6582 Results for “production”
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Five Questions with Union Square Director Nancy Savoca
Nancy Savoca — who wrote the excellent guest blog entry “Waves of Rebel Visions” earlier this week — today releases her insightful latest feature Union Square. The following interview was originally published on the eve of the film’s Toronto Film Festival premiere. Nancy Savoca’s True Love was an early high-water mark in the modern independent film movement. In fact, its storyline, newcomer casting and loose style is now the template for much current indie drama. So, it’s great to report that over 20 years later Savoca is back with another intimate drama realized on a low budget and entirely outside […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2012 -
The Work is the Reward: Chris Eyre on Hide Away
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 15 years since filmmaker Chris Eyre burst onto the indie scene with 1998’s Smoke Signals, based on a short story by fellow Native American Sherman Alexie, who also wrote the screenplay, and starring Native Canadian Gary Farmer (probably best known for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man). Since then the Portland homeboy has seamlessly shifted from the big screen, to PBS fare, to franchise TV and back again, most recently with Hide Away, an existential drama featuring Josh Lucas and James Cromwell. Earlier this year, Chris was tapped for an entirely different gig, chairing the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 12, 2012 -
Five Questions with Tiger Tail in Blue Director Frank V. Ross
Right now on Kentucker Audley’s No Budge website, it’s Frank V. Ross week. If that name elicits a blank response, it’s not an uncommon reaction. Though Chicago-based Ross is one of the original class of mumblecore directors, he never received the attention that was given to so many of his DIY peers, such as Andrew Bujalski, the Duplass brothers or Joe Swanberg (a fellow Chicagoan with whom Ross has collaborated numerous times). Nevertheless, his recent films Present Company (2008) and Audrey the Trainwreck (2010) have gained him a number of champions within the indie community, and those two films have […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 11, 2012 -
Benoit Jacquot, Farewell, My Queen
The court intrigue that animates Benoit Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen — set during the final days of Marie Antoinette’s reign — could be the stuff of so many costume dramas. To his great credit, however, the 65-year-old Parisian director, best known on this side of the pond for his 1995 hotel chamber drama A Single Girl, offers an elliptical, accumulative account of the events, keeping them tightly focused on the experience of the Queen’s private reader Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) as the storm clouds of revolution gather from outside the corridors of Versailles and the regime’s demise very quickly becomes inevitable, even […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 11, 2012 -
Five Questions with Alps Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos attained “one to watch” status as soon as his disturbing, divisive, and hilariously funny Dogtooth premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. That film — which went on to win the Prix Un Certain Regard and score an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film — has something of a companion piece in Alps, which opens this Friday at Cinema Village in New York City. Concerning a group of grief surrogates who help the bereaved by impersonating their recently-departed loved ones, the film is similar to its predecessor in its off-kilter tone and refusal to fit into any one genre or […]
by Michael Nordine on Jul 11, 2012 -
MUSIC VIDEO: “EVERYTHING CHANGES,” EYTAN AND THE EMBASSY
New Brooklyn-based production company Modern Mythology has scored a viral hit with their inventive video for “Everything Changes,” from Eytan and the Embassy. As the Wall St. Journal reports, the video has nabbed the title of “most costume changes in an unedited music video” by Recordsetter.com, a site promising that everyone can be the best at something. What’s great about the video is that, unlike many clips, the costume changes aren’t just for visual variety; instead, they narrate the history of rock and pop music. From the Wall St. Journal: Filmed in Williamsburg in video director Joe Pickard’s apartment in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2012 -
Jonathan Paley, Ballplayer: Pelotero
Although its population is just 2% the size of the US’, the tiny, impoverished Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic accounts for a fifth of all the young men who go on to become Major League Baseball players. How such an astounding share of pro baseball players come from the DR was what Jonathan Paley and his co-directors Ross Finkel and Trevor Martin set out to explore in Ballplayer: Pelotero. However, what they discovered was that, in addition to being a country ripe with baseball talent — one that the MLB has spent considerable resources mining for the past 50 […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 28, 2012 -
“BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD” — A HAMMER TO NAIL ‘REVIEW’
(Beasts of the Southern Wild world premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Narrative Grand Jury Prize, as well as Best Cinematography for Ben Richardson. It also won the Camera d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It is being distributed by Fox Searchlight and opened theatrically on June 27, 2012. Visit the film’s official website—as well as the virtual home base of the Court 13 collective—to learn more.) I want to make this immediately, abundantly clear. Perhaps more than any other review I’ve ever written, this one is coming from the pained perspective of a […]
by Michael Tully on Jun 28, 2012 -
MARIELLE HELLER AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART 2: “LESSONS EVERYWHERE”
Marielle Heller, a New York-based screenwriter, actor and playwright, is attending the June Sundance Directors Lab with her project, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. “In the haze of 1970’s San Francisco, a teenage artist with a brutally honest perspective tries to navigate her way through an affair with her mother’s boyfriend,” is its description, and the film is being adapted from the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Here is Heller’s second post from the Sundance Resort in Utah. Read the first here. The way the Sundance Lab is set up, you don’t always know how or when you’re going […]
by Marielle Heller on Jun 27, 2012 -
Alma Har’El on her Shia LaBeouf-Starring Sigur Ros Video
Containing the same truthful fusion of fantasy and reality as found in her documentary Bombay Beach, filmmaker Alma Har’el’s latest work is a provocative and dramatically compelling short film for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, made as part of the group’s Mystery Film Eeperiment. For the Project, the band invited a dozen filmmakers to select a track from their new album, Valtari, gave them the same modest budget, and told them to do what they saw in their heads. “The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom,” they wrote on their site. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 26, 2012
