When Ted Hope moved from New York to the Bay Area in September to take over as executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, he was stepping into an organization that, with the recent success of its vibrant and generous Filmmaker360 program, had already been making a substantial impact in the independent film world. In 2008, the late Graham Leggat, then the SFFS’s executive director, identified the need to reevaluate the organization’s ailing Film Arts Foundation, which had been in existence for more than 30 years but, despite having a robust fiscal sponsorship program, had dwindled in importance because […]
Ten years ago this summer, Good Machine, the film company responsible for helping launch the careers of such American auteurs as Nicole Holofcener, Ang Lee, Todd Field, Todd Solondz and many, many others, was absorbed by Universal Studios, effectively marking the end of an era in indie film. Good Machine co-president James Schamus would start Focus Features, the Universal subsidiary that he still oversees today (one of the last specialty distributors based in New York), while Ted Hope, the other co-president, started his own production company, This is That. But the company closed its doors in 2010 and now, Hope, […]
There is a saying I once heard: “Once you change the method of distribution, the product has to change.” This itself is a take on the idea that distribution defines the product. You see this around every day in the products you buy. Cars are influenced by the dealership networks that sell them. Phones by the mobile network operators and the choice of computer you use at work by whatever the IT department or value-added reseller prefers to work with. Mass-market restaurants offer what can be sold by wholesalers — typically frozen, long shelf-life staples. Almost every product category is shaped more by […]
At the start of my interview with Tim Squyres, the editor of most of Ang Lee’s films, including his latest, Life of Pi, I tell him how much I like the movie. I say that I know I like it because its images, its ingeniously affecting conclusion, and, most of all, the headspace it created for me have lingered for days. Upon waking each morning, scenes have come flooding back. And the subtleties of the film’s ending, which contains a rich meditation on the role stories play in our lives, have resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. “I get […]
With the 2008 post-crash Presidential election as ironic backdrop, Andrew Dominik’s violent crime, Killing Them Softly, bitterly regards our crumbling American dream. Brandon Harris interviews the Australian writer/director.
Jessica Yu revisits the subject of her own Academy Award-winning short documentary Breathing Lessons by speaking with writer/director Ben Lewin, whose The Sessions brings the story of the paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien to dramatic life.
David O. Russell makes bipolar disorder, dance competitions and the NFL the stuff of romantic comedy in Silver Linings Playbook, a seriously funny feature with star turns by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Miguel Arteta interviews writer/director Russell and executive producer/star Cooper.
Filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) are currently shooting a low-budget independent feature film, Game Changers, a drama/comedy about two video-gamers who are approaching their late twenties. With an initial target budget of $30,000, Game Changers might be better described as a shoestring budget feature, given that they began shooting with only half that amount raised. Though this is their first film together, Imbs has previously made a feature-length video, Eckstein has extensive shooting experience in corporate video and documentaries, and Imbs is an experienced editor who will be doing most of the editing. Imbs, who is based […]
Ben Shapiro’s excellent Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, opens tomorrow at Film Forum through Zeitgeist Films. The following interview was originally published on the eve of its SXSW Film Festival premiere. Photographer Gregory Crewdson is renowned for his elaborately-staged photographs, huge in scope, size, and ambition. So filmmaker Benjamin Shapiro had his work cut out for him when he set out nearly a decade ago to follow Crewdson and demystify the artist’s process. But the biggest surprise of Shapiro’s long-awaited film is just how open, eloquent, and down-to-earth Crewdson is when discussing his art. Crewdson allows the audience unrestricted access to his […]
Matthew Lillard has been in the movie business for a long time, racking up a sizable resume as an actor in films from SLC Punk and Scream to The Descendants and Trouble with the Curve, but with this , year’s Fat Kid Rules the World, Lillard makes his directorial debut. Fat Kid Rules the World tells the story of Troy Billings, a lonely, overweight teen, and Marcus, the magnetic-yet-troubled local musician/high school dropout as they fight to save each other from their inner demons (depression/attempted suicide and drug addiciton respectively). After a serendipitous offer out of the blue and feeling […]