Attend most U.S. festivals these days, and you’ll notice a certain anxiety around the issue of new technologies. There are the transmedia sidebars and also the distribution initiatives that bring festival films into your own living room, sidestepping the red carpets that in many cases unfurl only blocks away. And then there are the fests that temptingly allow you to screen films on your iPad without leaving your hotel room. But still, despite such gestures, all these festivals spend most of their energies, rightly, on their core mission — projecting films for live audiences — even as their blogs, op-eds, […]
I ran into filmmaker — and Filmmaker “25 New Face” — Kyle Henry at the American Pavilion in Cannes, and I was startled to learn that he was attending the festival… but skipping his screening. He offered to explain in a blog post. Your film gets into the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival, and you can’t stay for your screening… are you crazy? Well, that was my case this year. My film Fourplay: Tampa, a short that is part of the anthology-of-shorts feature Fourplay, got the magical golden ticket to one of the festival sections at Cannes this […]
I missed the Wednesday morning Melancholia screening, having to moderate a table at the Producers Network breakfast the same time, but afterwards I happened to catch a snippet of the press conference. I tweeted a few comments, namely ones in which the director talked about this relationship with the film’s d.p., who started the project by telling him not to behave like so many “old or middle-aged directors and make [his actresses] younger and more naked.” “Don’t tell me that,” Von Trier said he told the cinematographer. Watching press conferences on those little TVs in the basement of the Palais […]
When Filmmaker polled our editors and came up with the 10 Best Films of the ’00s, on our list was Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. Ahead of its time in its iMovie-edited home brew of diaristic lo-fi doc footage, Tarnation vividly depicted the relationship of the filmmaker to his memorably unstable mother. At Cannes this year, Caouette is back with his not-a-sequel, Walk Away Renee (pictured), dipping into the same footage trove but augmenting it with new material. This new footage consists of Caouette traveling cross-country to check his mom into assisted living, and sci-fi scripted sequences positing an alternate reality version […]
There are some jobs that bring about as much pain and rejection as they do inspiration and success. Screenwriting might be at the top of that list of professions. For every motivational tale of years spent toiling, hunched over the keyboard finally resulting in a six-figure sale, there are thousands of writers who continue to pound keys in front of just the pale, blue glow, still dreaming of being illuminated by a larger spotlight. Beginning writers are known to try everything in order to fulfill these dreams. They spend hours scanning the internet for names of agents and managers. They […]
For several years whenever I haven’t attended one of the major festivals, I’ve obsessively surfed to all the various film sites several times each day, hoping to soak up enough buzz and read enough reviews to feel connected — to feel like I’m somewhat there. And, invariably, I’m a little disappointed that there’s not more. Yes, there are reliable sources to turn to. Jeff Welles is always a fast and flavorful with his postings, mixing his first-person experience with industry news and commentary. Ann Thompson catches the pulse of the business, and Eric Kohn is mind-bogglingly quick with his review […]
I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]
This week I leave you in the capable hands of our editor Scott Macaulay. One of the exciting aspects of this gig is learning from a fella like Scott. A producer of some of my favorite indie films, he has been a great mentor and producer of this column. I asked him to just go nuts and write what was on his mind. Voila! Last fall, I posted a call for new columnists for this website, and the first to respond was John Yost with the idea for this “Micro-Budget Conversation.” I liked John’s proposal for a number of […]
Yesterday Deadline reported that Marc Maurino’s spec script, Inside The Machine, sold to CBS Films. Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson are producing for Contra Films. I want to wish Marc a huge round of congratulations for this sale. Last fall, I posted a series of pieces strolling down Filmmaker‘s memory lane. In each, I looked back at a single issue of the magazine, and in the second post Marc responded in the comments section with his own story. He wrote about how he discovered Filmmaker Magazine at a film festival and how it made him want to get into independent […]
For the three-year-old FilmNation, the 2011 Cannes Film Festival is a big deal. That’s not just because the company’s market slate is substantial, containing projects by Terrence Malick, John Hillcoat and, as executive producer, James Cameron, but because the young New York-based sales and production company has, for the first time, two films in the festival. The company is repping both Pedro Almodovar’s latest Competition title, The Skin I Live In (pictured above), as well as American indie Jeff Nichol’s Sundance hit, Take Shelter, screening in the Critics Week section. FilmNation was launched by international sales veteran Glen Basner just […]