It’s Independent Film Week and the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference, so I thought I’d bring up Radiohead before some panelist does. A couple of years ago I remember sitting at a panel (not at the IFP, actually) at which a young filmmaker was asking how to jumpstart his own business model. A guy onstage in a suit who probably billed at $600 an hour looked at him and said, “The answer is Radiohead,” referring to the band’s strategy of releasing their In Rainbows digitally over the internet for whatever price fans were willing to pay. (The band subsequently released a […]
Hello everyone! We’re Roja Gashtili & Julia Lerman, NY-based writing partners about to attend the 2010 Independent Film Week with our screenplay, Pretty To Think So. The script follows awkward 8th-grader, Mina Lehsani, as she uncovers the secrets of her mother’s revolutionary past in Iran… but as we like to say, it’s a lot funnier than you think it is! We wanted to tackle the tragic ramifications of modern-day Iran’s tumultuous history, and the subsequent mass immigration it sparked, in a way not seen on screen before. Enter… the Lehsanis, a quirkily accessible Persian family whose hopes, dreams, flaws will resonate […]
Hello there. My name is Marc Maurino, as the byline indicates, and close watchers of this blog might remember that a few days ago there was a post entitled “Why I’m Looking For a Producer at Independent Film Week.” That post just dove into what I’m looking for in a producer and was scant on background information about myself, because it actually started life as a letter I wrote to Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macaulay a few weeks ago, in response to his query in one of his editor’s letters about an upcoming article for the magazine (yes, I sometimes […]
Below is the second blog post from Katie Holly, producer of One Hundred Mornings, winner of the Workbook Project’s Discovery and Distribution Award. It begins a one-week run today at L.A.’s Downtown Independent. As I mentioned in my last post One Hundred Mornings was made as part of the Catalyst scheme, which was established to give writers, directors and producers a chance to make their first feature. Essentially it was a competition, and three winning films were given a chance to make a movie, fully financed and with additional production support provided in the form of mentorship. The mentorship element […]
I’m gearing up for one of my favorite work events of the year, IFP’s Independent Film Week. This time, however, I’ll be wearing two hats: as Arts Engine’s Filmmaker Services Manager, I’ll be attending the filmmaker presentations featured in the “Spotlight on Docs” section. Here, I catch a glimpse of what’s coming down the doc pipeline and get to scout potential projects for the monthly screening series I program, DocuClub. Every month, audiences gather to watch the rough cut of a documentary and offer thoughtful feedback for the filmmaker on the cut. The post-screening discussion is facilitated by an experienced […]
I just got off the phone following an interview with Indiewire. I was mealy-mouthed and unfocused, a good reminder that it’s never easy to talk about a script, even if you’re the one that wrote it. So that would be a bit of a stumble out of the gate for my push to get my new script The Garden made. It’s my first entry. My blog-voice is unformed. This may be a bit like a comedian’s first stab at stand-up: awkward for everyone. Long….blank….stares….. This first entry is supposed to be about my prep for the IFP Project Forum, which […]
I was one of the judges for this year’s Wookbook Project Discovery and Distribution Award, which grants one lucky film a week-long theatrical run in L.A. with social media, street team and PR support. That run begins this week, September 16, at the Downtown Independent Theater, and the film is Connor Horgan’s character-based post-apocalyptic drama, One Hundred Mornings. All this week we’ll have blog posts from producer Katie Holly and Horgan here at Filmmakermagazine.com. Below is Holly’s first post on the producing of the film. — Scott Macaulay One Hundred Mornings was made for a tenth of the budget that […]
“It’s so strange we remain friends,” said Errol Morris at one point in his dialogue with fellow director Werner Herzog at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday. During their hour-long conversation at the new Bell Lightbox, the two men spoke of many things — filmmaking, of course, but also reading, music, the Warren Commission report, and actors vs. non-actors (Morris: “In my more spurious moments I’ve said that the main difference between SAG actors and real people is that real people can act”). But mostly they engaged in a kind of digressive contemplation inflected by occasional bouts of one-upmanship — […]
Toronto, the IFP Filmmaker Conference hot on its heels, the New York Film Festival, and, for us, the close of our Fall issue — the season has begun. We’ve already begun work on the magazine, and I’m getting ready to go Toronto, where I’ll join Howard Feinstein and Livia Bloom contributing to the magazine and blog. Of course, the best part of any festival experience is the serendipitous discovery, the word-of-mouth gem you were tipped to or the film you randomly walked into that turned out to be great. I hope to be telling you about some of those over […]
Ten years ago, François Ozon’s dark, Hitchcock-tinged melodrama See the Sea caught the attention of American film critics. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin marked him as “an impressive new filmmaker with a flair for implicit mayhem.” In the 12 features since then, Ozon has expressed his mayhem in various genres (musicals, fairy tales, magical realism, period romances, etc.), with different cinematic influences (Chabrol, Fassbinder, Renoir, Pasolini, etc.) and in a range of production scales. But central to all his films is a deep sense of the essentially conflicted nature of emotional relations, be it the comic sadomasochism of Water […]