with the endlessly generous Stacie Passon, the writer/director of Concussion, for some words of wisdom on making the low budget, indie first feature. Her biggest piece of advice? Get AWOL into the IFP Narrative Labs. Fast forward to Part 2 of 3 of the yearlong lab fellowship: IFP Week. Stacie, now an IFP Narrative Lab mentor, gets into more detail. Passon: Now if my son comes in during this interview and starts whining, […]
The Broken Circle Breakdown spares you no sentiment at all. It’s willfully melodramatic and all the better for it. A broad, decade-spanning tale, set in an almost unthinkably weird but remarkably compelling European subculture. Belgian filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen’s newest film, a double prize-winner at Tribeca this year, leaps into loss and love and faith amidst the story of a Dutch couple, bluegrass musicians of all things, who confront, in vastly different ways, the untimely death of their young child. Set largely in the Flemish countryside, the movie goes back and forth in time, dancing from the start of the couple’s […]
What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drain the painting of an essential “aura,” even as it makes the image itself accessible to a much larger audience? Does it, as John Berger elaborated in his 1972 book and television program, Ways of Seeing, alter the painting’s meaning, rendering the original a symbol of capitalist exchange? Or, in today’s image-sharing world of Tumblr, is reproduction nothing more than whimsical statement of affinity, of a “like?” […]
The psychological thriller/horror movie AfterDeath is the first feature film of directors Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt. Shot on a tight budget and a tight schedule, the development and shooting of AfterDeath offers a lesson to anyone looking to make their first feature. AfterDeath is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker spoke to Medinger about the project shortly after shooting wrapped. Medinger and Schmidt met at Oxford University in the late ’90s. Schmidt was studying English and Medinger was studying engineering. After leaving university, Schmidt became interested in film and video and learned […]